A better way to do project review meetings (without the ego and argy bargy!)

How to get lots of useful feedback when there's lots of ego in the room

Yesterday on LinkedIn, I explained a situation I found myself in about 10 years ago where I inherited a project review meeting and it was a power-fest.

It was a chance for senior people to a) scroll endlessly though an excel doc on screen and b) wax lyrical about what they thought about that project... and the people running it. Who were in the room. Gulp.

It wasn't supposed to be like this but it had defaulted to a situation where people enjoyed hearing the sound of their own voice.

As I was the custodian of the projects and their leads, I had to change this. Egos aside, we just weren't getting what we needed from these crucial interfaces from senior people.

We needed feedback, insight, help, advice, support, encouragement.

We were getting judgment, implied blame, opinions.

The even bigger problem was that the format was stripping the project leads of their autonomy and energy. I needed them feeling ownership and hope to have any chance of finding ways around the many barriers to success for their projects!

The Feedback Shower technique

So I used a technique I had developed for Discovery Days at the accelerator I had been running which enabled a lot of stakeholders and mentors to give feedback to entrepreneurs.

It's called the Feedback Shower technique and it:

- gives everyone in the room an equal voice

- elicits a high volume of feedback rapidly

- signposts the kind of feedback that is most useful

- leaves the feedback in the hands of its rightful owner

But first I had to prepare the ground so the big personalities would accept this shift.

De-cheesing the Big Cheeses

The problem with traditional project review meeting formats where senior people just voice their thoughts is they are anchored in power structures and can be difficult to excavate.

Who wants to let go of power and voice when they have been using it so comfortably for a long time!

I also knew I was going to ask them to work harder in this meeting and so I had to 'attract' them to that idea too 😂

Here's how I framed it:

- These projects are really important to us all and need top quality input each month

- Your insights are completely invaluable - and we need more of them!

- We're going to trial a way to get more of your insights across a wider range of areas using a new technique.

- And.. I want to give the project leads time to digest all of your data and come up with a plan, so you don't have to figure that out for them in the meeting.

- It's going to feel different and weird to start off with but I know that your brains work so quickly you'll do it really well!

- We'll trial it for 3 session and improve on it each time - then we'll evaluate it as a group and the project leads can tell us if they are getting what they need from us.

Get the idea?

Here's how to do a Feedback Shower

I create a board with a column for each project.

I provide post its / stickies and give people 3-4 categories - ideally a different colour for each category but honestly, it doesn't matter if they are all the same.

The categories signpost the range of feedback I want for my project leads and typical categories might include: what people like, what they don't like/are concerned about, any ideas they want to add to the mix, questions they have and ways they can help.

By specifying categories, we are encouraging the best possible quality of feedback.

Here's what it might look like:

 

Then - important - the project lead themselves shares their update. As they are talking, the reviewers are filling in their stickies.

If they are doing it in the room on hard copies, they'll fill them in and then after that person has finished, they'll go and stick them on the right place on the board.

Now we have a complete board, bristling with helpful feedback:

You *might* choose to discuss some of the key topics there in the room. The project owner will lead this.

More usually, I ask the project owners to take their feedback, thank the reviewers and digest it over the next 24 hours, coming back with their proposed plan.

Sometimes, we have split the session so that we can have those nuanced conversations after the feedback has been digested. Sometimes, I've connected people up 1:1 with a single stakeholder to work through next steps together which is usually much more constructive than a group discussion.

The design is up to you but the foundations are:

- we signpost and equalise the feedback we need

- the project owner is the rightful owner of the feedback and will digest and use it

- there may need to be a mechanism for discussing the outcomes - but it's well designed and not a free-for-all.

**Note - you can do this for single projects too, not just multiple projects.