🚩BLUF: Bottom Line Up Front🚩
We jumped into a fun exercise to stimulate online engagement and self-expression without disrupting the flow of discussion or presentation with Hand Signals✋. Chris Federer led which he borrowed from the book Rituals For Virtual Meetings.
🚩 Instructions 🚩
Set The Stage: In meetings we want people to express themselves in various ways, including requests and reactions. You can do this in chat, though many facilitators and participants find this challenging to follow along. Hand signals ✋ can be a great way for people to be able to express themselves in a way that others are more likely to be able to pick up on 👀 .
The task today is to develop powerful hand gestures in only a few minutes!
Step 1(2 minutes): On your own. Brainstorm what kinds of expressions might be helpful for participants to have available to them. Examples:
Requests: I have a question, I’d like to build on the previous point, I’d like to express a different POV
Reactions: Applause, Now I’m confused, I agree
*Or think of your favorite emoji for inspiration
Step 2(30 seconds): Whittle down the list brainstormed in Step 1 to the most important expressions(requests/reactions).
Step 3(4 mins breakouts): Develop hand signals for each desired expression and test them in pair/triads.
Step 4(5 mins): Take turns introducing the hand signals so everyone can use them.
Step 5 Debrief(3 min): Get off mute and go popcorn style. Can also use chat to share takeaways.
Closing Expression Storm: In one response or reaction hand gesture, is there any inspiration you got here today that you can take into your remaining week?
🚩 Takeaways🚩
In short, this activity was fun and led to an interesting debrief. It may join the “core Flash Fifteen activities” list. Here are a few thoughts from participants:
“The thing that I’ll comment on is I'm appreciative of this exercise because it creates a ritual that is kind of for your team or for your company. It's kind of like not this, you know, universal thing, even though sign language can be a muscle or is universal. It's not every company is doing these types of things right? So then you feel a little bit more bonded with your colleagues. I think that could be a really cool traditional ritual. Custom.”
“To me, the big concern is how do you honor like American Sign Language or things that are not sort of like undercut that, right? It's like I have a young kid and one of the things they say is like, if you're going to do signing with your kid like use actual sign language, don't make up things for them, because it's you should honor that, like it's a language, right? And so it's sort of like how do you how would you honor that? But still, add your own spin on it? That would be my question.”