Pink/Green Meetings

Recipe: Add a short pink+green meeting to the demo meeting

As an engineering leader, you need to know what’s going on. But of course, unless you’re leading from first chair, you probably don’t know. Everyone always assumes the boss knows what’s happening, but we both know that’s just not true. So how to get people to tell you? That’s why I invented this meeting, to get people talking.

A pink and green meeting is a retrospective technique using two colors of post its, colored, wait for it Pink! And Green! Green is good, pink is not green. The participants all have two stacks of post it notes and a fine point sharpie. They write down things that occur to them that went well, or not so well. They annotate the post it with F, O, or G, for Fact, Opinion, Guess. The participants then swarm the white board, and put them on the board. You then choose someone from the team to categorize the post it notes into groups. Either you or the team member then looks at the categories and the team discusses.

One of the categories will have a number of pinks, that category tells you the most important thing to discuss. You can play it by ear if you do any other pink categories after that. It’s good to acknowledge most of the greens, positive feedback being super powerful. To be honest, the greens are usually things like “We did a bunch of work”, because people are happy to do work.

Why this works: There’s no one who is too introverted to write on a post it notes. The first time, they’re just humoring you. But as they continue over weeks, and they learn that all the other engineers are thinking the same thing, they’ll be very candid. It’s fast, because its a parallel operation. You’ll resolve things quickly, early, before they’ve had time to fester.

Below is the instruction sheet I handed out.

Please take 15 minutes today to prepare by writing down some thoughts for tomorrow:

What went well this week? Green is good.

What could have gone better? Pink is not green

Write at least 1 for each category, but write as many as you want. To jog your memory, I have a list of the major steps and events in the project at the end of this email.

If you're convinced you should do this, you're done, you don't have to read rest of the email. If you're not convinced, the rest of the email should convince you.

Why this is important

Preparing for this meeting will give you more of a voice in your working life.

How preparing will give you more of a voice

Retrospective's lead to mastery. Championship teams look at game films, we have to have a meeting. (It's not a post-mortem, nobody died.)

I want everyone to have a voice in this meeting, I want everyone to be heard not just the people willing to speak up in meetings. It's important that we learn as a team so that we can take lessons learned into the future.

To make that happen in a reasonable amount of time, in the meeting tomorrow, the process will be something like this.

First, I'm going to demonstrate an important life skill about post-it notes. (It's a trick I learned only a couple of months ago, snap, don't peel.)

Next, everyone will have a chance to write each onto a post-it note. We'll have one color for positives, another color for negatives. Along with your idea, please write F, O, or G for Fact, Opinion, or Guess. If you're willing, write your name.

We'll collect those post it notes into a "store" on the wall. You'll have the opportunity to see other people's ideas and second them by adding your own.

Once the post-its are grouped into themes, I'll have people swarm over to the columns they're particularly passionate about and work on naming that theme.

That will produce a group of related successes and challenges we can then use to drive the discussion. Visually, we'll be able to see the common areas of concern.

From that, we should end up with a set of 2-3 positive actions we can take going forward to make ourselves champions.

So you can see, that the people who spend a little time preparing today will have more of a voice tomorrow than the people who come to the meeting cold.

⚔️

War story: I used this process at SkyPort when the team was hugely demoralized after their previous leader had left. It was a UI team, and they weren’t getting along with the Back End team (common problem). Gradually, the team turned around, and we made steady improvements every week.

Randomly, one of the things I was most proud of had nothing to do with the work, but rather the free lunch. So my boss came to the meeting that week, and the vegetarians on the team complained that the vegetarian options had been kind of weak lately. None of us carnivores knew. So I took one of the pink post-its that said that, handed it to my boss, and we continued with the meeting. Later, I saw that post it on the office managers desk, and the veggie options improved.

As a carnivore myself, I had no way of knowing, but the problem surfaced, and got routed to the right person.