RETROSPECTIVE IDEAS
The ‘Bad Meeting’ Retro
Gamifying a Bad Meeting to generate Improvement Ideas
Meetings, Bad Meetings and Meetings about Meetings
Meetings. Even reading the word can make people sigh.
What is it about the structured activity of gathering people in an office building that generates all kinds of strange behaviours?
Think of a really bad meeting you experienced in the past: why was it so bad? Was it a meeting you participated in, or were you the facilitator?
Every team can improve how they work together in meetings, and sometimes we need to explore together just how bad things can get before we can start to make things better.
In this retrospective game, we set up an almost impossible facilitation challenge, and give team members a few classically dysfunctional roles to play in a meeting.
During the retrospective, your team will have a chance to have a bit of fun showing off their acting chops, and playing out a disaster of a meeting. It is designed to be a bit of fun, but hopefully it will get creativity flowing and afterwards, we can discuss improvements to how we really do meetings.
Setup
You’ll need at least 4 people, and 9 is a great number for this exercise.
Total Time: > 1 hour
1 person will be a facilitator each time.
For groups of 7–9:
2 observers and 4–6 participants.
For groups of 4–6:
1 observer and 2–4 participants.
If you have a mix of remote and co-located in your team, this version of the game works best with a mostly co-located group. I have run it with remote people as observers: you just need a way to broadcast the scene. (Note to self: remote version needed!)
You’ll need a room with some space for whiteboards or flip-charts, and a place where people can wait outside without it being too awkward!
You’ll need the cards too. Print the roles and attach them to A5 Cards if you have those handy. These will be like your ‘character sheets.’
There are two roles per A4 image here, and there is a downloadable PDF version on Slideshare.
1. Introduce the Challenge (10 mins)
Scrum Master describes the game. (2 mins)
- Welcome to the Meeting challenge! In this challenge we will be doing a little bit of acting.
- Our scenario is a fictional meeting. Please pick a card to find out the role you will play in this meeting.
Distribute the cards. (3 mins)
- Ask everybody not to reveal the details of their cards to each other
- Take the people with participant roles out of the room and brief them. (2 mins)
- Please take a couple of minutes to read the instructions on your card. Do they make sense? Do you have any questions?
- When the meeting is about to start the facilitator will open the door.
Brief the facilitator and the observers. (5 mins)
With the people playing participant roles outside the room, brief the others.
- This challenge is about interactions and they can be helpful or destructive.
- Observers need to take note of what helps and what hinders.
- Facilitator needs to remain calm, roll with the punches, and try to steer the group towards the outcome.
2. The Meeting (10 mins)
This is the fun part :)
Take notes and try not to laugh too much as your team-mates relish their dysfunctional roles and show off their acting chops.
3. Debrief (20–25 mins)
You could structure a whiteboard or flip-chart in three sections like this:
- Start with Observers’ feedback (3–5 mins).
- Then ask participants and the facilitator how it felt (3–5 mins).
- Guide the participants to record the behaviours that were constructive, and those which were destructive.
- Once we have listed some observations from the mock meeting, ask the participants if any of this felt familiar: does this ever happen in our meetings?
- Is there anything we could do differently? (5 mins)
- Try to leave the meeting with one improvement that your team can make to improve how your meetings work. (5 mins)
If you do run this retro, please let me know how you get on with it!
