When planning the agenda, Martin Albisetti and I were a little worried about things wandering off track, so we thrashed out a lists of dos & don'ts. I'll blurt them out here, with the really terrible ideas filtered out so I look more clever, and then offer some thoughts on how they worked.
Do
- be happy with the results of this meeting.
- ask questions, especially "why"
- be punctual
- stay on point
- design features
- check your email, i.e. laptops closed
- leave the meeting without being clear
- leave the meeting without being happy
The "Don't design features" rule was awesome. The rationale is that feature design leads to long discussions, and that it does a disservice to the many excellent engineers we have who aren't at the meeting and will be actually implementing a feature. At best, it's waste and at worst it's us telling people how to do something that they know how to do better. The clearest sign that it was a good idea came when other people started using it to shut me up.
3 comments:
I wonder what to do about the "laptops not closed" problem. I guess the solution depends on the cause...
Email genuinely backing up and needs to be dealt with? That certainly sounds plausible after several days. Allocate some time for catching up on demands from the outside world.
Meeting fatigue — after several days of intense discussion perhaps some people's capacity for engaging in intense discussion is simply exhausted? Not sure what to do about this except for taking more time or doing less, neither of which is satisfactory. Or finding a way when planning the week to accomodate the inevitable reduced energy towards the end, e.g. shorter sessions and more breaks?
Some participants don't think the current topic is very relevant to them, or that their involvement is superfluous? There's a pretty important disconnect there... why did they attend in the first place, and why were they invited? If circumstances have changed since the meeting attendees were chosen then maybe there needs to be a way for people to gracefully uninvite themselves.
Put another way, if someone's laptop is not closed, why don't they just excuse themselves and leave the room entirely? Perhaps there's no just obvious way to do that politely. Or perhaps they feel obliged to be there, but simultaneously don't agree that it's a good use of their time (maybe just because they have meeting fatigue). That's a pretty serious problem, and definitely a vibe-sucking one, and I'd love to know a good solution.
Maybe next time quietly approach a culprit during a break and ask them as non-judgementally as possible why they've started opening their laptop during a meeting?
Re email checking, I don't know exactly how you set it up, but maybe there's an introversion problem with these sprint meetings.
You get a bunch of people, many of whom (I think) work from home. They've travelled, they might be sharing a hotel room, they're spending all day having high stakes, high bandwidth face-to-face interactions. They socialise all evening. They sleep. They go round again. It may be pretty draining especially compared to their usual quota of human interaction.
So it may be that some of them are trying to create some downtime for themselves by laptopping. I don't have a good solution given the expense of these meetings.
FWIW, we deliberately scheduled an hour of "unstructured" time into each day.
Mary, although I can't speak for the others, you describe exactly how I've felt at these things in the past, and yes, it is draining. Although I can't think of any right now, perhaps there are more considerate ways of handling this than opening up your laptop.
Full disclosure: I also had my laptop open inappropriately at some points of the meeting, and bear absolutely no ill will towards anyone there who did the same.
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