This event is organized for the Geneva Innovation Movement (GIM) small group knowledge sharing circle as an opportunity to participate in a pilot hands-on digital skills workshop, organized in cooperation with GIM and IdeaSquare at CERN. We are inviting only a few key GIM members, high-level managers without concrete tech line duties, who are Geneva-based and we believe would be interested in this topic.
To some extent, digital skills are like learning another language. Our hands-on workshop is an experiment to see whether we can help to trigger a better mutual understanding of the two different mindsets.
The workshop is to be attended in pairs for learning from one another. Inspired by the collaborative team approach used at CERN for addressing scientific and technical challenges, you will be working in pairs with your colleague to build a “detector proxy” device. The closest we can get to a particle detector in the short time we’ll have, is to construct and code a motion sensitive home burglar (movement detection) alarm from scratch as a learning vignette, using a simple Arduino kit.
The non-tech manager will be placed in a situation where one is working together with someone on a topic where that person is more knowledgeable but where you need to be an integral part of, i.e. to make it work and understand the key principles behind it. That is, after the exercise you will be capable to meaningfully construct by your own – or contribute to something similar, perhaps even much larger… Often, senior managers experience difficulties in understanding their more technical colleagues - and vice versa. Senior managers do not need to know how to code but they need to be able to understand the basic philosophy behind it and to be able to convey their ideas in an understandable fashion to those who can then execute them as well as to understand the limitations of the technology.
