The Game
Meeting Cards is a game concept for companies that want to improve their meeting dynamics by getting fast, valuable feedback.
Goal
Meeting culture is one of the characteristics of a company that is more difficult to change. You need a way of getting feedback from your team to apply the necessary corrections and reach a better meeting culture.
The average meeting person can frequently experience some commonly repeated patterns that undermine meeting productivity: too many participants, no agenda, going off-topic, etc. In an ideal team composed of assertive communicators with some organizational knowledge, any team member should be able to identify these patterns and flag it in a spontaneous way. But this is not always the case.
This Game groups these repeated patterns in nine main topics, and it’s designed in a way that encourages participation and promotes honest feedback.
Game description
The game is based on 12 cards, 9 of them are repeatable meeting anti-patterns (improvements suggestions) and the other 3 are “thumbs up” (meaning a positive feedback). Therefore, these are the 12 sentences on the cards:
- The agenda was not clear
- The meeting was not time-boxed
- Not everybody had the chance to participate
- The agenda was not followed – or went off-topic
- Some unnecessary people were invited
- Some required people were not invited
- Not constructive attitude
- Action points are not captured or followed
- Insufficient facilitation or coordination
- Thumbs Up!
- Thumbs Up!
- Thumbs Up!
Each participant of the meeting should provide feedback by drawing 3 cards from their 12-cards set facing down to the meeting organizer. They can include zero, one, two, or three topics that could be improved for the next meeting, and complete the three with Thumbs up (if there is room for it). If everything was fine the participant can just pick the three Thumbs Up cards and pass them to the organizer. Then, the organizer should shuffle the cards to ensure privacy.
Every participant should draw 3 cards facing down to the organizer
Example of feedback given by a user that has 2 improvement suggestions
An example of a positive feedback: the meeting was great! Nothing to remark.
Evaluating the result
Once you get your feedback, you should group the received sentences and try to analyze the result.
- Are there repeated sentences? For example, if six people played the game and you find at least three times the same sentence, it’s probably a topic you should improve.
- Are there topics which require more information? For instance, if several people pointed you to invite others but you don’t really know who are they referring to, you can try to use the next meeting to get more information. You can also include the feedback in the minutes of the meeting and ask people to contact you.
- Cards have colors. That doesn’t make them less anonymous since you don’t know which color is from who, but you can use it to find related suggestions given by the same person.
Every group has its own dynamics, so don’t try to get too many conclusions from the cards. Use them as a tool, when you play several times you’ll find a good threshold to identify when something went wrong, and the best channels to complete the feedback.
Getting the game
The game is evolving constantly. We’re using feedback from people like you to make it better. In case you want to send us your ideas, feel free to contact us via the form on this site.
To purchase a deck, please visit our shop at MPC: Agile Meeting Cards Shop.
More information
We wrote a blog post about this, with more background about why we think is a good idea to use this tool. Continue reading about it in the blog section.