The Way Things Are
👥 Group Setting | 🕒 10 min + 3min/person | 🔄 Iteratively | 🛋️ Required Comfort: 1
Use When
Your team wants to reflect on its activities, the way they work, or challenge the “way things are around here”.
Prerequisites
A list of the activities your team conducts regularly.
Tool Description
An important part of innovation is that of paying continuous attention to the way things are done in your team, and to not get stuck in doing them a certain way, just because that has become “the way we do things around here”. This stagnation can for example happen when a team feels like they have “solved” a way to conduct a certain activity. “The Way Things Are” aims to get the team to reflect on these activities, and to challenge the status quo.
Select an activity from your list of activities. This can either be done randomly, or by intentional selection, if your team members want to work with a specific activity. Give every team member 5 minutes to individually note down the best and worst thing about how that activity is conducted. After this time, have team members go around the table and share their notes. When the roundtable has concluded, have a free-form discussion of what changes could be applied to the activity, based on what you found from the team’s notes. Look for patterns!“The Way Things Are” can be conducted during an existing reflective meeting, such as a Sprint Retrospective.
Purpose
“The Way Things Are” is intended to enable a reflective discussion of the way your team works. The tool acts as a prompt to make the team reflect on activities in their work that they might not necessarily have chosen to reflect upon themselves. This can be helpful in starting discussions about activties that might be performed ceremoniously.
Outcome
The team’s reflective discussion should lead to actionable changes to the selected activity. This should both support a culture where challenging the status quo is encouraged, and provide concrete benefits to the chosen activity.