Spice up your Sessions
and shape your meeting culture together
The Meeting Spicer was created as a way to tackle meeting's impact. Its mission is to: Hack Meeting Culture Worldwide! It’s a set of cards meant to help your team addess its focus and intentions for a meeting at a minimal effort using a series of micro challenges designed to make your meetings more engaging, effective and fun. There are 3 different card categories: Starting Cards (Green), Delegated Roles (Grey) and Ending Cards (Red).
The Delegated Roles (Grey) are there to help you decide what roles are addressed and who does what during the meetings without the 'usual suspects' getting assigned the usual tasks. It’s a really neutral way to make sure that, for instance, the only woman in the room isn’t the one having to take notes. A favorite Role-card is the Time-keeper card. When using that card, there’s actually someone in charge of making sure that all the topics are given the time they need but not a second more. Time’s up? Move on, people! Let’s keep this meeting short and sweet! And because that person’s been assigned that role, their word is respected and you can’t accuse them of whining: it’s their task to make sure that you don’t take more time than allotted to that topic.
The Starting Cards (Green) are there to help people focus on what the meeting should be all about, and on what's their part in it. to empower them to own its goal and effectiveness. A favorite card will ask you, for instance, to think (privately) whether your participation is mandatory, and what's your role in it. Which in turn might invite you to stand up and leave, or at least make you reflect on why you feel uncomfortable doing so.
Another key inclusion in the deck is something from the Open-Space Technology environment. it’s called the Law of Two Feet: if you are taking part in a meeting and the issues to which you could contribute or that could provide you with useful insights have been addressed, instead of waiting for the meeting to end - and as a result waste time on unnecessary meetings - get up and leave. We know this is not how most of us are used to doing things and we understand if you’re afraid of coming across as rude. But if you clearly explain why you’re leaving and everybody would do it, it would soon stop feeling weird or rude and everybody would be able to spend less time in meetings they’ve got no use for. Mission accomplished!
Other cards address issues such as agenda, timekeeping, active participation, decision making, team-work, etc.
All activities are designed to take 30 seconds and a single card is randomly chosed to start the meeting, so they are not 'wasting' the allocated time of the meeting, and there is no hidden-agenda behind the activity.
Ending Cards (Red): These cards will help you evaluate the meeting and identify the problem areas, they also might remind you to generate action items, summary etc. But because everybody’s simply answering the questions during the meeting instead of pointing fingers or whining about it afterwards at the coffee-corner, you get to have an authentic and short exchange about what people think went wrong, could go better, or appreciate what was great. It’s a really neutral way to get the team's awareness of things that could be improved and that they can take with them to make next week’s meeting even better. By addressing these issues head on, you’re creating transparency.
The Meeting Spicer is a way to spice up your meetings! to makes them fun while at the same time addressing some serious issues that make most meetings those dreaded, everlasting nightmares. But because it’s fun, it makes it easy to participate and figure out how to improve things. The cards are marked with a green, yellow or red pepper to indicate the different levels of spiciness. Because well, each meeting is different and not all meetings are suited to some in-depth self-reflection, for instance. But if time-management is a hot topic, make sure to add those questions!
And best of all, it only takes 60 seconds of your meetings.
The Delegated Roles (Grey) are there to help you decide what roles are addressed and who does what during the meetings without the 'usual suspects' getting assigned the usual tasks. It’s a really neutral way to make sure that, for instance, the only woman in the room isn’t the one having to take notes. A favorite Role-card is the Time-keeper card. When using that card, there’s actually someone in charge of making sure that all the topics are given the time they need but not a second more. Time’s up? Move on, people! Let’s keep this meeting short and sweet! And because that person’s been assigned that role, their word is respected and you can’t accuse them of whining: it’s their task to make sure that you don’t take more time than allotted to that topic.
The Starting Cards (Green) are there to help people focus on what the meeting should be all about, and on what's their part in it. to empower them to own its goal and effectiveness. A favorite card will ask you, for instance, to think (privately) whether your participation is mandatory, and what's your role in it. Which in turn might invite you to stand up and leave, or at least make you reflect on why you feel uncomfortable doing so.
Another key inclusion in the deck is something from the Open-Space Technology environment. it’s called the Law of Two Feet: if you are taking part in a meeting and the issues to which you could contribute or that could provide you with useful insights have been addressed, instead of waiting for the meeting to end - and as a result waste time on unnecessary meetings - get up and leave. We know this is not how most of us are used to doing things and we understand if you’re afraid of coming across as rude. But if you clearly explain why you’re leaving and everybody would do it, it would soon stop feeling weird or rude and everybody would be able to spend less time in meetings they’ve got no use for. Mission accomplished!
Other cards address issues such as agenda, timekeeping, active participation, decision making, team-work, etc.
All activities are designed to take 30 seconds and a single card is randomly chosed to start the meeting, so they are not 'wasting' the allocated time of the meeting, and there is no hidden-agenda behind the activity.
Ending Cards (Red): These cards will help you evaluate the meeting and identify the problem areas, they also might remind you to generate action items, summary etc. But because everybody’s simply answering the questions during the meeting instead of pointing fingers or whining about it afterwards at the coffee-corner, you get to have an authentic and short exchange about what people think went wrong, could go better, or appreciate what was great. It’s a really neutral way to get the team's awareness of things that could be improved and that they can take with them to make next week’s meeting even better. By addressing these issues head on, you’re creating transparency.
The Meeting Spicer is a way to spice up your meetings! to makes them fun while at the same time addressing some serious issues that make most meetings those dreaded, everlasting nightmares. But because it’s fun, it makes it easy to participate and figure out how to improve things. The cards are marked with a green, yellow or red pepper to indicate the different levels of spiciness. Because well, each meeting is different and not all meetings are suited to some in-depth self-reflection, for instance. But if time-management is a hot topic, make sure to add those questions!
And best of all, it only takes 60 seconds of your meetings.