Book Review: Show Your Work, by Jane Bozarth

Categories are tricky. One of the editor’s jobs for anonline magazine like this one is to pick keywords that will help readers to findwhat they need, and to discover what they didn’t know they need. Jane Bozarth’snew book defies most of the keywords in our template, so I’m going to do mybest to fill in some missing keywords and to encourage you to read the book.

Tacit and explicit

In Show Your Work,Jane Bozarth addresses an important “something” that is missing from mostcourses, curricula, and lesson plans: tacit knowledge. Nearly everyinstructional-design book ever written explains very carefully how to teachexplicit knowledge and skills, yet the tacit knowledge and the skills gainedfrom experience are what make the critical difference in performance.

The way that people, whether they are bricklayers orphysicists (almost everyone, it seems, except instructional designers andeducators), transmit their tacit knowledge is by “working out loud, making workvisible, making work discoverable, or narrating work.” There are many tools, oftenfreely available, that we can use to do this with text, video, voicerecordings, photos—and these tools are very often available at the end of ourarm, in a smartphone or other mobile device. So why don’t we work out loud?

Showing you how to show your work

In fact, it’s easy to show your own work, or to recordsomeone else showing their work. You can then include the captured “showing” ina course, a tool, a job aid, an online video—wherever and in whatever form ismost useful. In six unnumbered chapters, 192 pages, with lots of pictures,examples, inspiration, insights, and practice, Jane offers more ideas for doingthis than most instructional designers will be able to use in an entire career.

Here’s the breakdown, with some of the short quotes thatsummarize the content in each of the chapters. (I’m deliberately not giving anydetails, because I want you to read the book. You won’t regret it. You’ll haveto trust me on this.)

• Introduction (“Remember: Communication overinformation. Conversation over tools.”)
• Benefits to Organizations (“Knowing what gets done is not the same asknowing how it gets done.”)
• Workers: What’s In It for You? (“Saying, ‘Idon’t have time to narrate my work’ is akin to saying, ‘I’m too busy cuttingdown the tree to stop and sharpen the saw.’”)
• What Is Knowledge? and Why Do People Share It?(“Share is the new save.”)
• This Is How I Do That. (“If what you’re doingisn’t worth sharing, then why are you doing it?”)
• Learning and Development (“The point is toextract learning FROM work, not impose more work.”—Charles Jennings)
• How? (“People talk about their work all thetime. How can we make that more visible?”)

Did I mention: this book is fun to read

You can (and maybe you should) skip around in the book. Ifyou don’t care about the theory and the critiques and criticisms of business asusual in the first three chapters, you can go right to “This is How I Do That”(longest chapter in the book) and “How?” and then come back to the other stuff.It’s up to you. Jane didn’t number the chapters. There’s a message in that, I’mpretty sure.

You can immerse yourself in the text—because it’s not justtext, it’s stories and pictures. The only thing that would make it better isvideo and audio, and it’s too bad a publisher can’t do that with a physicalpaper book.

I see what you did there.

This quote is not in the book, but it’s a key tounderstanding what Jane did:

“When analytic thought, the knife, isapplied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”—RobertPirsig, Zen and the Art of MotorcycleMaintenance

What Jane Bozarth has done in Show Your Work is to show how to help others see and understand thetacit knowledge in our experience—what we (or others) are doing, especially theparts that aren’t in the recipe, the model, the template, the task analysis,the flow chart. She does it gently, carefully, without overanalyzing.

Yes, there are examples and explanations from people who doparticular things well, and even a template and a checklist or two. Theexamples and explanations aren’t there to teach you how to do those things,although you may well learn how to do some specific something from an example.They are there to show you ways to show your work, and to share tacit knowledgewith others, which is exactly what the title promises.

Jane has been very careful not to kill anything in theprocess.

Bibliographic information

Bozarth, Jane. Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-to’s of Working Out Loud. SanFrancisco: Wiley, 2014.