Anti-goals
A collaborative exercise that helps you define what you want by first focusing on what you don’t want. This activity can be focused on working norms for the team or on the product itself (like a Black Mirror exercise).
Outcome
A list of things the team does not want, and an agreement on how you will avoid these undesirable things.
Method
- Depending on your focus for the exercise, pose one of the following questions to the team:
- What does the worst possible day/week on this project look like?
- What does the worst possible version of this product look like?
- Give the team 5 minutes to brainstorm responses to the question – one idea per post-it.
- Rotating through the team, have each person read 5-10 post-its out loud.
- Take 5 minutes to affinity map the post-its and give a title to each group.
- If there are a lot of groups, you might consider running a quick team vote to prioritize which groups you’d like to focus on.
- Give the team 5 minutes to brainstorm ways to avoid each of the groups.
- Discuss each group and come to an agreement as a team on how you will avoid these undesirable things.
- Formalize the results so the team can continue to look back to them for guidance.
- If this exercise had a product focus, these might feed into experience principles work.
- If this exercise was about team/working norms, make sure it is documented and that everyone holds each other accountable for following them.