Worksite WIIFM

 Worksite WIIFM ("What's In It for Me") 

If you have VUCA project responsibilities, worksites are  a lean architecture for learning collaborative systems practice, one that can save you time, space, and money, on your learning and on your projects.  Each worksite is set up, provided, and priced for you. What else is in it for you? Cutting-edge tools, a way to get your skin in the game, chances to collaborate, and scaffolding for problem-solving and design in your real-world projects.  

Access to Tools

To develop CSP, at first and continuously, what is needed is "access to tools".  This is the famous phrase from the preface of the Whole Earth Catalog, that prescient  store of ecological know-how. Steward Brand and his colleagues built it, decades before the internet, by way of CSP. The main tools he and his team accessed then were cameras and basic typesetting. In today's era of global projects, finance, and pandemics, CSP tools are very different. They are social, cloud-based, and configured for rapid learning, with access that is flexible, sheltered, and inexpensive. Cogent Language worksites provide you access to such tools, in the form of leading-edge collaborative software platforms. 

Skin in the Game  ("BYOP")

Even more important than tools are choices about what to do with them, that is, real, personal choices about purpose. For developing CSP, personal involvement is not a distraction or side-trip. Rather, it is an essential. Bringing one's own experience and purpose to the party is "skin in the game", driving authentic learning, competence in the real-world, trust, and long-term, beneficial outcomes.

Project worksites don't simply "allow" you to work on your own projects - they depend on it. There is no other input - no textbook, no case study, no exercises, no tests. For the sort of party that a worksite is, it is only "bring your own project".  The unique challenges implicit in your project in focus will be surfaced and progressively addressed in worksites via  CSP rationales, stages, tool kits, and templates. At the end of the party, if your work through a complete network of worksites, you have a portfolio of work products pertinent to your whole project in focus, to your performing organization, and to its VUCA contexts.    

Community

Each project worksite serves as a job aid on a single major project challenge. To this end, each provides you with access to communities of practice with expertise on that challenge.  Asynchronous and persistent, this access takes the form of lists of reference materials, authorities, tool kits, blog posts, and video links, continously curated by Cogent Language. 

Moreover, since worksites are cloud-based, they can also provide a shared space for synchronous or asynchoronous collaboration with coach, mentor,  individual SME's, teams, and/or organizations. Real-time  performance in such spaces enables you to develop key competencies in CSP, including listening, presenting, coaching, and project walk-thrus. 

Scaffolding for Problem-solving and Design

One of these key competencies in CSP is design. On each worksite, the central workspace provides a scaffold for the design process that is to address your challenge at hand. This is the genba, the construction area. It is the place the real work gets done by you, singular or plural. 

The left side of that workspace is where "skin gets in the game". There, you express the challenge you are looking at in the real world by way of the configuration templates and workflow advice provided by the worksite. Next, you work through anaysis, brainstorming, and research relevant to the challenge, moving left to right, setting out results visually as you go. In the middle of the workspace, you do the work that is essential to design and problem-solving, namely rigorous problem definition and creative solution generation. On the right side of the workspace, you do decision-making, solution development,  testing, and refinement. 

The output of this design process is typically models, prototypes, or artifacts which can help resolve, solve or dissolve the real world challenge that you face. This transformation is especially likely when you have real skin in the game, collaboration and/or coaching involved through your process. 

In any case, by way of the worksite, you will have walked through a complete design process including a) dvergent thinking to analyzye contexts and potential solution components, b) pattern creation to identify root causes and root definitions of solution systems, and c) convergent thinking to reduce risk, cost, and burden.  The ability to do this sort of design work is absolutely crucial to your collaborative systems practice of project management.