exorcisms
aka "tacticals" aka "the weekly airing of tensions"
this is a managerial thing I reach for often.
sorry in advance for all the footnotes I scrawled all over it. this is a Thing With Roots for me.
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the Story
my first job out of college was at Medium. great job. odd managerial culture. the early days where I was there was dominated by Holacracy, which… say what you will, the tactical meetings were awesome.
after Medium, I went to a tiny startup, and since we were all ex-Medium, we kept having tacticals but small teams don’t need them, so that was a bit of managerial glaze on a yummy artisanal pastry.
after Scout, I went to Samsara for what I consider now to be my “formative years.” that’s where tacticals got the name “Exorcisms.”
I was an early member of the mobile infra team, so I got to help shape the culture of the team that grew around us. I’m not sure what came first, the Exorcisms or the Cult, but by year 2 we definitely were calling ourselves the #mobile-cult. (“you can join but you can’t ever leeeeeeeeave.”) there, Exorcisms became essential infrastructure for infra teams that provided infra to our customers (ha), and I brought it to whatever team I was on.1
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why Exorcise?
my teammate called it “the single most important tool for building psychological safety on a team.”
team members ask for and get help, which builds a muscle for collaboration that doesn’t come naturally to ICs or, really, most organizations. we make each other engage (tactically! haha) in the same way, over and over about stuff we care about, so it becomes smooth and easy. we make each person’s concerns into The Team’s concern.
(and ok, yeah, it usually replaces a meeting that’s worse.)
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aside, I have an important caveat which is the only important footnote. How does it fail? 2
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How To Exorcise
(while waiting for people to filter into a zoom room, I also go through past actions. in an ideal world, they’re all done, but in reality, some get re-upped or dropped.)
Check-ins
everyone says what’s on their mind (in brief!). like, “good, ready to go” or “I’m a bit stressed today” or “I’m not awake yet.” whatever. the point is a brief moment of mindfulness/to say anything at all to the larger group.
facilitator: note down the order in the doc. that’s what we’ll use the whole meeting. I like to write it down if they said anything informative, but that is unnecessary.
Tensions
First, what is a tension.3
A tension is any felt difference between the status quo and what could be.
this is a very permissive definition. that is intentional. and vague! in increasing difficulty, these are some typical categories of tensions:
“I have information that needs to be shared with the people in this room” - announcements. easy peasy, sometimes not even worth our time (coulda been a slack message) but some things just feel good to say/open up space for discussion about. you might trigger someone else’s tension lol
“I want something, and I know how I can be helped.” - a clear request. also usually easy. make an action item. check on it next time.
“I want something, and I don’t know how I can be helped.” - an unclear request. discuss until we make action items or feel ready to move on.
“Something really bothers me, and I think this room can figure it out and solve it.” - who knows, maybe I’m just complaining, but hopefully not.
literally anything else that comes to mind when you look at your team as a resource.
a tension can be malformed, but that’s fairly unusual, and it’s the facilitator’s job to tell you, so don’t worry about it and just try stuff. most common errors for a facilitator to throw are:
301 - this isn’t the team for this request. an obvious action is to find the right team/people, though! a 301 is usually (but not always!) obvious.
404 - the answer should be here in this room, but uh… :shrug: maybe it’s a true complaint and not actionable? a 404 is disappointment. :( sorry we can’t help you.
Step 1. Build an agenda
going in the same order as check-in, accumulate a list of tensions. the possible activities, in decreasing frequency of occurrence:
to pass, (especially common at the start when you can’t think of anything) just say “pass” or “perma-pass” to get skipped forever.
to upvote an existing tension, you can say so, or add yourself right in the doc at any time as a sub-bullet
writing it is obviously more efficient than saying it, but sometimes it’s easier to say out loud, especially when you’re not sure you actually have the same tension as someone else.
to add a tension, say it out loud as a phrase or a word.
that word or phrase is written by the owner who raised it, or written down verbatim by the facilitator. NO QUESTIONS. any question too easily becomes a discussion, which we call a “tension hijack.” not your tension, back off!!! don’t ask questions/start discussions yet, but raised eyebrows, complainy noises are totally allowed. as is an upvote-question, when it’s your turn in the rotation.4
facilitator magic words: “let’s not discuss yet. want to add your own tension?”
when it’s time (tensions coming in at a trickle, enough perma passes, whatever), the facilitator says, “sounds like we’re done. any last upvotes to get in?” and stack ranks by upvotes/interest. in today’s digital world in a shared doc, we emoji-upvote/write + our names.
Step 2. Resolve
this is the real meeting
facilitator: kick off with, “let’s get started, remember you can add tensions at any time. {first tension owner} wanna start us off with {first tension}?”
the owner describes their tension, and people discuss until the owner says “tension resolved,” at which point we move onto the next one.
the facilitator (and by extension the room) is NOT ALLOWED to move on until the owner says “tension resolved.” 5
yes, this is exactly as crippling for the facilitator as it sounds, but it’s also where the magic’s at. unless the facilitator throws a 301 or 404, which is, again, pretty rare/obvious to everyone, all the power lives with the owner.6
WE ALWAYS END ON TIME (or early. sometimes we’re just not tense :P)
facilitator: Save 5 minutes for checkouts. This means a hard stop at :25 or :55.
tensions we didn’t get to are dropped. sometimes they’re re-upped the following week/taken offline.
Check-outs
similar to checkin, everyone says what’s on their minds, leaving. “this felt like/didn’t feel like a good usage of my time.” to “sorry I was kinda distracted.” to “this meeting felt long.” to “this was kinda depressing.”
this is time for facilitator feedback. this feedback is essential. bad exorcisms got inadequate feedback. we can’t discuss during checkouts, but a good facilitator should follow up, and yes, “this meeting sucks” is a valid tension for next meeting.
I like to comment on the tension:action ratio when I check out. if nothing was actionable… something is really wrong with the meeting lol. I’m happy around 2:1, assuming some were just sharing of information/true unactionable complaints.
teams I’ve been on have pretty universally made checkouts into “checkout/shoutouts” because in addition to shoutouts being 100% always the best way to end any meeting, resolving tensions can be a downer! some tensions didn’t get resolved, action items haven’t happened yet… zooming out to see our teammates feels like the natural complement.7
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it’s hard to explain why a well-designed thing is special compared to its similarly well-designed peers. there are many meeting agendas that are good, and probably have some of the properties of Exorcisms (hey, convergent evolution, we all hate bad meetings!). still, after all these years of too-many-meetings of varying quality, nothing slaps like “tension resolved.” dopamine for a brain like mine.
also, a well-run Exorcism practice hits all my intrinsic motivators in all the right ways (wow, literally all of them, I just checked. it can feed happiness, growth/learning, healthy working environment, impact/velocity/general excellence, equity)
guess it’s not an accident I’m in this line of business. not an accident that before I became an EM—before even MOB had an EM!—I was hype on Exorcisms. it’s a bit of a managerial trick that leads to a team managing itself. (heck, Holacracy does have the last laugh! the OG dream of minimal management is alive)
this is my version of that dream:
Exorcisms eventually lead to all of a team developing a shared sense of how teamwork manifests every time they run into the demon of the day.
then, the facilitator’s job becomes easy. if the facilitator’s job is easy, anyone can do it (i.e. cultural change supersedes process change, as it should when it’s working)
then, no matter who’s there in the room, problems are getting noticed and solved with all the resources you have available, interventions happen immediately when anyone in the room senses they should, the team is really good at making decisions because we’ve worked really hard to get that “tension resolved” from the owners on smaller topics so we can all get our of this meeting so we’re better at the big stuff too.
and then, wait a minute, you don’t need your EM at all in your day to day. ✨
doesn’t everyone just want to put themselves out of a job? is that just me? :)
it helped that the good branding meant people had at least heard of us/saw MOB’s doc and thought “mobile infra has a meeting called an Exorcism? the heck?”
branding is oddly important for processes. even at Medium, there were mutated versions we called frankenmeetings. why are all these catchy names so macabre.
oh let me count the ways this goes terribly.
one, it starts (and stays) depressing because of weak facilitation. because every agenda item is a “tension,”it can feel like complaining instead of being actionable and energizing if the facilitator isn’t effectively pushing for actions. I feel pretty strongly that it’s the facilitator’s fault, but that downplays how challenging being a good facilitator is. exorcisms easily become an airing of tensions without resolution. action planning is just hard and it’s nobody’s fault. (but ok, I’m a manager it was the facilitator’s responsibility to make it not suck. not their fault but their *responsibility*)
two, it stays depressing because the team is having a really bad time, and well…. this is the time in the week when we talk about it. the airing of tensions is uh… rough if we got some big tensions, and the room/facilitator finds itself throwing 404s much too often. this depressing pattern actually means your team is helpless/not being well supported by the organization. this is… a painful but good failure, because exposing the problem shows that the solution is to get your team what it really needs (i.e. a pattern of too many 404s is a 301 in disguise!!! y’all just gave your manager what they need to advocate for you.) I think having sad exorcisms used to scare me, but they don’t anymore… in recent months, I’ve started saying “I’m in the business of making things obvious by making things visible.” and well… sometimes what we need to see ain’t pretty. by making tensions explicitly the subject of the meeting, we force the entire team to look at something… we might not want to look at, for as long as the owner needs us to. it’s scary. I think it’s brave.
three is a fun one, maybe just a variant of two… an exorcism can expose that a team isn’t a team. what makes a team, a team? holacracy claimed that tacticals could be run effectively at every level in a holacratic organization, but I actually don’t believe it. if you’re not really a team/don’t have an identity as a team, used to working together and leaning on each other, you’re… well… just a collection of individuals with shared goals. a cheer squad at best.
no hating on cheer squads, I am the #1 fan of most things, and I believe strongly in cheer squads, but you’re not a team. e.g. if you stuck me in a room with 5 other managers, we could have an exorcism, but it’s really not the best meeting format for us… as much as I love my peers and I hope they love me, there aren’t opportunities to help like you’d have on a real, functional team because our goals are only shared in an abstract, not functional level. it’s rare I have an opportunity to make my peer’s day. management can be kinda lonely in that way. connection looks different I guess.
dude, Holacracy changed their documentation since I last looked. “Agenda Item”??? wtf. what a step back. if you’re reinventing management with a shiny, hippie new system of organization, why take away the at-least-distinctive name of, like, the best thing about it. :scream:
this definition of tension I’m using here is from my memory. (which is bad, but I referenced it so much I’m pretty confident I captured the spirit of it!) I still love the OG name (even the exorcism rebrand didn’t kill the name) because of the satisfaction of saying “tension resolved” when the tension was yours.
I actually really dislike the updated documentation because it puts way too much power on the facilitator and makes it sound so much more… corporate than it used to be. man. bums me out.
yes, naming your tension is a tiny marketing opportunity, being too verbose is annoying/we can’t type that, being too cryptic confuses the room, but being just the appropriate amount of vague with your word/phrase gets you questions/upvotes later :D exorcism hax.
facilitator note, I’ve never been totally sure what to do with the upvotes that are secretly tension pile-ons (or the slightly worse version, tension hijacks!). if I suspect tensions, I say something like “great, {original owner} is resolved, anyone else on this tension pile still need resolution?” to give them a chance, and then “great, moving on.”
at the core of it, this is why meetings didn’t suck anywhere I was at. managers are (*surprise*) by default bad at running meetings for the majority of the team because we don’t know what everyone needs. the most efficient meeting possible requires omniscience, and the effective transfer of power between the people who can use it more effectively is the next best thing.
since becoming an EM, I often elevate someone else’s tension. I liked that this gave me language to do that. “hey, so this is only kinda my tension, I was inspired by {this thing} that {this person} said, and now I want the same/almost the same thing.”
tbh, most times we only remembered to do one of either checkouts or shoutouts :joy: being called on in a meeting is stressful! I still liked doing them together. combination checkout/shoutout is faster than two loops around the room for a facilitator struggling to manage time, and it’s totally fine if only the stronger of the two actually gets said. nothing happens on accident.