A to Z—Teaching Why Your Meeting Needs a System
Goals: Chat from A to Z as fast as possible. Show that high-performing meetings must have a system like Air Traffic Control. Show how easy it is to step on each other’s toes in virtual meetings.
Do you have a meeting where people are confused? Are you having to redo work? Do you have to throw away work because two or more people did it? What your virtual meeting attendees need is rhythm. Rhythm is a new set of rules for your attendees to get work done. A to Z is the perfect activity to have your attendees realize this for themselves. This activity can be followed by the group discussing and agreeing on a new rhythm or set of meeting rules that will help their future meetings get more work done.
Time: 5–30 minutes
Participants: 4–12; you can use breakout rooms if you have more participants
Technology: Chat
Category: Improving performance
Instructions: Your goal is to chat the letters A to Z as fast as possible. Every attendee can only chat one letter. Each attendee cannot chat twice in a row. If you repeat a letter or chat a letter out of order, you must start over. You cannot talk while chatting from A to Z. If you repeat or chat a letter out of order, you can talk until someone chats A to start. (optional) Every attendee must chat at least one letter.
Tips: At five minutes, if your attendees are still struggling, ask if they would like to see the rules again. If they say yes, show the rules again and highlight the rule showing when they can talk.
Debrief: To help your attendees get their lessons from this experience, you can ask: What? What happened during A to Z? How did your attendees tackle this challenge? So what? So what did you learn about virtual meetings? Now what? Now what will you do differently at your next virtual meeting based on this activity?
Variation: You can repeat this initiative up to two more times and time each iteration. You can give two to five minutes of planning time before you start the stopwatch. Write down the times for each completion and calculate the percentage increase or decrease in time. Usually a team can reduce their time 20–80% just through team process!
Click play to see an example of A to Z.
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