Aino Corry on Better Tech Meetings

Transcript

johann-corry-meetings

00:00:11: Sven Johann Welcome to a new conversation about software engineering. Our guest today is Aino Corry. Aino is an independent consultant and helps clients with facilitation of meetings in general and retrospectives for agile software development in particular. And she also has expertise in facilitating broker meetings, design sprint facilitation, architecture health workshops, small programing sessions, and executive strategy summits. And also, you know, that's why I know her, program committee meetings for all kinds of interesting conferences like GOTO, YOW and QCon. Welcome Aino.

00:00:11: Aino Corry Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate to be here.

Sven Johann So, Aino is here because she wrote a book about Retrospectives Antipatterns. And if you read the book, you realize this book is, let's say, it's not only interesting if you are running retrospectives. So, if you read it, you realize: Oh, wow, I can use that one in my regular meeting and I can use that one. Even if you're not into retrospectives, it's a very interesting book. And we just want to talk about the things in the book, let's say, with a larger perspective on meetings in general, such as tech meetings, architecture design reviews and stuff like that. And maybe one thing which motivated me to have this conversation and why meetings are so important for us software engineers, was one big software company, a famous software company. They were looking for, let's say, principal engineers. And one of the most important skill was that you need to be able to facilitate meetings. And I was like: Okay, now we really have to hurry up with this Aino. It seems to be very interesting. I found that quite interesting. Let's start. I have to say, I didn't apply there, but, you know, a recruiter showed up and I clicked on it.

Sven Johann So, Aino is here because she wrote a book about Retrospectives Antipatterns. And if you read the book, you realize this book is, let's say, it's not only interesting if you are running retrospectives. So, if you read it, you realize: Sven Johann But maybe I don't want to. I am happy where I am. What I found out is, you know, I'm moderating a lot of meetings and I'm sitting in a lot of meetings and looking at the things I learned in the book, I have the feeling my meetings are orders of magnitude better than before. So let's go into how we can make meetings instantly better. My first question, just as an introduction, is what types of meetings actually exist for tech employees and where we are considered to be an attendee or an organizer?

Aino Corry I guess that depends on the organization, what kind of process they have. But if I look at my experience, a lot of software organizations have implemented Scrum in one way or the other, and with Scrum or if they have SAFe, there are a lot of meetings that they just need to have regular meetings like daily meetings, retrospectives, as you already mentioned, planning meetings, review meetings, demo sessions, backlog refinement, all these kinds of meetings. And if you have SAFe, you have all sorts of other meetings on top of that, PI planning and other things. There are, of course, all these meetings that are in the processes. But then there's also 1: 1 with the managers or 1:1 with the ones that they are managing. It could also be, sometimes they're thinking about what you would call apprenticeship with people that needs to be on meetings and 'let's set a meeting for this so that we can talk about this', 'let's set a meeting for this, so that you can learn this'. We also talk about social things like meetings now because a lot of things are online or hybrid. So when we want to make something social like playing together or making drinks together, we calling for a meeting because that's what it says in our calendar, because the teams meetings or the Google calendar meetings or the Zoom meetings or whatever you're using. There are a lot of meetings, and for most of these meetings, the employees are expected to be just attendees, and that means that they take away a lot of their responsibility for making the meeting a success. I'm sure we'll get back to that later. But sometimes they organize this, so it could be that they set up some sort of ad hoc meeting about discussing some technical detail or trying to discuss what technology they should use. Or as I mentioned before, it could be some apprenticeship with onboarding a new colleague.

Sven Johann When I thought about it, I was like: Yeah, we really have a lot of meetings. I run a lot of 1:1, but also if you're an architect or you have to lead some technical things and lots of technical meetings where we have to make some sort of decisions or getting on the same page. We basically have the role of attendee and organizer. You are a facilitator. What is the facilitator role?

Aino Corry Mostly my facilitator role is somebody who didn't actually initiate the meeting, but somebody who is invited or paid to facilitate the meeting. And when I say facilitate the meeting and not leave the meeting, it's because as a facilitator I am trying to facilitate that the best thing that could take place takes place within the given time with the people that are there. And that means that sometimes I've been tasked to facilitate a meeting, for instance, to make a decision about some technology choice. But while I am facilitating it, I realize that there was a hidden conflict that probably needs to be resolved with something else than a technical discussion, or that we don't have enough data to actually make this decision. And if we make this decision based on what we know, we might make the wrong decision. Sometimes the way that I facilitate a meeting is also to call it out and say: I'm sorry, we have to stop the meeting now, and then we need to prepare a little bit more to make the meeting actually worthwhile. Because, of course, you can always, and that's where it comes back to a meeting leader. Sometimes if you think you're meeting leader, you're leading them in the meeting and it's your responsibility to get exactly out of the meeting what you want out of the meeting. And sometimes you do that with too much force and you can always, of course, make a decision with the people that are there based on the data that's there. But it might not be the best decision and then it would be better not to make that decision and then create another meeting. But as a facilitator, then as you can understand from what I'm saying, A) you have to do your homework. You need to understand what they say actually that they want to achieve from this meeting. What's the end result hopefully for them? And then you need to understand as much as you can about the people who are in the meeting. And you have to understand what kind of data we're bringing in. Is there something that everybody read before or is it something that we should create while we're there? In a retrospective, we often have this gathering dates and stage where people are putting up Post-it notes or they're voting for things. Is this part of this meeting or is the data gathered already? And then as a facilitator, you need to take care of the time. You have to think about, we need time to end this meeting because otherwise it would just end abruptly and be very irritating. We probably get back to that as well.

Aino Corry Well, that's interesting, right? That really depends on the meeting. If it is a meeting where there might be some lawsuit afterwards to figure out who said what, then it's probably a good idea to not just have a recorder as a person, but actually record it and then use one of these speech-to-text tool, so you don't need a person. If you want everything recorded, you just use speech to text. That's easy now. But in my experience, there's a lot of things written down at a meeting that nobody really looks at afterwards. And if you write down too much, the probability for it not being read is actually higher. What I would suggest is actually, unless you need to know who said what. What I would suggest is only to have the decisions written down afterwards in a very short way and then in a longer way. In a short way so that people can skim it and say: Okay, this is what we decided at this meeting and then perhaps a little bit longer text underneath if you need it. Who's responsible for this? When will it start? When will it end? Things like that. A little bit like I do it retrospective. When I facilitate the retrospective and we have all these Post-it notes and we may have had a brainstorm about things that we can do action points or experiments, and then we decide on one or two things to do. And then people, the first time they have a retrospective for me, they want to save everything. They want to take pictures of everything. They want to save all the Post-it notes and they want to put the Post-it notes into a spreadsheet and show it to the manager and things like that. And I said: Don't do that. Just throw it all away. Because the only thing that will give you any value is actually what you decided on. All the middle calculations normally aren't that important in my experience. But again, there are some meetings where the middle calculations are important. One of the things that you actually need to think actively about before you go into the meeting. What kind of recording do you need? Is it enough to record it and make speech-to-text with everything? Is it enough just to have the decision or what is it now?

Sven Johann And then let's jump into the preparation of a meeting. The first thing I have here is deciding if I need a meeting at all. Because sometimes I have customers that have a meeting for everything and it is very hard. And you think: We could have discussed that over Slack. What do you think about this?

Aino Corry That's a very good idea. And one of the reasons why I think it's a very good idea to decide whether this should be a meeting is that this is the first part of the thinking process about the meeting. And the thinking process behind the meeting is something that is very, very important and very, very ignored. It has become a knee jerk reaction just to say: Let's have a meeting, let's find some time in the calendar, put an hour on the calendar in this week or next week, depending on how urgent it is. And then suddenly you come to work and you have six meetings on that day, or maybe even more if they're shorter. And the to do list that you have of the work that you needed to get done. And I know that meetings is also work, but the other work that you need to to get done, you have to do list of things that need to work or need to be changed. And after a day full of meetings, you have a longer to do list than you had when you start. At least that's what it is like for me. I think that you should definitely think about whether you need a meeting or not. And I think what you need to think about when you decide whether you need a meeting or not is: Do we need to have all these people in the same room at the same time? Does it have to be a synchronous discussion or could it be an asynchronous discussion? As you said: Could we do this over Slack? Could we do this by sharing a document and making people answer? Now, unfortunately, there are some types of people who will not read the emails that you sent them and who will not join into this discussion on Slack and who will need to be invited to an actual meeting to get the work done. But that is more about people than it is about meeting types, I think. And you will probably learn after a while who you actually need to have in a meeting to do something. You probably know the types when you think about that. There are some people where you know you need to be with them for them to do the things that you want them to do and they see an appointment.

Sven Johann You reminded me on something I had a customer once. Once we were remote and then we had onsite workshops with lots of meetings where we can discuss things. And basically it was similar to what you describe. The day was full of meetings and there was basically no time to prepare or to follow up on the meetings. But we piled up so much new work. And each meeting was actually an interesting meeting and addressed an important topic. But nevertheless, I thought: Maybe we are lacking clear priorities. There is something coming up where we say: Okay, let's have a meeting on this. And everybody says: Yeah, yeah, we have to discuss it. But I was just always wondering: Do we really do we have to discuss it now or can we discuss it in one year? That was a problem. What do you think?

Sven Johann You reminded me on something I had a customer once. Once we were remote and then we had onsite workshops with lots of meetings where we can discuss things. And basically it was similar to what you describe. The day was full of meetings and there was basically no time to prepare or to follow up on the meetings. But we piled up so much new work. And each meeting was actually an interesting meeting and addressed an important topic. But nevertheless, I thought: Aino Corry Yeah, that's definitely also a problem. Again, I'm going to make the relation to Scrum, because I assume everybody knows that process and makes it easier. In Scrum we have a product owner for each team and that product owner is responsible for priotizing the backlog. And when there are requests for the team, the product owner will be the ones who say no. Who is the product owner for our calendars?

Aino Corry And that should be ourselves. But then we should be empowered to say no to meetings. Because there is a lot of interesting meetings that comes along and you want to say yes, but it's the same with functionalities for an app. There's always a lot of interesting functionalities or optimizations or security you can optimize. You can always make things better. Like even though meetings are interesting, you really have to have a product owner for you meetings and preferably yourself. As an example, sometimes I have retrospectives with project managers. And the project managers in the retrospective, one of the things that I asked them often is: What is the priority of your tasks as a project manager? And then they prioritize the tasks. It's blah, blah, blah people, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I say: So look in your calendar, how does the calendar reflect your priorities? And often it doesn't. And I think that might be a worthwhile task to do, not just for managers, but also for technical people to look at the calendar and see if it reflects what the important thing is. The trouble with technical people is that they often get into the state where they just dislike all meetings, that they dismiss all meetings as a waste of time because they have been in meetings that are a waste of time. And then the problem, again, is everything is just called meetings. And that means that when they call into a meeting, they immediately have the reaction: Oh no, it's a waste of time. I think that one of the things that's important is besides preparing meetings to give the meetings different kinds of names.

Sven Johann I mean, that's something I learned from you, actually. I have to mention it's not only the book, but you also made a video on Dave Farley's channel on meetings. And there are also lots of links to a lot of interesting resources. I dived into it and I found it very interesting. And one thing you said was: Make those meetings optional and it should be easy to drop out. You know, it's not a mandatory thing. I do now something similar, I work with a couple of teams and we have a regular meeting and sometimes we have a lot of things to discuss. And actually this one meeting is not enough, but the attendee said. We actually have so many meetings that it's better to go slower and if we can't put it in our Monday meeting, it's the next Monday or Monday in six months. But not more meetings because we have to get some programming done. I basically say to everyone: The meeting is optional. The whole meeting is optional. I have always topics based on the architecture topic priority list, which everyone knows. But if they have no time, for some reason we just skip it. If you are not interested in this specific topic, just skip it. And it's really not necessary to join all the meetings.

Aino Corry Yeah, exactly. And especially if you don't think that you're contributing to the meeting and you don't think you're getting anything out of it, you should be allowed to stay away. And then if people stay away, that is interesting information for the one who has organized the meeting. Why are people staying away? That's something that they should react to instead of getting angry or insulted, they should say: Hmm, this is interesting feedback. They don't expect to get anything out of the meeting. Maybe I need to change the meeting.

Sven Johann Yeah. When I think: This should be an interesting meeting. I mean, everything is interesting, but it's also important. What are the key elements in planning and preparing a meeting?

Aino Corry I think the first thing is to think about what is it actually that you want to get out of it. When I'm teaching students, the first thing I think about is not so much the content or the book or what I should say, but I'm thinking about the learning goals, the outcomes. And it's the same with meetings. Think about the outcome. What is your expected outcome of this meeting? Is it a technical decision? Is it, as you mentioned in the beginning, a shared knowledge? Is it trying to understand what happened with some problem? Is it discussing a specific problem? Is it discussing more problems? Is it making a decision about the process? What kind of meeting is it? And when you know what you want to get out of it, then you can start thinking about who should you invite? And thinking about: How long should it be? It seems like most meetings are just an hour, which doesn't make sense, because then some things are rushed and some things take a lot longer than they should. And then you can think about the preparation for the attendees. Is there something that they can prepare before the meeting so that you can make the meeting more efficient? It could be reading something. I know that there are some companies who said that the first 10 minutes of each meeting is a reading session where you will get a chance to read what has happened, and that is in response to the kind of type I mentioned before. Who doesn't prepare for meetings? There will be people who don't do that for various reasons. It might be important for you to do that. But again, that depends on the team, that depends on the people in the meeting, whether the kind of people who prepare or not. But if you want them to prepare, you should be really, really precise about it. I just facilitate a retrospective with some managers. Well, there was a big misunderstanding about how much should you prepare for meetings? Should you just show up or should you actually read the agenda and prepare based on the agenda? And they decided that they should have a separate email if they needed to prepare. And I think that's wise to have a separate email where they should prepare. There's also talk about if you should have a call people in for a pre-meeting where they could actually do the preparation as a meeting. I think that's going down the wrong route, but it's definitely important to think about not just how much you should prepare as an organizer, but also how much the attendees should prepare and how much they can prepare. And then, of course, if it's an online meeting. What kind of boards do you need? Would it be a good idea with an icebreaker to make everybody laugh? Because there's a bit of tension in the room or?

Aino Corry It's wonderful that we always have such pleasant meetings where nobody gets angry or something like that. Or the last thing is that you can make a joke that shows that you belong together, and that could be that you have something funny. You already have the Chuck Norris thing together, so you can sort of build on that and say: What would Chuck Norris say now? Or how would Chuck Norris have sold that? Or something like that. Or it could be that you're working with animals on your software. And you say that there's probably a horse in the room right now instead of an elephant in the room. You can say something that people understand, but the brains are a bit tickled about it.

Sven Johann Yeah, today, I have a meeting and because I'm going to a conference this afternoon, I decided I do not want to address a topic which creates a lot of tension because it's really bad. I'm still struggling with it. What can I do, if you think about it and we have a topic which is not really criticizing. So we are talking about certain parts of the code and how they address a problem. And I just don't know how to run this meeting that people are not pissed for example. That they are not thinking: Ah, he doesn't know anything about how this code came together. Of course I know. I'm the last person who should criticize codes, but I have to address it. We need to do something about it. But when and how do you see that? I'm always wondering if you have those critical meetings, how to take the tension out of it. Jokes are one thing. Is there an other thing, if you know, there will be a lot of tension, what you can do about it?

Aino Corry Yes, if you already know, there will be tension and you know who will create that tension, that's a very good start. You can talk to people beforehand. You can prepare yourself out of tension by talking to people 1: 1. Because the problem with tension in the meeting is that there'll be a lot of bystanders. And when somebody gets aggressive, it's normally because they're afraid of something or they're frustrated about something, insulted or something like that. And if people are looking at you losing your temper, that you will lose your temper even more. If you can get the conflict out of the meeting with all the people, it's much easier to make conflict resolving actions. And then you have the nonviolent communication. There is a lot of ways to try to get empathy between two people or two parties, but trying to understand the viewpoint of each other if it takes you by - surprise - in the meeting that the conflict shows up. One thing that's very important for you is to keep your head cold, which can be difficult. It's very important that you don't act on your feelings, that you don't take sides, that you don't start shouting, that you don't start getting afraid. If you can in any way, then what I tried to do when I sense my feelings coming up as a facilitator, I tried to take a step back and ask myself: Why do I have these feelings? I realize it's not easy. It's something I'm still working on because I've got a temper. It's important that you keep your head cold and then you should try to create empathy. And there are different ways of doing that. I think the first thing is that people often don't really disagree. They're just not listening to each other. One thing that could be interesting is to try to make them say the things from the side of the other one. But when you're going in couples therapy, the therapist will say: What did you just hear him say to you? Or what did she just say to you? I think it's quite important for creating empathy to try to put them in the role of the other person. I sometimes have teams where there's a problem, where some people thinks that the other part is not doing what they should do. And it can be interesting then to try to make them experiment with being in that role and then saying what you think that they normally do during the day. And that means that they have to try to empathize with that person and say: They got an email from me and then they needed to do this and then they need to do that. And then they didn't do it because they didn't have time or something like that. And just trying to put themselves in the shoes of the other person can help them realizing that something that to them seems simple might not be easy for that person, right? It's a bit like losing weight. It's simple, but it's not easy. Everybody in Denmark should do the bag exercises. It's simple, but it's not easy because there are other things that take priority. And that empathy is quite important. And then also you as a facilitator should try to figure out: Are they actually disagreeing? What is the agreement? Can we find some sort of agreement so that we start the discussion from an agreement about: Okay, we both want to have good quality code. We agree on that. But what does good quality code meet? It could be that they have different interpretations of what does good quality code mean. And that's much more interesting to figure out than to discuss whether the other one is actually doing it or not. Do you see what I mean?

Aino Corry Yes, if you already know, there will be tension and you know who will create that tension, that's a very good start. You can talk to people beforehand. You can prepare yourself out of tension by talking to people 1: Sven Johann I can relate to that. I never thought about it in that regards. But I'm a consultant and when I started after university, my boss back then, he sent me to family therapy, which was really true. It was a consultant training, but it was based on family therapy techniques. I found that quite interesting. There are lots of books out there, how to phrase questions to people and how to approach difficult discussions. For some reason I never thought about it in meetings.

Aino Corry Yes, if you already know, there will be tension and you know who will create that tension, that's a very good start. You can talk to people beforehand. You can prepare yourself out of tension by talking to people 1: Aino Corry But it's like this family therapy. It's long insisted and there's a lot of psychology that went into this and it's actually based on making people who find it difficult to talk to each other to talk. So it's perfect for software development. Just don't call it therapy because when you start calling it therapy, they'll be out of the meeting.

Aino Corry Yes, if you already know, there will be tension and you know who will create that tension, that's a very good start. You can talk to people beforehand. You can prepare yourself out of tension by talking to people 1: Sven Johann We started with the preparation, we did a little detour. We think about what we want to achieve. Who should attend. What we have to prepare, how do we want to share it? But now one thing I am notoriously bad and now with not only a book, but also a manager I work with right now. He is really detailed in planning the meeting, really like timeframes. Here 5 minutes, there 7 1/2 minutes and stuff like that. Crafting an agenda. How do you build an agenda? What are your recommendations?

Aino Corry I think it would be a good idea to make the agenda before you figure out how long time you have, because otherwise it's the wrong dependency. Obviously, sometimes if you're working with some people, like you only have 45 minutes and you have to do this in 45 minutes. Of course you can say: No, it's not possible, but otherwise I think it would be a good idea to make the agenda first. And I would look at that. As Sam Kean I look at meetings. I try to describe it in my audio book as well as I'll try to use the words from the audio book. Imagine that you see a Viking ship from above. And then you start on one end where there's a tip of the boat. That is the beginning of the meeting. This is where you all agree. That's where the ends of the sides of the boat meet there, because we agree on the agenda, we agree and what we want to get out of it. Then we start that divergence. That's where the ship gets broader. In the divergence, the facilitator will say: This meeting is about this. We can talk about this. This is within this, for instance, architecture decision that we want to communicate. They sort of set the boundaries for the meeting. And then in the divergence, we open the floor, we show the differences in opinion. We share the differences and experiences. Maybe some people said: Well, I have implemented this architecture pattern before in this technology, and it never works. And some people are saying: Oh, it always works to use cloud solutions and somebody saying: It's not secure enough to use cloud solutions based on these data. They're opening the floor. And the point for the facilitator is to make sure that when people say something that's outside of the boundaries of the meeting, that they say put that in parking mode. We have the divergence. Then we have the groan zone, which is the part of the meeting where people are discussing within this constraint, the breadth of the ship won't get bigger, but we will be keeping in this place. But before we start making any decisions, then we go to the other end of the ship, the convergence, where the ship becomes smaller again. And that means that we will cut off discussions and we will make it so small that in the end we will end with the sides of the ship meeting together at the conclusion of the meeting. That thinking about the meeting as the start of the meeting, the end of the meeting, and then the divergence, the groan zone and the convergence is the overarching agenda for your meeting. And it's important to think about this, I think, because it creates a framework for what you should do within these. So obviously within the divergence, you should make people share experiences, you should make people share data, you should make people say: This is what we should talk about, and then they know what we shouldn't talk about. And then in the groan zone we could put in different activities for maybe going into breakout rooms and discussing it within each department or two and two or whatever you need and maybe making some decisions. And then in the end, at this point in time, we need to start converging towards some sort of agreement and then you can start building your agenda with the time and saying that we probably need 10 minutes for the divergence to share this. We probably need at least 45 minutes for the discussion, and then we probably need 10 minutes for the convergence and then you can start seeing: Okay, we need one and a half hour of meeting because we also need to start an end or a break in the middle or whatever. And I realized that it is a good idea to have a meeting agenda with specific minutes with times on it so that you know as an organizer that you can actually do it, that you have thought about it. But I think that having the specific minutes on the agenda is not something that I would show the attendees. Because you need to be agile about it. It's very good to make a specific plan, but you need to realize that sometimes you need to change the plan. Sometimes you realize in the middle, as I said in the beginning, you don't have enough data to take this decision. Or you don't have the right people. Or you need to make an experiment. And that's what the meeting is: We have an experiment instead of making a decision. And the really important thing is as a meeting facilitator, to remember that it takes time to end the meeting. There are so many meetings, where we are discussing in the groan zone, up until the last minute of the meeting and then somebody saying: Oh, does anybody have a hard [stop]? Can we stay for five more minutes? And then we stay for five more minutes and we don't resolve it in those 5 minutes and then we say: Can we stay for another 5 minutes? And then people start dropping off and soon we're only three. And then we say: We can't really make a decision with those three. And when we've gone 15 minutes over for no reason at all, just becoming more frustrated. So I think it's quite important as a facilitator that at least 10 minutes before, if you're not in the convergence zone at that point. You should say stop, no matter how good the discussion is. We have a problem here. We cannot end this discussion within the allotted time. And there are probably people who need to run or we're tired right now. So let's let's stop the meeting. Let's make the convergence about what is the next step? Is it another meeting and do we need a meeting? Can the rest be resolved in smaller meetings? Do we need to invite more people? Does it have to be today? Something like that. And I think that's quite important because there's so many people who end meetings abruptly and that's just frustrating and that leads into that the technical people are thinking that the meetings are a waste of time because we don't see what we get out of it. I think that's also important at the end of the meeting to show people what we get out of it. Make a very super short summary. 30 seconds. We spent the time here today to talk about this. We learned this, we decided this. So that people know when they leave the meeting. There was a reason for this meeting.

Sven Johann Now, I now try to force myself. It doesn't work all the time to also write a little summary. Even the people who decided not to be in the meeting, because of reasons, we talked about this. Those were the decisions or decision postponed, action items which came out. I'm one of those guys that last minutes and it was very frustrating. So I'm always over the time and everyone was like: Yeah, I have to go now. I was like: Okay, let's see next week or something. And it created a frustration. But one thing I'm just wondering, because I share the minutes of the agenda, but usually, that's what I thought. But obviously, it is a very dynamic situation. It's just what I thought that people have a little idea what's coming. I share the times. But everyone knows, what I think it should take. But everyone knows: Maybe things become different. Now we have this agenda. Its' a software engineering podcast, maybe take an architectural decision as a nice example to go through. We have an architectural decision to make. Obviously, the person who organizes the meeting needs to make sure it's important enough to do it now. Why not earlier or later? That's important.

Sven Johann And then obviously I have to think about when I want to discuss what. What do we want to get out of the meeting, going broad and looking at discussing and I think for me it was really important this parking lot. Because people are just coming up with something. And I was like: Sven Johann And I'm a squirrel hunter. For me, the idea of being focused is important. Since I'm so bad at this, I always ask a person in the meeting to pay attention if I'm a squirrel hunter.

Sven Johann And then obviously I have to think about when I want to discuss what. What do we want to get out of the meeting, going broad and looking at discussing and I think for me it was really important this parking lot. Because people are just coming up with something. And I was like: Sven Johann And we have this discussion, where we go broad and then we try to go towards a decision and obviously as a moderator. A problem I usually have is, as a moderator, how can I make this happen? How to get this focus on the outcome, because we have to discuss, but we also have to write things down. We have to keep the people in a certain direction. What would you recommend to do that?

Aino Corry Well, I think it's important for you to know with each team, what is it that's important and what is it that's difficult for them? Some teams find difficult the divergence. Some teams find it difficult in the groan zone, some teams find difficult in the convergence. If your team has a specific difficulty converging because they would actually like to stay, keeping their options open and groaning, it's a good idea to make them aware at the beginning of the meeting that there will be a time where you will be the irritating person who will make them stop the wonderful discussions that they have so that we can convert towards a discussion. So remind them before the meeting starts that you will be doing this at some point. When you reach that point, remind them: Now we actually have to go into convergence because if we don't do that right now, we will just have a discussion meeting. And we decided that this was not a discussion meeting, it was a decision making meeting. If you want discussion meetings, we can have a discussion meeting with no outcome other than we've shared some knowledge by the discussion. But this is not that kind of meeting. We have to end this now. I believe that we have enough knowledge now and we have enough understanding of each other so that we can conclude something in this meeting and then ask them if they agree.

Sven Johann I found it quite helpful to really think about what kind of meeting are we going to have and then create it. The types of meetings I run are limited. Those are technical meetings. Either it's we talk about technical drafts or we take the architecture decision or we share the current status. There is a certain amount of types. And those types have a certain structure. And yeah, we can share the structure upfront and say: This is the type of meeting and the we have to make it, but it's still hard for me, I must say.

Aino Corry It's not easy. And I think that one of the problems that you might have is the same problem that a lot of people have and I have had myself when I was a developer, is that if you are facilitating the meetings yourself about something that you are really invested in, it is almost impossible to do it in a way that follows all these rules for facilitation. Because if you are actually interested in this technical discussion, which I think you are, it is very difficult for you to also spend the part of your brain being the facilitator. Because as a facilitator you have to be focused on the time, you have to be focused on the energy in the room you have to be focused on: Is everybody part of the discussion? Is somebody outside the discussion? Do I need to split it up in small groups? Do I need to move on to the next element? Do we need to end this discussion because it's going in circles? Does this actually need to go into the parking lot? And as you say yourself, you have to ask somebody to keep track on you so that you don't follow the squirrels or the shiny things. And it could be that maybe you should have somebody else facilitating the meeting once in a while.

Sven Johann I'm thinking about it. But I try now is I just try to decouple myself from it. It's kind of: I have my opinion. But my opinion doesn't matter.

Sven Johann I'm thinking about it. But I try now is I just try to decouple myself from it. It's kind of: Aino Corry That can work. It's like I said with the conflict resolution. If you get feelings of anger yourself or frustration, try to step away from your feelings and look at it from the outside.

Sven Johann As the last part of the discussion. You already mentioned it and I need to look at how people engage in the meeting: Do I have to split it up? And that is also something I learned from the last chapters of your book. Because I have the problem like everyone. When I talk about me, it's not me, it's every meeting. We have people who are usually very silent. We have people who are aggressive. I was always wondering, how do I encourage participation? I just don't want that the silence people are not heard. What would you recommend?

Aino Corry So if it happens in the meeting and they're silent. There are some things you can do. But if you already aware beforehand, there's all sorts of things you can do. Let's start with: You are surprised by it. It happens in the meeting. Somebody is silent and they are continuously silent. If you want to hear what they're saying, you need to allow them to say something, perhaps in smaller groups. Maybe you need to split them out so that they don't have to say something in plenary. We have this, at least in our culture, the plenary meetings where we all discussing and we say that the floor is open and everyone can say something at any time. That is actually not a very good way of having a meeting in general, because there will be some people who will say something all the time and then they will be the silent ones and they have several reasons for being silent. But let's assume that we're just treating the symptom. The symptom is that they're silent. You can split them up in breakout rooms, you can turn it into more of a writing activity than a saying something activity. You can make it more explicit and concrete what you want them to say. Instead of just asking, are there any questions? Do you understand this? What do you think we should do next? You could maybe look at one of the things that you talked about before and you could say: I would like everybody to think about this for 30 seconds. And then I would like to ask all of you. So you can do a round robin. If there is a point that you think was interesting and it was sort of left behind. You can say: Everybody think about this for 30 seconds and then I'll ask each one of you to say one or two sentences about it. And then cut off the people who want to make a speech, say, one or two sentences. And that can also be fun. That can also be something to laugh at.

Aino Corry So if it happens in the meeting and they're silent. There are some things you can do. But if you already aware beforehand, there's all sorts of things you can do. Let's start with: Sven Johann In online meetings, it's maybe also writing down something. But I made very good experience with this. Everyone thinks 2 minutes about what's important for you, what you want to get out of it or what you think is important for the solution. And then the round robin asking people. Another thing is there is this liberating structures idea and they have this one, two for all so that you alone come up with something. And then you speak to a second person and then, you know, then two people come together as four. And then you only need one person maybe speaking to the audience. Because I think for some people that's also tricky.

Aino Corry There's a lot of very good liberating structures for how to structure discussions. And I use that one, two for all in my teaching. Before I knew liberating structures, I knew this think, pair, share. If you think about it on your own, peer up with somebody and then you share if you want to. One, two for all takes a little bit longer because you have to put them into fours before you share. So I think it also depends on how much time you have, how deep you want to be on that. But coming back to the silent ones, if you're not surprised by the fact that they're silent, you might be working with the problem instead of the symptom, because we should be very aware of whether it's symptom treatment or problem treatment when we're working with these problems in meetings. And then the symptom is what you see, what you hear. But the problem might be bigger or smaller than you think. If you have somebody who's consistently silent in your meetings, you can reach out to them one on one and do several things. Either you can explain to them that it would really be valuable if they would share something in the meeting. You might ask them if you have that connection to them, why they are silent, if they think that if the meeting is not interesting for them, is that why? Is it because that they don't think they have anything to say that hasn't been said before? Is it because they don't think that they have anything to say that's interesting for anybody? There's often the fact that people who are new to the team won't say anything because they say: I don't really know anything yet. And those are the people that you really want to have saying something because they've got new eyes. And even though they ask what you call a stupid question, it can be a very qualified question because they don't bothered by all these: We always do, we never do or something like that. It could also be that it's a different culture that they come from. It could also be that you learn that there's not psychological safety in the team, but they're afraid to be bullied or laughed at by somebody else. It can be really interesting to talk to these subtle ones. It can also be that they're reflective thinkers and they just need a lot og time to think before they say something. Or they're shy or whatever. But it's interesting to learn why there is silence instead of just forcing them to say something like you do in the round robin for instance.

Sven Johann Round robin, is it's actually stressful for me. When I'm sitting in the round robin, I think: Oh.

Sven Johann Round robin, is it's actually stressful for me. When I'm sitting in the round robin, I think: Aino Corry What am I gonna say?

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Oh, I'm saying something stupid.

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Aino Corry I sometimes say to people that they can pass in the round robin.

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Sven Johann One last question with dealing with those challenges. One thing I'm always nervous about are negative people.

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Aino Corry Yeah.

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Sven Johann So how do I deal with negative people?

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Aino Corry First, I'll ask you, why are you nervous about negative people?

Sven Johann Nor I am relaxed. I know I will say something stupid, but in the past I was like: Sven Johann One thing is they kind of destroy the vibe of the meeting. You have a good meeting and we are going towards a decision or whatever. They are not really constructive. They just want to say that everything is rubbish. And then the vibe is gone. Also, if you have negative people, it shuts people down. Sometimes, depending on the people, I have no problem still saying something, but unfortunately, sometimes those people are really smart and they can talk you down and then it will become their meeting, their opinion, and not the opinion of the group. This makes me nervous.

Aino Corry And that's interesting that you say that and that's why I asked you because sometimes when we talk about these negative people and we talk about what to do with the negative people, I sometimes have people saying to me: But it's okay to be critical. If it's rubbish, it's okay, I shouldn't be shut down. And that's why I think it's interesting to have your answer, because the reason why we as moderators or facilitators are worried about negative people is that the negativity spreads and the negativity creates fear. And that's what we want to avoid. It's not that we're afraid of having somebody who is critical or negative. It's the spreading that we're worried about, the people who weren't actually negative to begin with. And I think it's important to also mention that before we start about how to deal with negative people, because otherwise we'll get that criticism. Let's imagine that we dealt with that criticism now. There are different ways of doing it. If it's happening in the meeting and you were not prepared for it again, symptom treatment, then what you can do is try to pull out the positive thoughts and the positive people. If somebody's saying something negative, then you can ask: Is there a different opinion about this? Or if you know that somebody has more positive opinion and you think that they are brave enough to say something against this person, you can ask them to chip in. Because the trouble is, as we also see in politics, that the more verbal, the more shouting people are, the more people think that they are the majority. But it can be important to show that they are actually not the majority, even though they're shouting. There's a lot of people who think something else. So that can be something to pull out in the meeting. If it's not something that surprises you, if it's a negative one that you have consistently, then you can use one of the patterns in my book, the antipatterns and the negative one and one of the solutions in that book, the reflective solution builds on another book by Linda Rising - Fearless Change, and she talks about somebody called champion skeptic, where you take somebody's skepticism and you use it in your own favor. So you talk to that person between the meetings one on one and you say: I appreciate that you are very good at being skeptical. I appreciate that you're very good at asking questions about this. You're not taking anything. But like, just as we said, you were actually questioning it. And that's a very good trait to have. So you are saying that you appreciate their criticism and their skepticism, because a lot of the people who are very negative or skeptic, they're very proud of that role. It's a role that they like to have somebody call them the grumpy old man, and then they laugh and they're proud of it. So they appreciate the skepticism. So if you can say: I appreciate your skepticism, I can see how it's good. But then you say: We're in the situation together. We need to make a decision about the architecture or we need to have some sort of talking about protect it. We need to actually also do something for the users. We can't just discuss the ticket, whatever it is that they're negative about. Try to give them empathy for you and say: We're in the same boat together, we're actually moving towards a common goal. Is there something that you can do to help this with your skepticism? If you see something or you hear something that's not good, could you come directly to me and said it instead of complaining about it? Come to me and say it, then we can try to solve it together. Or could you give me input to the next meeting that we have about this discussion or decision making so that we can take your skepticism into account so that it doesn't come in the middle of the meeting where we can't work with it. Could we use it as input so that you sort of force them to come up with that as part of the input instead of a big bomb in the middle of the groan zone.

Aino Corry And that's interesting that you say that and that's why I asked you because sometimes when we talk about these negative people and we talk about what to do with the negative people, I sometimes have people saying to me: Sven Johann So basically again, it's part of the preparation. If I know there will be at least one person.

Aino Corry And that's interesting that you say that and that's why I asked you because sometimes when we talk about these negative people and we talk about what to do with the negative people, I sometimes have people saying to me: Aino Corry Yeah, unfortunately, it just preparation, preparation, preparation will be my answer.

Aino Corry And that's interesting that you say that and that's why I asked you because sometimes when we talk about these negative people and we talk about what to do with the negative people, I sometimes have people saying to me: Sven Johann But if you have to prepare a lot, you also have less meetings, but the meetings are way more effective and that's the good thing. One question to wrap it up. Obviously we are talking about resources. If I want to become a better moderator and meeting organizer. We have your book Retrospective antipatterns. You mentioned Linda Rising - Fearless Change. We put everything in the show notes. We had the liberating structures mentioned. You also mentioned your talk on Dave Harley's channel. Is there anything else you would recommend? Where should I start becoming a better moderator and meeting organizer? What we haven't mentioned yet?

Aino Corry And that's interesting that you say that and that's why I asked you because sometimes when we talk about these negative people and we talk about what to do with the negative people, I sometimes have people saying to me: Aino Corry There's a lot of books that I could mention. And they all in my book, like books about body language, books about facilitating meetings, books about decision making for teams and I hope that also I'll make some more videos and Dave Farley's continuous delivery channel about meeting facilitation. I've prepared two more that will come at some point during this year. And of course, I have a course myself that you can buy about facilitation, that's on my website that I can recommend as well. But I think the biggest game changer for me was not reading books or listening to other people. What was actually to make a little retrospective every time I had facilitated a meeting and write down. What went well? What didn't go well? What could I have done differently? And that's actually what the book is based on, the book that I wrote about antipatterns. It's based on all the mistakes that I've made when facilitating retrospectives and what I have done to get out of these situations or avoid getting into this situation. And that's one of the things that we forget sometimes as facilitators, we rush from one meeting to the other and at the end of the day, we have some sort of feeling inside, whether we have a lot of energy or low energy. And that energy level is based on, I think, how well the work went for us, because a meeting can actually energize you if it's good. And if we just brush through the days like this, we don't learn from our experiences. And I think the most valuable thing is to learn from your own experience, because I can tell you exactly how I would facilitate a meeting, how I would prepare a meeting, how I would follow up on a meeting. But it might not fit with your skills, it might not fit with your situation, with your team. The most important part, is to remember to learn from your own mistakes, actually look them in the eye and see how you can avoid them.

Aino Corry Yes, that was one thing that I wanted to say as well, but I forgot. Thank you, Sven. It's good to get feedback as well. Sometimes when you facilitate a meeting and you ask people for feedback just to be nice to you, they give you great feedback. But if you have somebody who you trust, you can ask for feedback. But what would most polite towards them is to warn them beforehand that you would like to get some feedback afterwards. And if you can make it a little bit more concrete, you can ask them: Could you give me feedback on the way that I facilitate the discussion or the way that I explained the activities that you would do in the meeting or the way that I ended the meeting or the way that I started the meeting? The more concrete advice you can ask for before they go into the meeting, the easier it is for them to get feedback, because they are also actually in the meeting and should get something out of it. Just ask for a specific part of the feedback.

Aino Corry Yes, that was one thing that I wanted to say as well, but I forgot. Thank you, Sven. It's good to get feedback as well. Sometimes when you facilitate a meeting and you ask people for feedback just to be nice to you, they give you great feedback. But if you have somebody who you trust, you can ask for feedback. But what would most polite towards them is to warn them beforehand that you would like to get some feedback afterwards. And if you can make it a little bit more concrete, you can ask them: Sven Johann Aino, thank you very much for this conversation. For me, it was helpful. And usually when it's helpful for me, it's also helpful for the audience. Thank you very much and see you soon.