The Safe Library - Service, Safety, & Security with Dr. Steve Albrecht

By Dr. Steve Albrecht

Do your staff meetings turn into idea-killing sessions? Or are they doing what they are supposed to do - create value in a group discussion, initiate plans, develop solutions, and hold people accountable for their tasks and responsibilities? What do you tend to say of a typical library staff meeting: “That was a good use of my time, that was a waste of my time, or we could have got the same results using email exchanges?"

One reason many staff meetings de-evolve into conflicts, strong differences of opinion, or worse--the silent treatment among employees--is that they turn negative early. Allowing staff meeting members to value-judge, criticize, and make sweeping generalizations about what they don’t like about a new idea, policy, plan, or proposal defeats the purpose of a collaborative, brainstorming staff meeting. It discourages other more-quiet employees from speaking at all, so they leave the meeting literally feeling not heard. It can create bad feelings between colleagues, especially if their fledgling idea was the one that got hammered in the meeting.

Here’s a tool for running meetings that keep people motivated to problem-solve, not idea-kill. It’s called the P.I.N. Tool and it stands for Positive-Interesting-Negative. It provides a simple framework to evaluate new ideas and it can help to keep the group’s notorious idea killers at bay, at least until the end of the discussion, which is where their negativity belongs.

The P.I.N. Tool can be used by anyone who is running the meeting, a library leader, a manager, a supervisor, or even an employee who asked for the meeting or is tasked with moving through the agenda. Here’s how it works and what the meeting-runner should say, at least for the first few meetings where the P.I.N. Tool is introduced:

“We’re going to talk about some new ideas in this meeting. We can use the P.I.N. Tool to make the best use of our collective time if we focus first on what’s Positive about the issue at hand, what we like about it, and what’s good about it. We’ll capture those Positive attributes first.

"Then we can look at what’s Interesting about the new idea, plan, or proposal. That could be the facts and figures, the deadlines or due dates for it, the obvious or hidden costs, or some legal or procedural questions we’ll need to answer at some point. Interesting means what we still need to discover.

"Then we can move to the third step - looking at the Negatives, or what we don’t like about the idea, plan, policy, or proposal. It might be too expensive, hard to implement, or just not a good fit for our work culture here.

"The steps to the P.I.N. Tool are there for a reason. We start with the Positive, move through Interesting, and End with the Negative, to make sure every point of view is heard. The order is important because it protects new ideas and our bosses who are implementing them or your colleagues who have suggested them. We can use it as a reaction gauge.”

One of the examples I often use in training classes where we discuss the value of The P.I.N. Tool is an exercise where I ask the group to consider putting a casino on an airplane. Without the P.I.N. Tool in place, the first, immediate, and most vocal reactions come from the Idea Killers in the room who say some person of “What? That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard! It would make the plane too heavy. What about turbulence and the roulette wheel? Who is going to fix the machines if they break?”

This no way, not gonna happen approach can sink the idea before it even gets a full hearing. Using the P.I.N. Tool we can make a useful list and then evaluate the idea in total at the end:

Positive - More revenue for the airline; fun for those passengers who like to gamble; a way to learn how to play new games en route to Las Vegas or Atlantic City; and it supports the gaming industry and its manufacturers and its employees.

Interesting - How much does it cost to retrofit the back of the plane? What are the associated legal issues, flying over all 50 states? Who will collect the money? Would we need a casino employee on each flight? What about technical or electronic repairs? Can they be hacked? Does it make the plane harder to fly?

Negative - Too much noise; the possibility of angry drunks or furious losers. Would it cut the airlines’ revenue because of the missing seats, so tickets would be more expensive? Security issues for the money? Does it set a bad moral example for kids to watch their parents gamble?

By deferring the Negative comments unit the end of the discussion, we give the idea a chance to grow, percolate, expand, and make more sense. Doing the tool backward, as we usually like to do in staff meetings - Negative-Interesting-Positive - means that we lose conversational momentum. With some human beings being as they are (chronic complainers), it’s easy to come up with a long list of don’t-likes early, which can make the list of likes much smaller.

Using the P.I.N. Tool, our list of Positives tends to be longer because it happens first. Holding the Negatives until the end gives those naysayers - who may make several valid points as to what’s wrong with the idea or why the new approach won’t work - their say, just at the point where it’s time for their input.

Try the P.I.N. Tool at your next staff meeting. Once you describe the ground rules, it should be easy for your colleagues to follow them.