This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz
by James Britt.
Original Post: Lean Introductions
Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamesBritt-Home
Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys
Some folks show up early. Some folks don’t know everyone else; we go around and do introductions. More people show up; not everyone knows everyone else; we do some introductions. And so on, until the meeting starts.
Introductions typically involved people saying something about where they worked, what they did, what their company was about, and so on. Even when you ask people to be fairly brief they often are not. Some folks just like to talk, mostly about themselves or what super cool awesome stuff they are doing. Fair enough, enthusiasm is important. And some folks get asked questions about their work during their introduction. Quite understandable; it’s good when you meet someone doing something you’re interested in.
The problem is that one or two digressions are OK, 15 or 20 are not. My friend Ray Niemeir, a regular at the PRUG, noted the problems with both repeated introductions and extended detail, and suggested ‘lean introductions.”
The idea is you go around the room, and each person says their name, and offers one terse bit of information pertaining to a given “tag”. We typically start off with “daytime affiliation” as the tag. With that constraint we can get through a good-sized group of people fairly quick. Quick enough that we can do again, and maybe again once more.
With each pass, the “tag” changes. “Favorite language other than Ruby.” “What you do for exercise.” “Last movie seen.” “Conference you really want to attend.”
My contribution to the technique was to ask each person to give their full name each time; I’m bad with names and the repetition really helps.
What’s nice about this approach is that it’s the right kind of simple. Easy to explain, easy to do, easy to vary when needed. If people show up late for the meeting, it’s simple to have another pass of lean introductions. Often (if I remember to do it) we’ll have another go-round at the end of the meeting (outroductions).
User group meetings are a great way to learn new technical information, but the big win is in fostering human relationships. The easier it is for people to start learning stuff about each other as people, the better. It means you can put a face to a name on a mailing list. I means you can better interpret the tone underlying list posts because you learn who’s serious, who’s a kidder, who’s who.
Lean introductions is great tool for community building; try it at your next user group!
Previous Topic
