Mojito with Management

Thanks Jurgen Appelo, author of Management 3.0 , Managing for Happiness and ‘How to change the world: Change Management 3.0’, I’ve been using the practice of Happiness Door in so many different contexts.

Before we get to the contexts themselves, what is Happiness Door?

Let me directly quote from Jurgen Appelo’s book ‘How to change the world: Change Management 3.0’ where Jurgen says
“When you mix different ideas from multiple sources, a new idea can emerge that both aggregates and improves on the pre-existing ideas. I call it the Mojito Method”

So, take different ideas, stir them up and use them in a way that is even more useful than the individual ideas themselves.

Happiness door is such a Mojito where Jurgen Appelo combines the Feedback Door and Happiness Index; making this combo an even more powerful technique for providing feedback.

More on the Management 3.0 website:

Happiness Door

Using colourful post-it notes and or stickers, I’ve enabled hundreds of my workshops globally, online and in-person meetings, offsite meetings with my teams, senior management meets and offsides and more with this amazing practice of Happiness Door. And voila! Such strong engagement and powerful feedback!

Energised and sparked with the power of this practice of Happiness Door, I decided to tweak this practice and experiment further. 

Being one of the many selected vendors to present our proposal to a large MNC customer in foreign land to bid on a change assignment, my colleague and I decided impromptu that I would start the presentation with the tweaked Happiness Door. (customer and location remain undisclosed for obvious reasons and obviously no photographs for the same reasons)

How did I run the Happiness Door (tweaked)?
 
We had 45 minutes to present our proposal.  I pulled out an A3 sheet of paper along with Post-its while the 16-20 CXO’s continued to pour into the large room in a board-room sitting to listen in (hopefully) to our 100 + slides presentation.

I then explained in less than a minute with a short introduction of my colleague and I that we would like to start with checking into this meeting with each person around the table sharing 2 things:

1. What’s their mood when they entered the room?
2. What’s your expected outcome from this meeting?
   Write / Draw the above on 2 different color post-its.

I also mentioned that we would checkout with a similar approach when we closed this meeting at the end of 45 minutes.

I stuck the A3 sheet with 3 Smiley Post-its in 3 different colours on the door with moods ranging from sulk 🙁 to a poker face 😐 to a broad energetic sunny day smile 🙂

To my pleasant surprise, I saw each and every CXO actually putting out their mood, some creating drawings and also writing bullet point expectations from the meeting one by one – making the door very colourful too with the post-its’. 

Well, ok, not all of them necessarily walked to stick the post-its’ to the door. I facilitated that. But that’s ok. They shared their expectations and mood loud enough for all to listen in as some of them passed the stickies to me to stick to the door too.

This allowed a number of things to happen around the room

1. The CXO’s started to listen in to each other’s moods and expectations
2. I started to move slides in my head on what we want to dive into in the remaining 30 minutes and which parts of our presentation the CXO’s are clearly not interested in. 
3. Both me and my colleague were glad to be sensitive about the moods of all CXO’s and more importantly glad to know that we had to be sensitive about the low moods and negative expectations of 2 CXO’s.

What started off as a presentation moved to be an interactive and collaborative discussion amongst all of us for 90 minutes instead of 45 😉 – a super positive brownie as we saw it!

As my colleague and I wrapped up, I purposely chose to not remind anyone of checking out at the Happiness Door. And then 3-4 of the CXO’s asked me almost at the same time ‘Hey, thought you said we would check out at the end of this meeting. So, are we doing that or?’ And the others agreed that we should do the checkout now as the meeting had ended. And we did and consolidated all feedback as our take-away. 

Ah! We did get the change assignment too 🙂 after a few next discussions. And they still remember their experience with the (tweaked) Happiness Door!

Learning and actions

1. Increase in sensitivity to each other’s moods and expectations
2. Emotional connect into the meeting versus just a physical presence in the meeting
3. Clear, concise and transparent feedback allowing the facilitator and the participants to collaborate constructively
4. Observable collaboration, engagement, open and honest feedback.
5. In terms of next actions,
   1. The CXO’s are using this practice in a number of their own meets especially with their direct reports
   2. They see this as a good practice to gauge the moods and feedbacks transparently given the safe environment they are building for their teams to work within