Scenario Roleplaying Discussion Workshop

What Is the Scenarios Workshop

Intention

• develop tools for identifying scenarios where our sense safety personal values are being violated or challenged
• practice how to and understanding when to
  • call in/out
  • engage/disengage
  • advocate
• practice graciously receiving positive or negative feedback given under varying circumstances
• practice taking responsibilities for our mistakes while maintaining self-compassion and connection with others
• practice embodying, modeling, and fostering inclusiveness in the workplace
• Walk out of these sessions feeling empowered to
  • challenge real workplace situations that go against our values of diversity, equity, and inclusion
  • grow in our interactions at work

What do we actually do?

• come up with “scenarios” (brief workplace/life situations that we feel challenged by)
• discuss and unpack these scenarios to understand them better
  • how did these behaviors impact us
• identify ways we might engage in these scenarios for a more desirable outcome
• role play these scenarios to practice our skills

How Do We Do It

Agenda

• Introduce the meeting and go over Community Agreements
• roleplay
  • choose a scenario
  • solicit volunteers to roleplay different characters in the scenario
  • mix it up and improvise
  • have fun!
• discuss
  • share first impressions
  • share our own experiences
  • discuss strategies for how to engage with the scenario
• iterate
  • roleplay again applying strategies from previous steps
• repeat

Coming up with Scenarios

We solicit scenarios from our participants! If we’re out of scenarios, we’ll spend the first 30 minutes in break-out rooms to come up with scenarios during the meeting.

Scenario Guidelines

• workplace based scenarios are encouraged and this is not space for talking shit about people/incidents
• IF you must base the incident off something that happened to you,
  • no identifying information
  • give some time between incident
  • re-skin the scenario
• topics to avoid (not because they aren’t important to discuss but we aren’t equipped to handle them)
  • politics
  • explicit sexual harassment
  • physical violence

Scenario Template

context:

• brief sentence explaining the context and settings of your scenario
• avoid judgements in your context! Leave that for discussion! #### dialog:
• use your favorite fake names
• provide line-for-line dialog

Example Scenarios

An App By Any Other Name

Context:

Jake is an EM and manager his close-knit team of engineers Bob, Pierre, Chris and Ramón. Today Jake is holding a cross functional team meeting with their product manager Alice and their designer Pat.

Dialog:

Jake: Welcome team, we are meting today to review Alice and Pat’s designs on our upcoming product. Chris: Hey guys, super appreciate the work y’all did! We implemented Pat’s designs and I felt it really augmented our sexy nurse app! Alice: I’m going to assume by sexy nurse app, you mean the personalized medical assistant app we are working on and discussing today. Pierre: Bro, we’ve been calling it sexy nurse app for weeks. You haven’t come up with a product name yet. Jake: Alright guys, lets stay on track, we’re not here to discuss the app name today Stupid Language

Language

Context:

Alice and Bill are having a discussion at their desk, Claire is overhearing at a neighboring desk

Dialog:

Bill: This project is a disaster Alice: Ugh, the whole thing was done in JavaScript which is STUDID FUCK. We should rewrite it in C++.

I Just Said That

Context:

Jake is the manager of the devops team. He’s holding a meeting with the team members Bob, Pierre, Alice and Pat to discuss ideas for addressing recent trend in service failures

Dialog:

Jake: Okay, so the service broke again this weekend and we really have to fix things up. Give me your ideas. Pat: Oh gosh, again, what did I miss? What happened this time. UGH. Bob: How about we break it up into microservices Alice: What if we modulate the tachyon beam? Jake: Cmon focus folks, this is a serious issue Alice: Sorry (haha) Pierre: We’ve been running this service for years, why are we running into issues now? Pat: We’ve seen a gradual increase in users since we started, it’s natural for us to hit scaling issues Pierre: What about breaking up into microservices? Jake: Hey Pierre, I think you might be onto something there, can you elaborate more? Be Targeted

Made in collaboration with Raymond Keller