Posts tagged as:

participation

Gradient of Agreement

by Steven M. Smith

I’m a big fan of Sam Kaner’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, ISBN 0-86571-347-2. I highly recommend it to anyone who leads meetings.
In my post on Decide as a Team, I wrote about using a method called Roman Evaluation to reach a decision. Kaner talks about a more formal concept he calls Gradient of Agreement in [...]

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Word Choices — We — Part 2

by Steven M. Smith

In my first entry about the word "we," I argued using the words "We decided to…" often create ambiguity. I suggested asking yourself several questions to reduce ambiguity either when you hear those words or when you are about to say them.
In this entry, I will lay out the case for when using the words [...]

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Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings, Part 2

by Steven M. Smith

I argued in my first article about stand-up meetings that the right participants were the key to a successful meeting rather than whether the participants were standing up or sitting down. Despite my dislike for forcing people to stand up, I mentioned in that article my positive regard for other elements of the standard stand-up [...]

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Rethinking Stand-Up Meetings, Part 1

by Steven M. Smith

Stand-up meetings are popular in software development organizations now.
What makes a stand-up meeting more effective than a traditional meeting to socialize status information?
Nothing.
The effectiveness of a stand-up meeting, like the traditional status meeting, depends on the participants. If you have the right people at the meeting, you can be effective whether the participants are sitting [...]

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Your Team’s Answer is Wrong, Part 2

by Steven M. Smith

In response to my post entitled Your Team’s Answer is Wrong, my colleague Bob Lee writes – 
(You wrote) "The trainers passed out a copy of the correct answer for the case study to all of us." (emphasis added) The definite article the as opposed to the indefinite article a is a killer here. Had they [...]

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