No More Meetings!

By Mike Bonifer and Jessie Shternshus

Among the most-frequently heard complaints by employees, no matter how large or small their organization, or its reason for being, is that they get pulled into too many meetings. A calendar full of meetings as far as the eye can see.

That most of them are pointless or

• Language: English
• Publisher: BDI Publishers
• Release date: Dec 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781946637161

Book preview

Contents

FRAMES / GAMES

Each entry has one or more of the following objectives:

Innovation

Collaboration

Communication

Customer Success

Strategy

The highlighted objectives will be covered in that FRAME/GAME

Active Listening / Eavesdrop#

Award Ceremony / ImpAct Awards#

Being Present / In the Frame##

Breaking Patterns / Hats Off

Breakthrough / Chalk Walk

Building Consensus / Stir the Pot#

Creative ideation / Leapfrog

Customer Communication / Be the Customer#

Customer Curiosity / Visual Metaphors

Customer Success / Hammer Time#

Customer Support / Complaint Symphony#

Decision Making / Pursue, Pivot, Punt#

Design Thinking / Design Thinkeroo#

Diversity and Inclusion / I’m Someone Who#

Emotional Connection / Masks and Expressions##

Escalation / To Make Matters Worse#+

Expressing Creativity / Inner Critic Coffee#

Expressing Gratitude / Thank You For#’

Final Review / Fresh Eyes#+

Forecasting / What’s the Weather Like?#

Gaining Clarity / Alchemy#+

Getting Unstuck / Chilean Miner Escape Act#

Goal Setting / Crystal Balls#+

Group Alignment / Oceans Away#

Group Empathy / What Fills Me Up#+

Group Focus / Virtual Mirroring##

Improving Environment / Space Inventors

Managing Change / New Juice#+

Offsite / Wandering Walkabout

One on One / Personal User Manuals#

Performance Prep / One Phrase Five Ways#

Peripheral Vision / Three Shifts

Personal Productivity / To-Don’t List#

Positivity / Halos and Wings#

Post Mortem / Dearly Departed#

Presentation Prep / Pitchback#

Prioritization / Tag Team Knockouts#

Problem Solving / Sorry, Gong Number#

Process Analysis / Acid Test#+

Process Improvement / One Fail, Five Positives#+

Professional Development / Each One Teach One#

Ramping Up / Quilting Bee

Re-framing a Challenge/ Re-express Yourself

Re-framing a Challenge / What’s Within Reach##

Re-tooling / Medium Rare+

Retrospective / Back to the Future#

Retrospective / Mood-o-Meter#+

Roadmapping / Mapper’s Delight#+

Social Idea Sharing / Light My Fire#

Stand-up / Continue, Consider#

Storytelling / Sign Safari

Team Building/ Spirit Vegetable

Trust Building/ Hide in Plain Sight

Trust Building / Two Truths and a Lie#

Unlearning / Fresh Take#+

Urgency / Headline News#

Visual Thinking / Huddle Pass#+

#Denotes Game works in both physical and online environments

##Denotes Game designed specifically for online environments

+Denotes Game can be played asynchronously

Frame1.jpg

FRAME: Active Listening

You call it eavesdropping.

That’s just creepy! you say. Who cares what people are talking about in the break room?

Where do you think stories come from? we ask. Great storytellers are great eavesdroppers. Eavesdropping is their thing. The listener isn’t collecting evidence. She’s using the eavesdropped conversations as inspiration for stories.

You say, "Well...you may have a point. About the listening."

We’re glad you’re coming around, we say. There are times and places for everything. If people talk loudly enough to be overheard, something in them wants to be heard, and we can listen without betraying anyone’s relationships or violating their confidence.

How? you ask.

This game, we say.

GAME: Eavesdrop

Active listening is an essential communication skill, and yet when do we ever get a chance to practice it? One of the crucial parts of active listening is engaging with your ears and eyes by reading an email while also being in a conversation. In the same conversation, we are listening to multiple conflicting points of view held by people trying to solve a problem. It can mean simultaneously reading emotions and literal language. Active listening, or as we’re calling it for purposes of playing this Game, eavesdropping, means synthesizing these points of view into a whole. It means we create a coherent narrative in which all voices are heard and honored. This game will give you practice doing that.

People love listening to other people’s conversations even if they don’t want to admit it. So let’s just all admit that we do it. Today we are going to give everyone permission to eavesdrop. You heard us right. Eavesdropping made okay!

First, set up a circle of chairs, each two feet apart, in the middle of the room to accommodate everyone in your group (up to 20 people).

Then give everyone an index card and a pen.

Have people sit in each one of the chairs.

Designate one person in the group to be the Eavesdropper: the BIG E!

Ask the people in the chairs to pair up (or work in three if an odd number) and begin a conversation about something that’s happened recently in their lives. It could be anything: a new pet at home, a birthday or milestone, a trip.

With these conversations underway, the Eavesdropper is given two minutes to walk around the outside of the circle, in any direction, eavesdropping on conversations, and writing down words or phrases that catch their ears.

The Eavesdropper can spend as much time as they want on any conversation but must listen to each conversation at least once. They can return to any conversation multiple times during their two-minute listening session.

The Game’s objective is for the Eavesdropper to put together a one-minute story from the words and phrases collected from overheard conversations.

The story must be shared immediately with the full group and only use words or phrases on the Eavesdropper’s index card. Okay, we’ll spot you some prepositions and conjunctions, but other than that, it’s simply the collected words and phrases read to the group so that they make a story.

Got it? If not, eavesdrop on someone explaining it to someone else.

Once the Eavesdropper has shared their story, pick a new Eavesdropper, and have people in the circle change places and start new conversations about different topics. Switch places in the room and start yer yappin’. Repeat.

This game can be easily adapted to a virtual environment by pairing people in separate meeting rooms and giving the designated Eavesdropper the ability to move between meeting rooms.

This is an excellent way to improve your listening skills, let go of the script in your head, and connect with what’s going on in the room. Fun, eh?

OBJECTIVE: Collaboration, Communication

SUGGESTED DURATION: 2 hours

PHYSICAL AND ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS

FRAME: Award Ceremony

Award ceremony: A rite of passage or commemoration. An idiosyncratic ritual.

In organizations, we tend to focus on what is required to do a job, often at the expense of recognizing the impact of doing the job on those around us, our customers, and our world. This coming-together describes a ritual that will call out and honor the impact of our work - what each person in the group has contributed to the outcomes, and how their contributions have affected our organizations and us.

GAME: ImpAct Awards

Time to end the game that results in crappy outcomes that you have to spend time and effort not getting blamed for or sucked into. To hell with that. Let’s play a new game!

This game keeps you, your group and your company on track to appreciate one another, and your customers. It will replace heads-down processes and their siloed points of view with a more holistic approach.

The names of all attendees are placed in a hat. Each attendee draws a name out of the hat.

People should think about the person whose name they’ve drawn, their impact on them personally, on the team, on your organization, and/or on your customers. Take 30 minutes to create a two-minute speech and a handmade ImpAct Award to give to the person. Use found objects. Do not go out and buy anything.

One by one, people step to the front of the room and, without revealing the person’s name, read their speech about the person whose name they’ve drawn. Be playful, exaggerate for effect, make a speech in the style of awards shows and banquets, but be complementary. This is not a roast.

At the end of the speech, they will reveal who they’re talking about and hand the person their handmade ImpAct award. Round of applause for the honoree, accompanied by the type of fanfare music that typically accompanies awards. Woot, woot!

Everyone is familiar with award ceremonies, so you’ll be working from a well-known idiom. Speaking in and playing with the idiom will liberate participants to express truths and emotions that would not be so apparent if you asked them to be serious and literal.

FirstPlace1.jpg

OBJECTIVE: Collaboration, Communication

SUGGESTED DURATION: 1 hour

PHYSICAL AND ONLINE ENVIRONMENTS

FRAME: Being Present

It’s hard to sit still all day in front of a screen. At home. Moving between meetings without ever getting out of our chairs. Heads get heavy when they’re not swiveling and gawking. Eyeballs get weary when every image is 18 inches away. Ears get bored with every sound coming from your pods. Where bodies go (or don’t), minds follow. The reverse is also true. Pretty soon, our