Adopting "Popcorn Style" for Our Daily Standups

😓 Facilitating Every Day Is a Bit Tiring

In my team, we used to conduct our daily stand-ups in a format where a facilitator would nominate members one by one. I was the facilitator.

But to be honest, facilitating every day is a hassle.

Even though it was just a matter of saying "Who's starting today?" and "Next is Mr./Ms. XX," it felt like a subtle burden.

🎲 Making the Facilitator Random

To alleviate this burden, my team introduced a system where a Slack bot randomly designates a facilitator every day.

This certainly distributed the load. However, I noticed another problem.

👥 It Becomes a Conversation Only Between the Facilitator and the Speaker

Even with a random facilitator, it still tended to end up like this:

• The structure becomes a one-on-one conversation between the facilitator and the person nominated.
• An atmosphere where the facilitator feels obligated to respond whenever a member says something.

The facilitator feels the pressure to keep things moving smoothly, while other members start thinking, "The facilitator is listening, so it's fine."

🔄 Trying the Round-Robin Style

To resolve this problem, we changed to a round-robin style (a format where the speaking order is decided in advance).

Since there was no longer a single facilitator, the structural problems of facilitation were resolved.

However, there was still a problem.

😴 You Don't Have to Listen Until It's Your Turn

• People would do other things until their turn came.
• They weren't listening to what other members were saying.

Because the speaking order is fixed, there's no problem if you don't listen until it's your turn. This was not resolved by the round-robin style either.

🍿 Introducing the Popcorn Style

That's when we introduced the Popcorn Style.

The Popcorn Style is a format where the person who has finished their turn nominates the next speaker. There is no facilitator; it proceeds like a relay of the microphone.

Since you need to think about "Who should I pick next?" or "Who hasn't spoken yet?", people naturally start listening to everyone's updates. Because everyone becomes the one doing the nominating, no one can remain just a bystander.

Since my team does our daily stand-ups online, we also made it so that each person handles their own screen sharing, which the facilitator used to do. Also, since we need to decide on the first person to avoid everyone wondering "Who's starting?", we repurposed the Slack bot that used to designate the facilitator to the role of "deciding the first person."

If you feel your daily stand-ups are becoming a bit of a routine, please give it a try 🍿

📚 References

• Popcorn Style | Facilitator School