Gear-up Ageism role-play

Team 3 (Brennan "Betty White" Holtzclaw - facilitator)

(You can't practice real-life)

1. What is the real problem here and should it be addressed at a company-wide, team-wide, or individual level?
- Not enough details to really know. Seems like the dev team doean't know how to just listen to the client.
- Do a little more reasearch into whether this is just an isolated incident or chronic. Could this be solved wit a little personal interaction?
- Maybe evaluate who is talking to the client (if this team was made up of the original team, couldn't we just be the ones that talk to clients?) The team should be able to continue to operate fairly autonomously despite the acquisition.
- The full-blown synergy might never be there. Did the parent company do a poor job on boarding the new team? Who's fault is it really? How do we make the new team care about this old person project? Identify the rotten eggs and target actions there.
- Company-wide - it's no longer the same company since the acquisition. It just makes sense to reevaluate. Baby-boomers are hitting the AARP hard, and there's a ton of them. Probably better to change the whole company's attitude to fit the NEW company dynamic.


2. Is this the same as the scenario from last time?
- Maybe this isn't actually ageism. This is more just a difference in communication between groups of people. What is being asked for or communicated here that a young person can't deal with?
- The key component here isn't actually age, its a failure to communicate.
- Could this team work on a boring project that wasn't for old people? If we replaced old people with black people is this immediately a racist issue?

3. OK - so you've been monitoring slack, and you've seen a lot of little signals: old-man-emojis, golden girl giphys, an old-man nickname. As the team lead, what's your first move? Do you go somewhere before the CEO.
- Address it directly
- Address it company wide to get everyone on the same page.
- Team meeting. Explain the relevence of the project.
- Do you do anything? Does it matter if they blow off steam on slack?
--- Meet with the team to address their concerns, see what they don't like, and see what can be done to solve the problem.

4. Once you've identified the problem (your team hates working on an 'old-fashioned' product) what do you bring to the CEO?
- The team needs something extra. They need another outlet. This won't ever go away. Maybe some considerations for the team?
-Some good team bonding can come from shitty projects.