Acting on Concerns

👥 Group Setting | 🕒 20 min | 🔄 Iteratively | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 1

Example

Use When

Concerns of the team seem to exist just below the surface, but it’s hard to find the appropriate time to bring them up.

Prerequisites

A project or goal which your team is working towards completing.

Tool Description

It is common to see team members harbor concerns for their work, but choose to keep them to themselves in order to avoid looking negative or intrusive if they suggest changes. “Acting on Concerns” aims to have your team members air their concerns, and more importantly, act on them! Select an ongoing project that your team is working on. Sit down in a meeting and:

1. Have a 5minute individual brainstorm, wherein team members write down any concerns they have or could have, likely or not, for meeting the goal of the project. It’s important to state that these concerns can both be related to the work at hand, how the work is conducted, or really anything else.
2. On a shared board, create two columns labeled “things we can change” and “things we cannot change”, and have team members add their concerns to the column they find appropriate for their concern. Feel free to challenge which column a given concern belongs in!
3. Have a 10-minute open-floor discussion of what first steps can be taken to address the concerns in the “things we can change” column
4. Make a list of action points to address those concerns

“Acting on Concerns” can be conducted during an existing meeting wherein the team discusses their concerns, such as a Sprint retrospective.

Purpose

“Acting on Concerns” gives your team members a prompt to voice concerns they might otherwise hold back, while enabling your team to discuss what can be done about the concerns your team can address.

Outcome

A list of action points that address potential or existing concerns.