Research shows that when a team of people working towards a common goal experience positive emotions associated with their work achieve a higher level of performance and become more self-efficient.
The Positive Gossip exercise is a communication exercise that allows participants to look back on their experience together and positively gossip about each other. The exercise fosters positive emotion and also helps workshop participants to:
✓ Develop and maintain relationships
✓ Reinforce group norms
✓ Build trust with each other
✓ Boost self-confidence
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As Facilitators, we spend days to weeks developing the design sprint activities and the sequence of exercises. We devote a great deal of focus to the introductory activities and with good reason, as we know that if we don’t set the right expectations from the start we might lose the team’s engagement during the process. While we focus our attention on the beginning of the day, this focus is rarely mirrored at the end of the workshop.
▸ What if you could provide the team with the opportunity to reflect and debrief at the end of the workshop?
▸ What if you could create a sense of closure, and help team members initiate thoughts around their future behaviors?
The Positive Gossip exercise is a concluding activity that will end your workshop on a high note! This exercise also works best at the end of Day 1 of your design sprint.
▸ Create your own board starting from our Mural or Miro template.
▸ Open the Outline or Frames and rename the individual areas with your workshop participants' names. Each person needs to have their own area.
▸ If you have more than 7 participants in your workshop, just duplicate one of the areas and add it to the Outline/Frames.
Here are your Facilitator Notes:
❛We are now at the end of a tough day and I would like to wrap it up with a 15 min exercise focused on you, as individuals that worked really hard today and gave their best to ensure that we all reach our common goals. This exercise is called Positive Gossip and it is actually an antidote to negative gossip.❜
Here are your Facilitator Notes:
❛With this exercise, I want to help you recharge and be ready for the days to come by reminding you, or highlighting, some of your main strengths as individuals. Sometimes we forget about our blind spots and it’s nice to be reminded how others see us. In order to instill this positive mindset, we are going to do the following…❜
▸ Ask participants to visit everyone else's area and leave concrete, positive feedback related to their contributions, behaviors, or attitudes.
▸ Once finished, ask participants to pick from their own list one single piece of feedback that resonates with them the most and share it with the group.
▸ Highlight the positive thoughts that emerged and thank everyone for their contributions.
