📖 How We Learn

Ceremonies

Townhalls

Townhalls are conducted to induce curiosity and offer a unique opportunity for employees to come together to share knowledge around thought provoking subject like STEM, Business or Design.

Content Shared in this ceremony is intended to be inspirational in nature usually not including anything we might work on in immediate or distant future.

Protocols

• Clearly outline the event’s objectives, target audience, and expected outcomes a week before the townhall.
• Format of the activity is more conversational than presentational in nature.
• Make sure there is a script, and or additional written media that can be adapted in a blog form and published on our blog.

Tip

You can suggest topics or volunteer to participate in the townhall channel on mattermost.

Workshops

Workshops are special format of knowledge sharing sessions and are usually conducted when the management decides a certain knowledge is mandatory for carrying its operations going forward.

This generally includes highly opinionated and selective topics usually relevant to certain departments and skill sets.

Protocols

• Breakdown group into manageable sizes to promote engagement depending upon the target audience, complexity and importance of the topics.
• Clear expectations should be set about how the new knowledge should be adapted across the organization.
• It is mandatory to cover any reference materials provided before and after the workshop.
• They are designed to be a self containing sessions and participation is encouraged from the attendees. Presenters will move with the assumption that everyone understood the topic if no questions are asked.
• Participation is mandatory as this will affect the employee progression inside the organization. Work from home or other forms of short leaves will be automatically cancelled even if approved beforehand.

Tip

Generally management is responsible for conducting the workshop you can provide feedback to any C level person overviewing that department.

Knowledge Sharing Sessions

They meant to share knowledge employees gather both from their personal and work related experiments.

In services industry we are in a unique position to run multiple experiments in parallel and are constantly learning new things, usually there is always stuff worth sharing.

Furthermore whenever we develop something we have set of principles (which always need to be followed) and best practices which are mutable in general we get to see the limits of these best practices in practice and get to share any new things we have adapted along the way to systemically solve a problem.

Protocols

• Clearly outline the event’s objectives, target audience, and expected outcomes a week before the session.
• Define the problem statement so clearly that people are invested in finding the path you have taken.
• List all potential set of solutions/techniques available to you in solving a problem.
• For learnings which are more of a discovery than a conscious effort, its still better to share the problems first

Tip

Talk to your managers if you want to conduct or participate in any knowledge sharing session

Blogs

You can write and publish anything as long as it add creates clarity and is structured.

Mannerisms for Above Ceremonies

We are interested in your opinion

• We are not interested in the standard definitions we are interested in your unique understanding and your mental models.
• We are not interested in your presentation, we are interested in your story.

---

There is such thing as stupid questions

Of course there is such thing as stupid questions but asking them doesn’t make you a stupid person, doesn’t asking them for fear of embarrassment does. Ask yourself

How much more stupid would it have been if I had not asked this question?

Note: Other than this questions should be questions not judgement, they should always comes from a place of curiosity and making group understanding better.

---

“Not the Best” Vs “Fundamental Flaw”

Before you add your 2 cents, weigh whether or not your objection reveals a serious issue. It’s okay to make a remark like “I believe there is a better choice and it’s this, but I’m also okay with the current choice.” It’s also okay to suggest improvements to the idea without vetoing the current choice. Make clear what type of objection you’re raising.

---

Nail The Problem

• Define the problem statement so clearly that people are invested in finding the path you have taken.
• List all potential set of solutions/techniques available to you in solving a problem then present the path you have opted to take.
• For learnings which are more of a discovery than a conscious effort, its still better to share the problems first clearly.

---

Be Respectful Of Others Time

A lot of effort has been put to research, evaluate and curate the materials. Show respect and love to your colleagues by appearing on time :-)

Tangents

Tangents are essentially experiments where you know outcomes might or might not contribute to success or value addition with the right tradeoffs. They focus on optimizing learning and innovation with a moderate to high chance of failure.

There are primarily 2 types of tangents we go on in the organization

Top Down (High Risk)

Experiments we conduct during the actual project execution. These are high risk in nature and usually are conducted with very careful monitoring.

Ops and engineering leadership make sure there are extra resources in place to conduct the experiments in safe and timely manner. Usually

Bottoms Up (Low Risk)

Experiments we conduct during the downtime. In an ideal world this will include all the experiments employees wanted to try to learn and innovate either around existing problems or totally out in the wild stuff.

Unfortunately this is still in progress most of the experiments conducted in this category can be run in a better fashions.

Tip

Current guidelines are employees can talk with their managers to define tangents of their departments they will be refined on Bi-Annual basis and then learnings will be shared in other ceremonies with the beneficiary departments.

Execution Logs (In Progress)

This include all the experiments we ran or potentially wanting to run across the department with the details of

• What was the goal?
• What was the scope?
• Who conducted the experiments?
• Was the knowledge shared across team? And if yes then through which ceremony?