Example: Meeting from Hell

The Demo from Hell

IT Corp’s back-end development team consists of Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave and Eve. They have agreed to start working with psychological safety, in the hopes that it can help their team grow and develop even better architecture solutions in the future. They have chosen to adopt the tool “Meeting From Hell”, and have decided to try it out ahead of their weekly Friday demo meeting in the upcoming week.

The team meets on Zoom Thursday afternoon, where Bob presents the tool to the team. As the team has selected their weekly demo meeting as their activity, the team starts out by establishing what the objective of the activity is. The team uses an online whiteboard, and writes down the following: ”The objective of our weekly demo meeting is to share what has been built during the week, to understand our progress towards the project goal, and to discuss what to do next.” Each team member is then given a stack of digital post-it notes, and in a 5minute collective session, team members discuss and throw post-its on the online whiteboard, collecting ideas such as: ”Lie about what work you have completed”, “Indicate that you have completely changed the original plan for the work”, “interrupt others”, “present completed work that was not in the plan” and many others.

Each team member selects two cards for themselves. They are now ready to conduct their weekly demo meeting: hell version! The team conducts their meeting in their usual way, making up work to present as they go, and trying to actively achieve the worst possible outcome of the activity. After their 15 minutes of simulation, the team goes down the list of items which the team members selected. During their discussion of one item, Dave says: “I actually think we have a tendency to complete things that are not part of the plan - maybe we should work on that?”. Alice suggest that the team could color-code the tasks in their task management system, such that only cards that are planned for the current iteration are green, and the rest red. The team agrees, notes down her idea, and continues down the list of items.

Note: Immerse your team, get creative!

“Meeting from Hell” works better, the more your team engages with it. It is intended to be funny, to be over the top, and to allow your team to discuss things they could not imagine happening. Make it very clear to your team members that this is intended to be a creative activity, and that they should have fun! Similary, also make it clear that your team members will not be held accountable for coming up with ideas of how to achieve the worst possible result outside of the meeting. The point of the exercise is to address poor work experiences in a controlled environment, to make it easier to discuss the (hopefully) less severe experiences your team might have outside of the meeting.