How we nurture our reading culture
As a developer, reading has been a big part of how I try to stay relevant over time. Reading and hacking, hacking and reading. That said I have to admit that I’m not always keeping the pace, sometimes I slow down a bit (tired, different project, whatever alibi I choose to use), sometimes I accelerate.
Nevertheless, I think a reading culture is key in growing as a human being and as a professional. The same goes at company level, of course. The issue is that when it comes to other people you can’t (and neither you shouldn’t) really force them into something they don’t want or like to do.
How can you nurture a reading culture then?
I think all you can do is trying to lead by example, facilitate and remove frictions and maybe to create some dedicated spaces.
At Flowing we’re trying two things:
- A yearly budget for your own learning, no questions asked, that you can use to buy also books (or even an ebook reader).
- An internal book club
How our book club works:
It’s quite simple actually, nothing fancy here. We have a dedicated slack channel to coordinate the activities: we choose a book, define a reading pace, and then, usually once a week, we meet to discuss about the readings. Most of the times a 30 minutes online meeting does the trick.
We even record and publish on our slack the discussions so those who could not attend the live session are still able to listen to it and maybe catch up by the next one. Some of us use these recordings as a podcast :D
Who chooses what to read?
Nobody dictates the reading list, nor the topics we engage. This is totally free and up to the participants. Every time we complete a book we collectively create a list of suggestions for the next one and then we choose using a doodle.
This is very important because it allows the group to choose the topic based on the particular mood they have in a certain moment. Some times this leads us through a technical book, other times through some business book or really through any other kind of reading we may like in that moment.
Is it any good?
I really like this initiative. We’re at our 4th run (4 books) right now, I’ve participated in the last 2 of them and I have to say: I’m really enjoying it. There are a bunch of advantages running a simple book club like this.
First of all, you get to feel a bit of peer pressure and that can push you that tiny little bit you may need to avoid skipping your next reading session. It’s never (not for me at least) like you feel obligated to read the next chapter and respect the deadline, but you kinda feel like you don’t want to be the one missing it ;)
The second and most important advantage of all of this is the insights you get about what you are reading. You get a deeper understanding of what you’re reading because you get to see it through the eyes and thoughts of some of your fellows. Most of the times this means mixing your ideas and their ideas on a matter, noticing something that would have been unnoticed maybe, or even building together on top of what you read. This is definitely the part I enjoy the most and the reason why I would suggest something like this to any company.
That’s what we are reading right now:
And here what we already read:
We also just discovered groups on Goodreads and created one for our book club so from now on, if you want to follow what we’re reading you can have a peek ;) https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/973938-flowing
I don’t know if this “book club” thing is going to stick with us but, as for now, it’s fun and useful. Do you have anything like that in your group? What do you think about it?
