The One-Minute Test
Often, when we meet with design teams, we’ll reserve a few minutes at the tail end of the meeting to do an unusual type of wrap-up. We ask each participant in the meeting to, on a sheet of paper, answer the following three questions with a total time limit of 60-seconds:
- What was the big idea? (What was the most important thing you heard at the meeting?)
- What was your big surprise? (What was the thing you saw or heard that surprised you the most?)
- What’s your big question? (What’s the biggest unanswered question you have at this time?)
After everyone has had a chance to write down their answers, we’ll share them. If the meeting was friendly, we’ll have everyone just go around and read what they wrote. If the meeting was stressful or contentious and we want to take advantage of anonymity, we’ll collect up the papers and the meeting moderator will read them aloud.
This is a trick we picked up while doing a project at the Harvard Business School years ago. One of the professors used a slightly-modified version of these questions at the end of every class, collecting up the answers and seeing what class the students thought they just sat through.
We find that it’s not unusual to discover that different people in the room had just attended completely different meetings. People are surprised by things that other people take as a matter of course. People take away a different emphasis about what was discussed. People’s fears and concerns are reflected in…
