Speed Dating for Learning: A New View on Old Problems
Three minutes, two strangers, one goal.
Speed dating is a concept surely familiar to everyone — eligible singles mingling with one another, sampling dynamics, exploring mutual interests, looking to make a connection. The format has been around for nearly three decades, but only recently has it been utilized for something other than meeting The One.
The speed dating setup has the potential to bring a completely new point of view to seemingly infinite domains. Interest matching opens a world of communities for anyone looking to network, practically introducing them to endless possibilities to make new connections they didn’t know existed. The format is also more forgiving for people who usually struggle with networking, with socially anxious people experiencing speed-dating as a relatively low-risk situation — encouraging them to miss fewer opportunities to branch out, and demonstrate their soft skills. Finally, nowadays people seem to find their time increasingly precious, making the speed dating scheme the perfect solution to make connections in a time-efficient manner.
This three-part blog series is going to introduce three areas where the speed dating format can make a real difference: 1. knowledge management and recruitment, 2. education tech, and 3. events and networking.
Interest matching as a multisolution
The first field where the speed dating format (SDF) could be implemented for facilitated communication is knowledge management. Knowledge management (KM) is “an effort to benefit from the knowledge that resides in an organization by using it to achieve the organization’s mission” (McInerney, 2002).
There are three levels of proximity that are discovered in inter-organizational collaboration: 1. geographical proximity (how close the two organizations are in space), 2. organizational proximity (the similarities in organizational structure), and 3. technological proximity (the similarity in technological knowledge bases) (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). Using an online speed dating solution, all of these three proximities could be decreased between two organizations that would otherwise be far apart. First, as the COVID-19 pandemic has proven, geographical proximity does not necessarily have to play any part in the life of knowledge workers when there are remote solutions, and the same principle applies in KM. Second, organizational proximity would be diminished entirely by a speed dating platform operating purely on interest matching, leading to free flowing information exchange and decreased psychological and organizational distance. Third, as mentioned before, interest matching would decrease the hindering effects of a large technological knowledge gap and accelerate ideation.
Similar challenges plague intra-organizational communication, with large psychological distance between departments, vertical company structure, and even diversity inhibiting optimal KM. Interest matching on an online speed dating platform has the potential to eliminate all of these hindrances and facilitate genuine information and idea flow.
Meet and greet your new colleague
There are problems with recruitment, too, that the SDF could solve. We have already looked at some of them, like geographical location (Ban et al., 2003).
A major problem when recruiting is knowing the difference between a good coworker and a good CV. Often we are faced with a pile of résumés that, at the end of the day, only tell us so much about a person. However, there is generally not enough time to thoroughly interview everyone who would be a good fit on paper, so why not arrange a speed dating mingle? Get to know your applicants quickly, efficiently, and personally. Being able to scope out a future colleague from among the expert CVs can make the difference between a good and a bad hire.
If you’re curious about how your professional community or business can use micro-mentoring to help your employees or members skill up, get in touch and we will show you how!
Comment your ideas on how the speed dating format could be utilized, we would love to hear your thoughts, and perhaps even extend the blog series to new dimensions :)
