Collaborate by “Narrating your work”

I’m participating in an IBM Social Business Jam and one of the participants referenced a concept called “Narrate your work” as a metaphor to help people understand the value of sharing status updates. (Since the IdeaJam is private, I won’t divulge the particpant’s name.)

The idea of “Narrate your work” was first proposed by Dave Winer in 2009. Mr. Winer’s original article was targeted at news reporters.  But the concept applies across the spectrum of business people. At its most basic level, “Narrate your work” helps answer the question “What are you doing?”

I’ve been thinking about the implications of that simple question – What are you doing? – and how the idea of narrate your work can really have a meaningful impact on you and your network of co-workers.

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In many respects, “management” is an exercise in getting an answer to that question.  Over the years, managers have tried a variety of techniques to understand what is being done:  Management by Walking Around, requiring status reports, weekly and even daily meetings, etc.  Many employees complain about the intrusiveness or the wasted time spent complying with the demand for information.

For our co-worker network, we want to know what each other are doing.  So we have formal and impromptu meetings, send emails, talk over lunch, etc. Often we are surprised to find out other people are working on similar projects to our own.  We say to ourselves, if I’d only known Joe was working on that, I could have helped him get to a solution faster.

Narrate your work can help us deal with management and co-worker needs for the answer to “What are you doing?”  Narrate your work can be something as simple as updating our status in your social computing platform of choice.  If your company uses something like Lotus Connections, Jive or others, you easily can update your status  to inform others what you are doing.  If you don’t have an internal platform, try using Twitter and recruiting those in your network to follow you.   As you get more sophisticated, you can begin to narrate your work with richer media like video and audio.

When you narrate your work, you gain control over when you inform people and how much information you provide.  Want to save time? Rather than spending an hour or two at the end of the week trying to figure out what you did so you write up your status report, you can collect up your tweets and send that off to whomever needs a status report. If you can get your management and co-workers to follow you, then your status report is simply “See my status posts” or “Read my tweets”.

What do you think about this concept?