TotalEnergies
Making strategic know-how accessible and bringing industrial knowledge capture to life
How do you get engineers, researchers and highly specialised technicians to share knowledge beyond their own field of expertise? For an internal seminar, the knowledge management department at OneTech, a subsidiary of TotalEnergies, wanted to convey the value of its cross-functional information networks.
To turn this complex subject into a dynamic team moment and sparkcollective intelligence, Arcane Experience rolled out a bespoke programme for gamifying knowledge sharing built on staged technical content and real-time interactivity. The project supports their digital transformation by optimising internal knowledge management .
The challenge: sparking collaboration across 60 technical networks
OneTech operates in highly strategic fields that demand deep company knowledge : electricity, MetOcean, instrumentation and drones. The challenge was to manage knowledge, smooth the transfer of knowledge and share this complex expertise with every team. The Knowledge Manager faced two major challenges :
Encouraging sharing
Raising team awareness ofcollaboration tools to encourage natural knowledge sharing .
Connecting disciplines
Getting experts out of their bubble to formalise and cross-pollinate knowledge and expertise.
The logistics were tight: the department had just 45 minutes in the middle of the seminar to engage an audience of 200 players at once.
Our answer: a collaborative format blending live theatre and a room-wide quiz
To maximise engagement across 200 participants without adding to the seminar’s logistics, our team went for immediate interactivity.
Live sketches
Two sketches performed live on stage, putting the company’s tacit knowledge into perspective.
Dynamic staging
A format built on the interaction between two disciplines, turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
Collective interactive quiz
A room-wide activation on the topics covered, to sharpen active listening and check the concepts had landed.
The learning design: stripping out the jargon so knowledge can flow
The key to this gamification strategy lies in authentic dialogue and the quality of the collaborative work carried out over the three months of production. Naturally head-down in their own field, technical speakers find it genuinely hard to shift approach in order to share knowledge. The risk was slipping into a standard conference, which sorely lacks energy when public speaking isn’t your day job.
Our role was to strip the jargon out of the speakers’ approach, using storytelling to script cross-disciplinary knowledge exchanges : a drone network specialist talking directly with a MetOcean network engineer, for example. This theatrical treatment humanised technology knowledge, removed the barriers to sharing and made collective decision-making easier during the game phases.
The impact: putting knowledge management at the heart of overall performance
In 45 minutes flat, the programme turned a complex management challenge into a collaborative moment praised by all.
Expertise bubble burst
Letting specialists explain their innovations in plain language and make their knowledge accessible during exchanges between peers.
Concepts remembered
Using learning through playful challenge to capture knowledge across the organisation.
Company team seminar
Replacing top-down presentations with a captivating theatrical format to unlock shared knowledge.
FAQ: gamification for organisational knowledge
Why do gamification and live staging work so well for technical subjects?
The more specialised a subject, the more it risks creating barriers of understanding between departments. Gamification uses dialogue as a universal translator. By staging real interactions between two disciplines in an accessible, fast-paced tone, you avoid the pitfall of the top-down conference. Interactivity reawakens employees’ curiosity, supports knowledge transfer and turns complex information into a rewarding moment of sharing for organisational knowledge.
How do your designers get to grips with our subject matter to build the quizzes and the staging?
Our design method adapts to the complexity of your topics. Depending on the project, our designers immerse themselves in your challenges. We can run in-depth interviews with your subject-matter experts to absorb their content, and we can also survey a sample of your future learners. This dual approach pinpoints their current level of knowledge and what they actually expect. That raw material is what lets us strip the jargon out of the content, make knowledge easier to absorb and feed your knowledge base with dialogue that rings true. If your transformation calls for in-person co-creation workshops, explore our team building for bringing teams together.
Is a 45-minute session enough to showcase our internal knowledge?
Yes. It’s an ideal format to add pace to a team seminar and create a clear break. Where a lecture-style presentation saturates attention, live staging brings real visual and human energy that keeps the room listening. The interactive quiz then instantly confirms that your strategic messages have landed, creating healthy competition within the community of practice. It’s the most effective way to stimulateorganisational learning, showcase the knowledge available and encourage your employees to exchange knowledge freely in their working environment. Want to build communities of practice or energise your internal networks? You can contact us directly to design your project.
