Mindful Retrospectives: An experiment

Several of us at QuizUp recently participated in a retreat called “Leading Differently: The Power of a Purposeful Pause” led by Janice Marturano. It focused on being present, using tools like meditation and purposeful pauses to train the mind to reach that goal. During the retreat, we did frequent, short meditations to help get us back into the room after breaks and such.

This inspired us to try meditations out as a part of our meetings as well. All of our teams do regular retrospectives, so trying this out there was perfect.

Most of us have been to meetings where people are physically present, but mentally away. This mental unavailability can stem from various things and is an idea we’ve discussed before, ignited by Jim and Michele McCarthy’s writing “Software for the head.” There they introduce the check-in protocol, a part of the Core Protocols.

Our experiment with what we now call Mindful Retrospectives could be seen as a version of checking in. Here’s what we’re trying:

First of all — phones go on silent and are put in a box, which is kept in the corner of the meeting room. These little attention grabbers can easily spiral a meeting from good to not-so-good. When one person starts signalling a lack of interest by checking her phone, it can quickly affect others.

Second, at the beginning of the meeting, we invite attendees to stand up and do a couple of deep breaths. We then invite them to sit down, find a comfortable position, and begin a 3 minute mindfulness meditation. We’ve been using basic meditation methods, such as focusing on the sensations of the breath. Most recently we’ve tried using the app Stop, Breathe & Think which includes several 3–5 minute guided meditation, perfect for starting a meeting.

What we think we will achieve:

• The No phones policy is awesome, at least from the facilitator’s side.
• We believe that mindfulness meditation helps us being present and raises individual awareness.
• We believe a short meditation will help people become present in the current moment, by leaving other work outside the meeting. Meetings with present people are far better than meetings with mentally away people.

Main challenges:

• Getting people to drop their phones can be hard and can become a struggle.
• Suggestions that some might call “new-age”-y or “startup”-y can be met with cynicism and a skeptical attitude. We try to combat this by inviting people to participate. Those who don’t want to, just wait in silence.
• Leading a meditation can be frightening, at least it was for me the first times, I was shaking.

Have you used meditation in meetings? How did it work out?