Share unexpected knowledge, and learn a ton in the process
The Brown Bag practice
What is it? Remember the days where you’d open your backpack, pull out a paper bag and unpack your sandwich, slice of cake, apple, and juice box? No? Me neither…
So what are brown bag sessions? They are informal, conversational and bitesize learning sessions, typically held over lunch (get it?).
They are a safe haven for your team to demonstrate new or niche tech and kick it around with their peers. Ironically, the presenter learns as much as the attendees — There’s nothing like hosting a session to find out if you have truly understood a topic.
How does it work? Keep it conversational and informal. Run them when someone volunteers, and encourage it to be demonstrative and light hearted.
Bring new or niche tech to the table, and spend the time chatting about some tech you may not get to play with during your day job. Take the feedback on what works best, but fortnightly seems a sweet spot to keep the anticipation, but also manageable. Around 20–30 minutes is good as it limits prep time, and gives plenty of time for Q&A and conversation afterwards.
When is it useful? Although working under one roof, our teams work on vastly different areas across channels, domains and the tech stack. Bringing home concepts and having a bit of a ‘geek out’ gives some space to learn something left-field, meet new team members, and reconnect with those who are perhaps remote or out of the office on a project. We’ve also found that the person running the session benefits massively in rubber stamping their understanding, and developing their ability to convey technical topics to those who likely aren’t in the know.
The content is always enlightening, we’ve had sessions on Robotics, Blockchain and more…. “Brown Bag” — a dated name, yet the content is is often just the opposite!
This is posted as part of the Craft Community Practice series by Jack Stevenson & Neel Joshi
