Agile Notes (No. 55)

Maintaining full group participation

Hello all! Welcome new subscribers! Thanks for joining us. We continue with Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka. This week we are moving on to Chapter 17: Managing the Meeting Participants.

I’m writing this on May 4th and I thought it would be fun to learn about some Jedi mind tricks. :)

This is a great chapter. It provides the tools to recognize drop-offs in participation AND the possible underlying dysfunction responsible.

You can’t get to the Performing mode if you don’t have FULL-group participation. One of your key skills…your Jedi…skills is listening to the team. You have to have your ears up when the team is interacting.

• Are members of the team checked out? Are they on their phones or laptops?

• Do meetings quickly break down and go off into tangents that have nothing to do with the stated Meeting Purpose?

• Are team members being cut off, interrupted, or spoken over?

• Are one or more people consistently the dominant voice? Are some team members simply not being heard?

These are some of the things you need to be listening for. As a Scrum Master/Agile Coach/Project Manager, etc you have to get beyond (way beyond) what team members are saying. You have to get beyond what the Burndown/up charts are saying. You have to dig underneath it all.

Tabaka provides a few excellent tips for diagnosing the symptoms of the behaviors highlighted above as well as steps to take to get your meetings/discussions back on track.

There is a great “trick” she mentions in the section on how to deal when discussions go off topic. I use it all the time. Playing dumb. :) I always think of Tom Hanks in the movie, Big.

In the scene pictured above, Hanks is in a meeting with high-level executives reviewing toys for the upcoming season. As they pitch their toys, he raises his hand and says, “I don’t get it.”

It’s very Beginner’s Mind.

Tabaka says we should use this method. It has worked for me MANY times. I DON’T say “I don’t get it.” OK…maybe sometimes. Tabaka offers a couple of great prompts for us:

• “I hear 3 different scenarios being discussed. Did I capture all of them?”

• “I am having trouble tracking the various discussions happening right now, but this is what I think I hear (and list them).

Once you have clarity, you can then refer to the Meeting Purpose to get the team back on track discussion the agreed upon topics. The team can decide to put the side-bar items into the Parking Lot or they can decide to bust the meeting and agree on a new topic.

How about you? What questions or prompts do you use with your teams when you need to get them re-focused? Tell me about a time a meeting went off track and how you recovered.

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