Don't Be A Dead Shark - Exercise Your Learning Muscles

I love to learn, do you?

Just like when Alvy Singer compares his and Annie Hall's relationship to a shark, in IT you need to keep moving forwards - because otherwise you're a dead shark.

But how do you encourage your team to continually learn?

In this week's RunAs Radio, Don Jones talks about getting people to exercise their learning muscles.

He gave a great example:

Set your team members a research task on technology topics drawn at random (e.g. Containers, PowerApps, Vue.js). They need to learn enough about the topic to be able to answer the following questions:

  1. What is it?
  2. What does it do?
  3. How does it work?
  4. Why does it matter?
  5. How are other companies using it?
  6. How might we choose to use it?
They should present back a 10-20 minute executive summary to the team.

Sounds like a great idea - I'm going to try it in my next team meeting. And the week after we'll watch Manhattan...

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