Book Club Books at Work
Helping People Learn Through Literature, Share What They Know and Pass It On Across Generations
A handover document holds what can be written down. Much of the rest is passed on slowly, over time and in conversation, and a book read together can be one place for those conversations to begin.
Book Club Books at Work begins with a handover document Flavia Rossi can’t finish.
A Story-Based Learning Resource: Flavia’s Story — From the Handover to the Book Club
Flavia is Head of Conservation at a firm that restores historic buildings, where she has worked for thirty-one years. She retires in a year, and her director has asked her to write down everything she knows, so that her team can carry on without her.
The obvious answer is a handover document. After three weeks, she has forty pages of procedures, methods and contacts, and every page is accurate.
What the document doesn’t hold is everything that makes her good at the work: when to stop, what to keep, how to listen to an old building, and why any of it matters.
Book Club Books at Work follows Flavia through her final year. Through a book club with four colleagues, three books, three stories from her own working life and a stonemason’s chisel she has kept for forty-two years, she discovers that the knowledge she was expected to write down is only half of what her team needs from her, and that her organisation needs both.
Blending storytelling with Reflection Points, Learning Questions, Self-Coaching Exercises and the Book Club Books at Work Workbook, the resource guides each of your people through the same journey Flavia takes. It is designed for independent learning and for facilitator-supported group sessions, with a full Facilitator Guide and a Manager’s Guide that explores the same story from the other side of the table.
Book Club Books explores how reading fiction and non-fiction can reveal patterns in a working life, and how talking about a book with others can lead to conversations about work that are not always easy to begin directly. Here, three novels, read and discussed over several months, spark a Success Story, a Failure Story and a Passion Story, and are brought to one of the moments organisations know best: passing on what experienced people know.
For Your Organisation
The Challenge
Your organisation holds a great deal of knowledge in its experienced people: the judgement, craft and hard-won wisdom built over years of doing the work. When those people move on or retire, organisations ask for handover documents, set up mentoring and plan for succession. These are valuable, and they matter.
Yet some of what experienced people know is hard to fit on a page. Procedures can be written down. Judgement, instinct and the reasons behind a decision are much harder to capture. Conversations between people at different stages of their working lives often stay practical, and some of the deeper learning goes unshared.
When that happens, an organisation keeps the files and loses the wisdom. New colleagues learn the methods without the reasons. The same lessons are learned again, at greater cost. And experienced people leave without ever being asked what they most want to pass on.
Book Club Books at Work helps each person share what they know through reading together over time. A book gives people at different stages of their working lives common ground to talk from, and over months of conversation, their own experience, judgement and questions begin to come into it. And it helps managers make room for that kind of learning, so that knowledge passes between generations and reaches everyone in the organisation, whatever their stage.
Who This Is For
Experienced people preparing to pass on what they know, through retirement, a change of role or simply a wish to share it. New colleagues who want to learn more than the methods. And teams who would like to learn from each other across every stage of a working life.
Perhaps they have written a handover and know it leaves out what matters most. Perhaps they have years of experience and have never been asked what they would most like to pass on. Perhaps they are new to their work and want to understand the reasons behind it, not only the steps.
It is also for the managers who plan for succession, and for the learning and development teams who design mentoring and knowledge-sharing programmes.
What Your People Will Learn
- How to recognise what a handover document leaves out
- How reading together can open conversations about work that are not always easy to begin directly
- How to use a book as a starting point for sharing their own experience
- How to write a Success Story, a Failure Story and a Passion Story, each sparked by a book
- How to name what they most want to pass on, and why it matters
- How to listen when a new colleague challenges an established way of working
- How to create a living handover that carries wisdom as well as procedures
- How to start and sustain a book club that keeps learning moving across generations
What Your Managers Will Learn
- How to ask experienced people for what they know, as well as what they do
- How to make room for learning across generations
- How to support a book club as part of how a team learns
- How to make sure knowledge stays in the organisation when people move on
What’s Included
- Flavia’s complete story, told in three parts
- Three books, each sparking one of Flavia’s stories: The Wrench by Primo Levi, The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- Reflection Points, Learning Questions and Self-Coaching Exercises at every stage
- The five School of WorkLife practices for sustaining your learning: Self-Awareness, Observation, Effective Self-Feedback, Insightful Self-Questions and Writing Your WorkLife Stories
- The Book Club Books at Work Workbook, including the Handover Test, the Book Club Guide, the Three Stories Worksheet and the Living Handover
- A Facilitator Guide with three 90-minute session plans, facilitator questions and guidance on feedback in the group
- A Manager’s Guide, exploring the story from the director’s side of the table
How This Resource Works
Book Club Books at Work is built in three parts and nine stages.
Part One — Discover What a Handover Leaves Out
- Stage 1 — The Request
- Stage 2 — The First Book Club
- Stage 3 — Three Questions and an Answer
Part Two — Develop Through Three Books and Three Stories
- Stage 4 — The Wrench: Flavia’s Success Story
- Stage 5 — The Leopard: Flavia’s Failure Story
- Stage 6 — Gilead: Flavia’s Passion Story
Part Three — Direct the Learning Forward
- Stage 7 — The Living Handover
- Stage 8 — The Hardest Conversation
- Stage 9 — The Club That Continues
Each stage follows Flavia through a moment in her final year, then turns to the experience of each of your people with a Reflection Point, Learning Questions and a Self-Coaching Exercise, and closes with time to write. By the final stage, each of your people has discovered what a handover leaves out, written three stories sparked by three books, named what they most want to pass on, and begun a way of learning together that continues long after any one person moves on.