Often when we meet people, we ask the common question of How are you; and while many don’t care about the answer, sometimes the answer defines the following conversation. Like if someone says that I’m doing not good, terrible headache. You might then ask, was last night drinks night?
Same way we often want to know the other person mood before we start a conversation. How many of us have been the victim of a bad mood; where we have gone to a person thinking of negotiation and based on the other person mood, we’ve returned thinking; now’s not the right time.
The Happiness Door is another practice I use at times to sense the mood of the room either during start or beginning of an activity/event or both at start and end.
I’ve used this many time, and I get surprised every time hearing people, but makes it so useful for me because I know where I am starting from, or how my event/activity went and where I’m ending at.
I start this activity with giving each person a Post-it (could be a normal 3*3 post-it, or a shape post it, or a cloud post-it (like you see in the image) ) and a Pen ( again could be colors/sketch pen/normal ball pen). I then tell them to either draw a face / figure / cartoon which tells their current mood.
Sometimes I define the three states (putting post-in of a happy smiley, a average smiley and a sad smiley), or in some cases I don’t define any state and leave the door empty(mostly I do this).
People are confused at first generally, if they are doing this for the first time, so with groups who are doing this the first time, I usually start with myself.
Using the smiley face drawn I describe how I’m feeling. For example, a person might say “I have a curious smiley because I am curious what Sumit is going to do in this event”. If it’s a new team I ask them to tell their names as well, and then tell about mood. Some people like to choose just some words like I’m curious or I’m happy, whereas some people like to tell stories like they were feeling hungry and the event is stopping them to have an early lunch.
The insights coming from doing this is valuable. If you see the image, this is from a big leadership meeting I had. I was introducing 4 major changes in the way we function, and I knew that people will be looking to oppose/challenge me. This activity in the start gave me a good idea, who was excited, who was not, who was willing to commit, who had confusions, who needed the push. At times getting this in the starting is so good as a facilitator as it tells you the mood, and often it makes us feel that the change we are about to bring is easy or tough for audience to accept; or does it need a little more explanation for some area.
While doing a culture-based event, from Happiness Door I came to know how people were really interested in the session because they saw the Lego boxes on their seats. In one of the Retro, I came to know how people Hated the session because last 2 Retro action items were not honored. You also come to know when people were forced to come to a session using the happiness door.
Now let’s switch gears on using this practice towards the end of the event/activity. At the end of the activity/event, it is more useful. It tells me how the people brought the idea. It tells me how people perceived the ideas that were shared. Often more than the smiley their body language tells me that they got excited or bored. As a facilitator it’s the perfect way to get instant feedback, it’s literally live feedback from audience.
I’ve seen people say that the culture Lego piece they build made them emotional, I’ve heard people say that they got very involved in the activity. Often people tell that they came thinking a very different thing, and they are leaving with something else. I’ve got people speak their mind like what they thought was their aha moment.
Again, just re-iterating the fact that feedback for any session/change is critical, and the Happiness Door not only gives the feedback, it gives the emotion, the mood, the change the event brought, the emotions people came with and much more, making it super effective and very useful.
I recommend any Change Agent to effectively use this and they will surely see amazing results!
If you want If you want to learn more about Happiness Door, you can look at the management 3.0 page here on the same.
Update: So, one of my friends reminded me of another implementation of happiness door I had done some time back. A Lego Human consists of 4 pieces (head, legs, body, head gear (could be just hair or a cap or helmet). I kept these at different places in the room. So, like 1 bunch of all legs at one place, and so on. I told people coming to the meeting to pick 1 piece from each pile and make a human. People were surprised/amazed, but Lego is interesting for all ages (trust me on this one). Now once they assembled their human, I told them to move the hands of the human or legs and tell what’s their mood while starting the session. I got people to make the Lego sit down and say we are relaxed and looking forward, someone made the person curious (again Lego can’t do that action, you need to speak). But with Lego in their hands I could see the excitement, and the legs and hands were used a lot. We did the same during checkout which was so awesome. The little experiment worked nice and I could see people interpret so much just by using the hands and legs of Lego. I remember one checkout Lego was walking person, where the person said, “We got a lot of inputs, time to walk and act”. Super interesting.
Inspiring Agility 