Challenge

Company has very boring and ineffective status meetings 3 times per week which supported by many  reports. All the employees were keep silence regarding this problem and continue to visit them but it has  no results and just “eat” their time.

Selection

We decided to conduct the retrospective in order to figure out what’s wrong at the moment and what we  may do to improve it and receive more interaction from team. We chose mindmapping tool during  retrospective meeting. To group our stickers we have identified several categories:

-  What we should stop doing

-  What we should continue doing

-  What we should do less

-  What we start doing

This technique has some benefits: it allows to share opinion of each team member, to indicate all the  opinions and thoughts at the stickers and to group our thoughts by categories which defined our following  company strategy and gather the important insights.

Application

15 participants of regular status meetings participated in mindmapping process. First of all we analyzed  materials which we have for that meeting and divided this meetings into several logical parts. After  participants were given a stickers where each of them were asked to write their feelings about each of  topic(part of meeting), how could be these meetings different and then to share opinion about questions:  What we should stop doing, What we should continue doing, What we should do less, What we start doing.

All these stickers were presented on board and then we started to group them into 4 categories  abovementioned.

While distributing the strikers each of team member could explain his/her thought that it would be clear  for everyone. Moreover, the goal of this meeting was to make a decision how we would like to transform  these meeting that they would not be that boring.  In order to reach this goal we voted for things  mentioned at strikers in each category. We defined main action points for future and take them into work  as experimental to test.

Insights&Approach

Such methodology gave us great discover. At our meeting people start to talk who usually do not talk and  express their opinion. Moreover, we find out that main problem was related to the format of documents  which we need to fill in before status meetings and everyone was bored to repeat these action in  documents points 3 times per week. Mindmapping allowed us to generate more new ideas how to  transform our “boring meeting” and structure our thoughts.  Categories let focus not only what we need  start doing, but also on what we should stop doing.

What could be different? I think we should have a timekeeper for mindmapping process especially at the  stage of discussion.  Some discussions take a long time and go too deep into details, so such person could  be useful that each of team member could explain what does he/she mean at the stickers written. The

positive thing that mindmapping process helps us to reach the goal and find several ideas how we could  transform the meetings in order to be effective.

