Using the Roles and Ritual Reset Plays in sequence

Lisa Yeager

I'm curious in how folks may have used the roles and responsibilities play in tandem with the ritual reset? We're looking to first explore areas of ambiguous and/or overly ambitious roles and responsibilities.

A related item that people have expressed concerns about on our Atlassian implementation team is the abundance of meetings that we have - some of which are under our control and some of which are not. So once we have ferreted out and addressed gray areas of roles, I plan to do a variation of the ritual reset. 

I'm interested in hearing from folks who've addressed similar challenges using these two plays in tandem. What worked? What didn't? How did you modify (or would you, in hindsight?)

 

Christine P. Dela Rosa

I've been on and facilitated a number of Ritual Reset Plays, some of which have changed roles and responsibilities on the team. But, to address meeting overload issue, it's really the Ritual Reset Play that's helped us most.

When moving types of rituals onto the grid, we see 1:1s, team statuses, check-ins, team representative syncs, analytics reviews, leadership debriefs, and other types of meetings on to different parts of the importance grid. What's most interesting isn't which meetings are obviously in need of a reduction of frequency, but actually, what the less valuable meetings provide us and whether a meeting is the right vehicle to exchange that information.

Coming out of the Ritual Reset Play, the drivers of rituals we discard often have to let go of a responsibility and pass on a new responsibility (in the form of something other than a meeting) to another person (or even a divvy up the responsibility across everyone on the team). So for the teams I work with, roles and responsibility changes tend to come as a result of ritual changes.

However, if you're going the other way around and start with the Roles & Responsibilities Play, I can see how starting with the right responsibility set for each role can trickle down into the right rituals to implement. In this direction however, you won't get feedback on how people feel about the ritual until it goes into effect and the team feels it out first.

Good luck! Either direction of using the Plays seems good, but perhaps Ritual Reset is better for teams who have established rhythms and Roles & Responsibilities is good for teams who are just forming (or re-forming).