Livening up dull staff meetings
Goal: Give your staff a healthy sense of humor and professional pride.
Activity: Tired of being an ordinary Programmer Analyst? Want your business card to read Code Contortionist, Process Pirate or Software Sculptor? When your shop is long on work and short on humor, break the ice with an activity that won’t consume much meeting time.
Preparation: Make a list of technology profession nouns such as architecture, code, collaboration, deployment, enterprise and infrastructure. Next, list unusual professional titles that are unrelated to technology (jockey, masseuse, knight, excavator, rock star, surgeon and so on). Cut out the words, keeping the technology nouns separate from the unusual professions. Randomly draw one from each pile to form new job titles. Depending on your preferred variation, you can draw the job titles ahead of time, or have staff draw their own during the meeting.
Variations: For departmental meetings or large gatherings, have “Hello, My Name is …” stickers handy and ask each person to write his name and “new” job title. The wacky job titles are great conversation starters. Another possibility is to choose the random job title combinations ahead of time and print a new business card for each staff member. You could also make place cards for each chair. When each staff member enters the room, ask him to sit at the place with the job title he likes the most or best reflects his job. If you have a thick-skinned group, consider substituting the second list with undesirable animals such as paramecium, ogre, sloth, gnome or lizard to create hilarious job titles like Programming Paramecium or Validation Ogre.
- SD Magazine
