Make use of a concrete operational example
Boosting participation in team meeting
Routine is comfortable, sometimes necessary, but also pernicious. Applied to communication, it issues in low-level “background noise” that lulls us all to sleep... which means that if you want to wake people up, nothing works like a surprise! And if possible, a surprise that provides food for thought, and novel ways to share.
“Routine is not organisation, any more than paralysis is order.”Sir Arthur Helps, English historian and novelist
Compare
Remember
An axiom: take advantage of "events" and even more so of bugs
that come up from day to day. Neither to judge nor to reprimand but to
seek in them better understanding and ways to make
progress.
These cases are often approached from the angle of analysis / corrective action, which is of course a necessary and productive method for creating improvements. But it is not the only one.
These cases are often approached from the angle of analysis / corrective action, which is of course a necessary and productive method for creating improvements. But it is not the only one.
Propose a learning exercise
A short exercise, a simple game... 10 or 15 minutes can suffice
to wake people up! It might be a role-playing game to create some
perspective on a difficult relationship, a case study to
highlight different possible approaches...
Allow autonomy
If you decide to take on a subject from an angle which is new,
even fun, then you'll want to allow everyone their freedom in the
"performances" and the debates. Ideally, there should be no
pre-established expectations regarding the result. We explain
how the exercise works (as concisely as possible!), people express
themselves within that framework, then we debrief and
conclude.
Practice
A manager wants to revisit a problem that occurred with the team earlier this month: a dossier was not delivered on time and the QA department complained about the lack of information on this slip.
What do you think of his approach?
The QA department is criticizing us for not having informed them of the
delays on the the “RX12” dossier. It's true, we should have alerted
them ahead of time. I'd like to propose that we do an exercise: one of
you will take the role of Denis (head of QA) who is expressing his
discontent and we are all trying to make things right.
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This approach, while less effective than the second, is nonetheless
useful. Less effective because the manager has already given the
conclusion (“we should have...”) and the exercise does not propose
imagining how the problem could be avoided in the future.
Today, one of you is going to change hats... and play the role of Denis
(head of QA). And another of you is going to come see him 5 days before
the deadline for the “RX12” dossier. Each of you will prepare for the
meeting...
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Taking on the problem from an “outside the box” perspective. The
proposed exercise could be productive but others are also possible: it's
all a question of breaking habitual routines and starting to think
about what needs to change.
I’d like us to come back to the problem that came up with the QA
department. I need clearer picture of what happened... so I propose
that we sit down and analyze the chain of causes and effects.
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Analysis of cause-and-effect is useful but fastidious to do in a
meeting. It would be better to have it done ahead of time, and at the
meeting to discuss only the conclusions and the plan of action.