Background:
In March and April of 2020, the company I was working for had gone fully remote, and we were all getting used to the rapid pace of changes we were experiencing in work and life. Change causes a lot of anxiety, and the people I was working with all felt a bit more exposed, myself included… I would call the time very “raw.” The business was challenging, companies reacted to the change, froze budgets, and made drastic cuts, and layoffs were happening. Stores were out of food; children were schooling remotely. It was a cats-and-dogs-living-together type of environment.
We started taking deals we would typically pass on to keep people busy and employed. Some of them sucked, but we had to make it work to keep the lights on.
Writing it down:
On our corporate Slack, people posted pictures one day of dumpster fires, dumpster fires floating down the street, and everyday things like that. They were trying to find language to describe the situation. I noticed that folks were using different terminology for things. I wondered how it compared.
I took the language, wrote it down, gave it an order, filled in some gaps, and then posted it to see if people liked it. I think people loved it. We started using the language in meetings, and it increased our ability to relate and talk about a lot of stuff that was sucky about the world, our lives, an email, whatever at that point. Lots of tense moments got broken by the levity of deciding if it was really FUBAR or just a Shit Show.
I also posted the idea on my Facebook, and a camping friend of mine, David Wheatly from Humanergy, took the picture, named it, and made the PDF. He put his fingerprints on it as well. He said he even used it in some of his work.
When would you use this?
I’ve used this when groups of people are venting and having a rough time figuring out how to talk about a not great situation. They take it, own it, create their own words, add their own phrases.
Seeing things written down allows folks to separate from it, feel validated and consider what it would be to feel worse or better knowing that there are other measures and words. Then, they start to broaden and align different experiences in their life to those other words. Covid 2020 is at the bottom; they can feel anchored in that.
When you’re using it, if you need to change the words, go for it. It makes it more fun and personal. If there are translations, colloquialisms, or new phrases, add them wherever needed. Again, the goal is to have a language you and others can use to describe situations. The speech needs to stay current and relevant to the people using it.
The Scale is a seed to help when people have difficulty relating to what’s happening around them. It’s the process of writing down the words used, establishing a language, broadening their perspective, and maybe adding some humor. With that language, it can help people process and move forward.
Related Ideas:
GradientMetrics presented this graph to show consensus building on words to describe probability. See this Reddit thread for the discussion.
If you’ve found value here, can relate or have your own contributions to the list, please feel free to comment. If there are other places you’ve seen this type of analysis or language, please let me know, and I’ll add it to the post.