King’s Rounds
My favorite kind of department meeting is one where everyone’s involved, ideas are being kicked around, and anything can happen. In our Technical Services meetings, we encourage this using a format called King’s Round. David Anderson introduced it, and since I can’t find any reference to the rules online, we’ll just say he invented it.
The first rule is that everyone has to come with a topic or two. Topics can be anything – we’ve had excellent discussions about the future of Flash, our implementation of agile processes, and our mobile development strategy. Going around the table, everyone gives a one-sentence summary of their topic, assigns it an importance (between 1 and 5), and lets the moderator know how long they’d like to talk about it. We skip the department head, or “king”, and we also skip the moderator. Every suggestion is written down, and if someone can’t think of a topic, the moderator comes back to them to see if any of the suggested topics have given them an idea.
The king has ultimate power, but the moderator should start with the topic of highest importance. The person who suggested it then starts the conversation (by giving a few more insights, ideas, or reasons why the topic is important), and it goes from there. The moderator should limit any off-topic discussion, and also stop the conversation after the suggested number of minutes, but we always find that the discussion is really only getting good around the time we thought it would be over. Again, the moderator has the power to allow or disallow that.
The king usually holds back as the conversation starts – the purpose of the discussion is to let the king hear a wide variety of viewpoints, and entering the conversation too early can have too much influence on its direction. Eventually, though, everyone’s talking.
After a few weeks of these, the king will have a list of discussion topics, including who suggested them and how important they thought they were. This artifact can be very valuable – it’s a snapshot of what everyone was thinking about when the meeting happened. Even if your topic isn’t chosen, it might happen that someone else grabs you afterwards and says “hey, I want to talk about that, too”.
The system’s not perfect, but it’s sparked some great freewheeling, unpredictable, open-ended conversations. And that’s my favorite kind of meeting.
posted by Dan Nordquist on June 24th, 2010 at 9:04 am Permanent link to this post
One Response to “King’s Rounds”
I can’t take credit for the original idea. The practice of a Kings Round came from The ManKind Project. The process for choosing a topic is similar, but the support is more oriented toward dealing with tough personal issues.
For our purposes I love the format and it’s one of the highlights of my week. We’ve had some great conversations and each time it reaffirms that collective intelligence and wisdom beats any one individuals thought.
-dta