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Meeting from Hell

👥 Group Setting | 🕒 45 min | 🔄 Once | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 3

Example

Use When​

Your team wants to discuss what poor psychological safety could look like in your environment, without pointing fingers or calling anyone out.

Prerequisites​

A loose agenda for an upcoming activity which your team will be conducting in the near future.

Tool Description​

When working with psychological safety, it can be uncomfortable to address the areas wherein psychological safety might be lacking; the skeletons in the closet. “Meeting from Hell” intends to allow your team members to express and bring these skeletons to life in a format that invites laughter in areas that might normally be considered taboo. Select an upcoming activity that your team will be conducting. Then:

  1. In plenum, discuss and establish the objective of the activity. Write it down somewhere where all teams can see it.
  2. In a 5minute collective brainstorm, make a list of all your team could do to make sure that you achieve the worst result imaginable with respect to the objective of the activity.
  3. Have each team member pick two items from the list (overlap is fine)
  4. Conduct a simulation of 15 minutes of the chosen activity, wherein team members attempt to realize the items they picked. Team members may invent imaginary issues or work items as part of the simulation.
  5. After the simulation, have a 5minute reflective discussion about how the selected items affected the intended outcome of the activity
  6. Go down the list of items your team members selected, and ask your team: “Is there anything that we are currently doing that in any way, shape, or form resembles this item?"
  7. If the answer is yes to any item, discuss and write down what first steps will help you prevent those items from happening

Purpose​

“Meeting from Hell” allows your team members to express the in-expresseable, and address the skeletons in the closet in a less serious environment.

Outcome​

“Meeting from Hell” produces action points for avoiding undesirable outcomes in future instances of the selected activity, and can act as a good conversation-starter for discussing psychological safety in your team.