Effectively improve your meetings using the Perfection Game

Improvement ideas for future actions come from lessons learnt. Perfection game is one of the techniques used to express our opinions. It is a non-violent and action-focused technique, that can be used to get feedback. It can also be used as a retrospective technique or to help teams to self organize.

Here’s how it goes:

Each interested person has to answer three questions

• On a scale from 1 to 10, how much value did you get from the meeting/session/event?
• What went good during the meeting/session/event?
• To make it a 10, what should be done differently next time?

We are going to use an internal open space as example. Using the perfection game to give feedback is like this:

I gave 8.5 to the sessions. I liked:

• The organization
• The venue
• The topics and the way they were presented

To make it a 10, I would:

• Improve facilitation to minimise conflicts during the sessions
• Favor presentations with content more fit for the local context
• Propose more practical, hands-on sessions

Conclusion

If we compare perfection game with the typical way to get feedback – answering the question “what did you think about …?” – the benefits are:

• It’s measurable on a scale from 1 to 10
• It provides a clear list of improvements
• It eliminates the negative effects of feedback (e.g throwing blame)
• It’s effective, short and simple

This technique is very versatile. You can use it whenever you need feedback, for example at the end of:

• Scrum or Kanban retrospectives
• Scrum or Kanban planning sessions
• Meetings (e.g internal meetings, group learning sessions, pair working sessions)
• An event (we use it for I T.A.K.E. Unconference)
• Day to day work between colleagues, to facilitate personal improvement

What other techniques do you use for your team improvement? Also, let us know in the comments if you want to find out other techniques.

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