Working with young teams often throws up interesting challenges. There will be times when, what might seem like an intuitively simple concept to you may require a lot more creativity, when it has to be communicated to the teams.

The reason I make the above statement is not because young teams are averse to new concepts which foster creativity, but because young teams are always super charged and unless they are totally convinced to an idea, they will come up with another idea which might seem more interesting to them.

So if you have a concept which you believe can foster creativity in your team, you may at times have to be a lot more creative in propagating this idea to the team members. Now that may put you in a quandary as to how does one propagate a new concept. Let me illustrate the same with a small example of what we did at Tekriti.

Every Friday at Tekriti we have an interesting concept called Tekfriday, where Teknokrats give a presentation on a topic of their choice. Mostly it’s a technical topic, but sometimes it is also an experience sharing session. What is a matter of pride for us is that now TekFriday’s are so much a part of our DNA’s that they are planned for and looked forward to every Friday.  

Tekfriday took its roots from the very start of Tekriti. Every Friday a mail would go out, the contents of which were organized in such a manner so as to tease the brain cells of the Teknokrats and generate excitement in their minds on the contents of the presentation. So for instance once a particular team was presenting on the topic of performance tuning in rich internet applications, below mentions the mail which went out to the Teknokrats:

Subject: Today’s TekFriday: A very interesting story

Once upon a time in the land of RIA (”rich internet applications”)

There lived a few talented and smart programmers.

They used to churn out code, building highly impressive applications

Beautiful UI, great functionality. Everything was going great in this land.

Then one day, dark clouds started looming over RIA.

These dark clouds threatened to put all the work done by the residents of RIA to nought.

These dark clouds were of application performance and tuning.

RIA was in trouble, and so were the talented and smart programmers.

Then one night a bright star emerged and threw it’s powerful rays on two residents of RIA.

The residents immediately became endowed with super powers.

Their super powers had the capability to blow away all the dark clouds,

 The dark clouds of application performance and tuning.

With help from “QA”  and

their special weapons- “AB” and “httperf”,

slowly carved and started blowing away

all those slow queries and unoptimized code.

But then to blow away the clouds completely,

The entire population of RIA needed to be empowered

and the two super stars need to share their powers with everyone.

They will do that in Today’s TekFriday.

If you want the power, be there

The above mail immediately triggered a thought process in the minds of the Teknokrats on what was going to be covered in the session. The email above was that little drop of creativity which was needed to foster an entire concept of TekFridays. As I mentioned above, once the benefits of Tekfriday’s and the entire concept of sharing sessions was firmly accepted by the Teknokrats, it became an auto process.

Today mails like above don’t go out on Friday, why, not because the creative juices don’t flow, but because creativity has been fostered and creativity has been accepted. Here’s to the continuous journey of fostering one creative concept after another.