How we improved knowledge sharing at our company
At intive we do a very good job in consulting clients, adopting insights and shipping tangible solutions. We also improved our internal knowledge sharing through initiatives like the intive Academy, internal newsletters with profound articles or by introducing collaboration and knowledge sharing platforms.
Despite these initiatives we figured out that there’s no quick and easy way to share, teach or tell stories to people outside of our work area. During lunch you might ask? Of course, but to be honest, not everyone wants to talk about work related stuff during the break.
So our goal was to create a format which has the spontaneity of a chat with a co-worker explaining things, but reaches a broader audience; it needed to be flexible, but not too long lasting and there shouldn’t be much effort to organize it. After a few creative iteration rounds we came up with a pretty good solution: The Lightning Talk Format.
The idea behind the Lightning Talk Format is to create an open space to share knowledge about random topics, to train presenters’ storytelling skills, receive feedback to iterate on ideas and — of course — get together with co-workers informally.
Lightning talks themselves were first introduced at the YAPC conference in 1997 and are short presentations without many letters, lots of images and — in the best case — with a funny story. The shortness of the talk guarantees full focus of the audience, it is flexible to arrange and the preparation time is usually shorter than giving a talk at the intive academy.
We introduced it the lean way in our office in Regensburg. Without involving many people, setting up Skype calls or sending invitations via Outlook. There’s a limit of three presenters each time. Every one of them is allowed to talk for a maximum of 15 minutes and everyone can give a talk or join spontaneously.
The format is highly frequented even if it takes place at friday afternoon in our company office. That’s proof for us, that sharing interesting short stories in an easy and uncomplicated way improves knowledge sharing on the fly.
