We had daily standups or "toolbox talks" in various forms over the years. Useful when used properly. Usually hijacked by windbags in charge. I'm all for stuff that works. Im just cynical old bastard and hate ****y language 🙂
However, my teams have a daily standup (which given it’s virtual is a misnomer now!)
Calling it a standup meeting only tells you about the furniture not the content. Other teams in the business have daily standups too – but they aren’t working with software so they have completely different purposes, agendas and even direction of information flow.
So why not just go with the flow and call them meetings like the rest of the working world? If it doesn't pertain to a specific agenda or method of working then it's just obfuscation as TJ says. It's difference for differences sake.
Don't get me wrong, we talk in acronyms all the frigging time (usually specific to the company) and it does my head in but at least they are self explanatory once someone others to tell you what they stand for.
And TJ, if you object to any of this because you don’t understand it, that’s absolutely fine – you aren’t the target audience.
I enjoyed reading it. Understood some of the words 🙂
Toolbox talks are different from standups...
We had daily standups or “toolbox talks” in various forms over the years. <span style="font-size: 0.8rem;">Useful when used properly. </span>
I’ve only been to one toolbox talk in my life, but my understanding is they are a health and safety driven thing. I’m not sure they have a particularly helpful name either - I don’t carry a physical toolbox at work, I didn’t seem to need one for the session I went to and, at least in my case, it was preaching to the choir.
<span style="font-size: 0.8rem;">Usually hijacked by windbags in charge.
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so it’s almost like you need some sort of ground rules for your meetings, conventions or habits that reinforce how to make them effective and efficient. Imagine if you could drive massive cultural change so that in that short daily meeting it was listening to the team not dictating orders? Imagine if one of the ways to help people understand the way that meeting is supposed to work was just to give it a special name (and train everyone on the idea and reasons behind it)? And imagine if instead of calling the person who makes that meeting (and the stuff that falls out of it) actually work we gave that person an odd title - one that didn’t include the word manager with peoples preconceived perceptions of what that means? Perhaps a really bizarre title would help - because people new to the approach would then say “what do they do?” Rather than assuming they know what a “project manager” or “team leader” does.
FWIW the biggest car crashes I’ve seen with this stuff are when someone at the bottom tries to bring it into the organisation but the folk at the top still think they can run the business the old way. The other disasters are when someone from a software background with their fancy agile ways tries to implement that in another setting - it can work there but it needs a far greater understanding of what you are trying to do and why. More importantly it needs people to buy in to it, and often it’s imposed.
I’m all for stuff that works.
Now it does work in software, when adopted properly, for the right type of projects. It’s widely adopted from startups to massive companies. Like all such things some places make a mess of it, some get overly hung up on trying to do it “right” and so forget to take a step back and ask how to do it better (ironically doing it “right” involves doing exactly that!). As well as organisations that do it badly, some individuals do it better than others. The OPs point was he’s in an organisation which should be big enough and experienced enough to do it right but clearly either the individual or the organisation is not.
So why not just go with the flow and call them meetings like the rest of the working world? If it doesn’t pertain to a specific agenda or method of working then it’s just obfuscation as TJ says. It’s difference for differences sake.
because that’s exactly the point the “daily scrum standup” does have a specific way of working and a specific agenda*. You can have stand ups on anything - our departments that make physical product have standups (imaginatively called “the ten o’clock standup”) and the leadership team have a weekly standup which in times of crisis becomes a daily standup. The name standup is because it’s supposed to be quick where people don’t get comfortable and where the faff of a traditional meeting isn’t involved. These are actually about getting shit done rather than sitting around talking about getting shit done (don’t get me wrong software companies are very good at that too).
* it’s not a printed old fashioned style agenda or usually even a list of bullet points in the teams invite - this is the whole point, everyone in that meeting should know it’s purpose and agenda because it’s got a very specific name and it’s being facilitated by a person with a very specific role. Despite this someone could walk out of a tax software company on Friday and walk into games company on Monday and would have a pretty good idea how their stuff was structured.
You basically just described our morning /start of shift meeting. Changes, upcoming work, challenges and how we're going to manage them.
Toolbox talks are just another term for pre-job briefs but as you say not everyone carries a toolbox so the latter is a clear and concise description of what's on the agenda.
I think we're at crossed purposes here regarding agenda as well, I mean in a general sense rather than written. I can see where the confusion comes from though, I could have picked my words better (irony not lost).