Rotten Tomatoes Meeting Reviews Google Chrome Extension

A Piece of Organizational Design Fiction

How would you feel if every meeting was critiqued by an automated system? What if it might boo or cheer you?

The above is a piece of design fiction of what it might be like if you were checking out various Google Chrome extensions for meetings and one was available to do more than just auto-summarize.

Read on if you want to find out the process to create this provocation…

Near Future Laboratory inspiration

I’ve been really inspired by the Near Future Laboratory’s work. More recently, I’ve been reading The Manual of Design Fiction (which is great) and attending General Seminars focused on particular topics (which are mind expanding) but I also finally got motivated to use The Work Kit of Design Fiction cards (which has been added to my collection of card decks).

Most recently, I attended a workshop where Julian Bleecker of the Near Future Laboratory and Dré Labre showed how they use the design fiction cards in their practice during a The Near Future Laboratory & Design Fiction Daily Show.

I’ve been interested in doing more speculative fiction, futures, and design fiction practices at work. So far I’ve tried to apply the lessons from these practices to PRFAQs (writing a post about this soon) and various workshops to create more discussion about what really matters.

Why not consider the future of work through design fiction?

In my day-to-day I think a lot about how people work together. That includes meetings, workshops, decision making, writing documents, and anything else they might collaborate on. I do this from the perspective of a product operations person (aka “PM’ing the PM experience”).

I had the design fiction cards but needed to consider how I might inject some inspiration from the workplace…

I also happen to be a huge fan of The Ready, a future-of-work consultancy, that has a great podcast. I previously purchased a deck of cards they created called Tension and Practice cards. The use of the cards are meant to create a bridge between the present (tensions) and the future (practices to address those tensions).

At this point you may be asking: “Chris, how many card decks do you have?” And I’d respond “that isn’t material but let’s just say it is more than 20 and less than 100.”

Anyways… I ended up using a single tension card with a grouping of design fiction cards to come up with a design fiction for the future of work.

As an aside, the reason why I like card decks is that they are great ways to expand what we are considering or to arbitrarily restrict what we are considering. Both directions are there to temporarily add confusion to a situation that we need to try to resolve. It is like annealing in metal (or simulated annealing in machine learning). Adding some heat to make the later work stronger.

These are the first set of cards I drew to try it out:

These were the cards I pulled:

• Tension card: “our meetings are theater”
• Attribute: “autonomous”
• Tone: “99¢ store-like”
• Archetype: “product review”
• Object: “artificial intelligence”
• Action: “sonify”

From there I did some ideation. Here are a few ideas that came out of it:

• Google Meet plug-in that turns everything into a play or musical — backgrounds, AR filters to turn people into Shakespearean actors, background music, autotune when speaking, sound effects at inappropriate times, etc.
• Auto-generating fake meeting audio recordings based on an email chain to avoid scheduling a meeting (e.g. “this could have been an email”).
• Reviews automatically generated on a scale of theater to not theater.
• Movie or theater critic gives a scathing review of the meeting if it is bad and a breathless review if it is good — “I give it two thumbs up!”

Based on the final output you can see parts of the ideas coming out with the last idea really being interesting to me. From there I wrote a lot of text that could be in a product review (the archetype as a “diegetic prototype”) for about 10 minutes. I was trying to channel what someone might say about this extension, especially someone that got “two thumbs down” for their meeting.

After mucking around with what a Google Chrome Web Store review might look like this is what was created:

What types of questions does this evoke for you? Should this be something anyone can add to a meeting? How much should this be public feedback vs. private? How does this create incentives to have meetings (or not)? How might it help improve (or hurt) meeting culture?

Collecting the action items from the meeting

What’s next? I think I’ll try to put together a few more design fictions about the future of work. Probably not daily like Dré does but we need to have more conversations about this beyond “remote vs. not.”

We need to consider new ways of working to address complexity of a more connected world.

Here are all of the organizational design fiction posts so far:

• #1 — Rotten Tomatoes Meeting Reviews Google Chrome Extension
• #2 — RiteFeeling behavior modification program to reduce meetings
• #3 — MICROMANAGED? Don’t fight your bureaucracy, insure against it!

And I’ve also talked about how product managers write fiction, starting with the PRFAQ.