The Fears and Hopes Protocol is a facilitation exercise designed to get a group’s expectations and concerns into the open at the beginning of working together. Its stated deeper purpose is to create a norm in which the group takes collective ownership of people’s expectations and concerns and begins addressing them together.
The basic exercise is very simple:
Fear: Each person considers: If this were the worst meeting/workshop/class you had attended, what would happen or fail to happen?
Hope: Then: If this were the best, what would the outcome be?
People can share in pairs, before the group collects the hopes and fears together.
The facilitator records them without editing, commenting or judging them.
The group reflects on what has emerged and can turn that into working norms: essentially, what do we need to do together to achieve the hopes while dealing with the fears?
I find this highly relevant to my transformation-in-teams philosophy. It isn't an intimacy exercise; people aren't being asked to expose their deepest personal fears. They're making explicit things that often remain hidden when a group starts work:
What do I hope we can achieve? What am I worried might happen?
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