Agile QuickTip: Yellow and Red Cards!

Here’s how introducing yellow and red meeting cards can help you focus your teams meetings, and stop them getting taken off track.

We’ve all been there when a meeting loses focus. Sometimes participants get too far in the weeds, sometimes they start talking about things that aren’t relevant, or maybe start talking about redundant things that have been covered and put to rest.

One technique that can really help your team members to focus comes from soccer.

Introduce the yellow and red meeting cards. Here’s how it works. Provide each participant with a yellow and a red card. This can be a post-it note, or just index cards.

Now, whenever a meeting starts to get off track, anyone with a yellow card can hold it up, providing a signal to the person speaking that maybe they need to refocus or move onto a different topic. If two or more participants raise a yellow card, this means that someone can hold up the red card. When the red card is held up, this gives the speaker or the speakers 60 seconds to wrap up that discussion before moving on.

Using this very visual and clear tactic, you can keep meetings focused, on topic, and quite frankly, way more engaging for everyone involved.

I hope you enjoyed that Agile QuickTip, and I hope you found it valuable. I’d love to get your feedback on this tip, or any others from the series, so feel free to send me a message! Don’t forget to check out thinklouder.com to see how our training and coaching offerings can help both you and your teams.