Exploring the Known: Empowering Innovation by Working Out Loud
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Exploring the Known: Empowering Innovation by Working Out Loud

Exploring the Known: Empowering Innovation by Working Out Loud 

Sharing in-progress work with others – your team, your client, your leaders – can be a daunting prospect. It can also be a great way to share lessons learned, drive quality into everything we do, and build trust. Working Out Loud is “a practice that combines conventional wisdom about relationships with modern ways to reach and engage people”.

This concept is not new to Arc Aspicio. As part of our strategy, we have been exploring Working Out Loud to empower employees and reinforce the habits created by our culture. In turn, this boosts innovation by strengthening our team’s collective knowledge. By finding new ways to open our work environment and draw from our collective expertise, we foster the unexpected connections and collaboration that we may have missed.

As one of the early adopters of Working Out Loud at our firm, I’ve discovered something surprising during our first steps on this new journey. Working Out Loud is uncomfortable! To foster unintentional collaboration, it is important to share work and ideas early, and there is a natural reluctance and hesitation, including within myself, to share unpolished, unfinished work. However, this discomfort has helped me explore un-tapped potential much more quickly. The more we embrace this concept, the better we can strengthen a more connected and integrated culture.

By exposing our work, we share how we think to wider audiences early on. Working Out Loud reinforces the existing habits of our team to:

  • Innovate – Invigorate our strategy through open discussion channels and idea flow that allows the best ideas to surface, influence, and shape a solution as early as possible
  • Adapt – Expose the skills and expertise of a collection of subject matter experts that team members can be cognizant of as they approach their work through the lens of a subject matter expert collective
  • Deliver – Uncover the experience of team members, including lessons learned and best practices, and use them to achieve Speed to Mission for our clients

Our team already has a strong sense of shared mission that puts of client’s missions first, favoring shared accomplishments over individual accolades, creating a culture that that is opportunistic for a concept such as Working Out Loud to produce results. Our culture is one of our strongest assets, and through Working Out Loud we aim to reinforce its impact to our firm and our clients.

About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio is a management, strategy, and technology consulting firm that takes a mission-oriented approach to complex client challenges. As a rapidly growing company, Arc Aspicio has a bold strategy for 2016-2018 that drives growth through new capabilities in strategy, design, human capital, data analytics, information sharing, cybersecurity, and strategic communications. The company is known for a strong, collaborative culture that values gratitude – for its clients and its great team. And, #welovedogs! Follow us on Twitter @arcaspicio or learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.

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Contributors

Maxwell Mathews |

Maxwell joined as an Associate after working on an NSF funded ecological research observatory project called NEON supporting the information technology and systems engineering teams. In his free time he enjoys running, hiking, exploring the local craft brewery scene, and rooting for his alma mater the University of Colorado.

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