Minimal.cards is a web app to organize team process and improve coordination, culture, innovation, and delivery. We also have a physical deck of cards available if you like in-person meetings.
This is part one of a three-part series on why we built minimal.cards 🙃
Who are we?
We're Ashlyn and James, a rag-tag pair of tech-workers who hate the same things that you do: wasting time in pointless meetings 🎉
We're optimistic people, but constantly feel like our lives could be episodes of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' (Larry, want some content? call us 🤙) Meaning, we are fascinated by complicated interactions between people and find humor in the nuances of people communicating with each other.
Here's one of those stories; it's the worst meeting of our lives, the one that led us to build Minimum Viable Ceremonies to help people avoid:
- shitty meetings,
- politics and power grabs, and
- process replacing productivity with theater.
Setting the scene
One bright Tuesday afternoon, we walked into a board room with a kaboodle of post-its and sharpies, ready for our process planning. Morale was high, and we told each other repeatedly that all we needed to do was sit down, plan out our team process, draft our squad constitution, and be on our merry way for the afternoon.
Little did we know.
Two hours later, we both stumbled out of that room grumpy, a bit hungry, pretty darn disillusioned, and without a syllable of a process or constitution of any kind.
What we were up to
The idea behind this meeting was to decide how we, as a new team, would work together to deliver our outcomes. What kind of process to run? Who's responsible for what? What are our core values as a squad? Simple questions with difficult answers.
Planning how a team will work together is one of the toughest yet highly rewarding activities you can engage in as a team. Like a patient zero that's at the center of a disease outbreak, this meeting is at the center of all things wrong with 'how' you work. Running agile processes can be tricky because there is no right way to work as a dev team or a product team. But, there is one meeting that you can consistently point to for solving most cultural problems - the process planning meeting.
If this process meeting is facilitated well, the return on investment is considerable. This one little meeting can honestly save up to hundreds of thousands of dollars since the highest cost to building software is time (e.g., people's time in salaries or opportunity cost.)
How did it go so wrong?
First off, we want to say that we're not blaming anyone in the room for this. Like most disasters, this wasn't the result of just one thing going wrong or the actions of one individual, but a confluence of several bad circumstances that came together simultaneously, in a particularly undesirable way. Our goal is to review a few of the factors which led to a crap time. Not to blame any particular individuals involved 💖
The three things that made this one meeting feel so bad:
Unskilled facilitation
A facilitator's job is to work through a clearly defined agenda in the agreed-upon time, make sure that everyone gets a voice, prevent bad actors from stealing focus, and make sure that the meeting's purpose is achieved.
A poorly facilitated meeting is a breeding ground for bad actors and big egos to shift blame with manipulative behavior. Left unchecked, this results in people feeling undervalued or upset, or worse, emotionally checked out from the work.
Wrong people in the room
Generally, meetings are about a transfer of information between parties. It may be informational (e.g., an announcement), receptive (e.g., feedback gathering), or collaborative (e.g., a workshop), but either way, if key stakeholders don't show up, everyone is wasting their time.
Even worse, though, people are forced to attend a meeting when they don't need to be there. Nothing's more demoralizing than spending a valuable hour of your day listening to other people exchange information that doesn't affect you at all.
Politics and manipulation
Meetings are a magnet for power dynamics. It's not always obvious who has influence over decisions or what their motives are. Are they pulling strings behind the scenes? Sometimes people want to attend meetings because it allows them to exert their influence, rather than to support other team members to work together.
Especially if a meeting is under-facilitated or the agenda is unclear, many meetings run the risk of turning into a battleground of egos, where the winner gains the ability to increase their influence or status within the company.
So why was this meeting in particular such a disaster?
All three of these things came together to create a bad meeting that had far-reaching repercussions.
In this meeting in particular, we had a person who was thrown into a facilitation role they weren't comfortable in, and asked to lead a group of people through a process they were unfamiliar with, with power dynamics that they weren't prepared to navigate. As a result, the agenda we had planned fell apart fairly quickly. The conversation devolved into whose ideas would prevail rather than whose ideas were best for us as a team.
Because the delivery team sensed a power vacuum (due to the absence of senior leadership), lots of people with various skillsets, opinions, and values attempted to fill the void at the same time, resulting in people talking past one another and generally staying stubbornly off-topic.
The aha! moment
One good thing did come out of this meeting—the identification of a problem. After about an hour and a half of fatiguing conversation, James said, "I'm really into the most minimum viable ceremonies process that we can come up with. Can we just pick the most important ones and start there?"
James and I knew if this problem exists for us, a room full of incredibly skilled and experienced people, this must be a problem for other teams. This one painful meeting set the course for the creation of Minimum Viable Ceremonies.
Next steps
Anyone with any level of facilitation skills needs to be able to facilitate a process planning meeting because it's the core of a team's culture. Learn more about how we approached this problem to develop a solution in Part 2 (coming soon!). Sign up for our newsletter below, and we might email you when we post part two.