Games in project meetings
A project meeting can spend forty minutes producing agreement and no decision. Often the cause is not the agenda but a game: a familiar exchange with a hidden level, played by competent people, that ends in frustration, blame or heroic effort — and quietly charges the project in days and trust. Naming the game is the first exit.
A scene from project life
The weekly status meeting opens with a real problem: the testing window has shrunk by a week, and the lead asks for options. The senior developer offers one. "Yes, but the environment is not ready," says the project manager. A second option appears. "Yes, but the vendor has not confirmed." A third. "Yes, but the business has not signed off." Each reply is factually true — and the meeting warms to its real business: proving that nothing can be done. Twenty minutes later the original problem is untouched, everyone feels vaguely wronged, and the window has shrunk further.
Later the roles rotate. A designer presents work that is two days late. Asked directly, she answers with a list of warnings she sent in March — messages nobody acted on. "Why didn't you tell us it would slip?" asks the lead; the warnings were real, but buried in threads, copied to everyone and addressed to no one. She leaves with the moral victory; the project leaves with two lost days and a new caution between two people who must speak plainly next week.
Neither participant planned this. That is the point. A game is not a conspiracy and not a character verdict. It is a well-worn path: an opening move everyone recognises, a sequence that runs almost by itself, and a payoff nobody would order on purpose — being right, being wronged, or being indispensable, purchased with the project's time. Until someone names the path, the team will walk it again next week.
The method, in substance
Eric Berne defined a game as a series of exchanges with a hidden level and a predictable outcome: on the surface, people discuss facts; underneath, they trade positions — Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim, the three corners of the Drama Triangle — and the exchange ends in a familiar bad feeling. Christiansen and Bilund give games a full chapter under the heading of honesty: typical workplace games, grouped by the role that starts them, and ways to refuse, interrupt and replace them. Three run project meetings across industries.
"Yes, but…" begins when a problem is presented and every proposed solution is answered with an objection. The hidden level is a contest the presenter cannot lose: each defeated suggestion proves the problem — and the presenter's position — exceptional. The payoff is confirmation that nothing helps, which relieves everyone of the risk of trying. The project pays with a decision window, closed while the meeting felt productive.
"Why didn't you tell me?" runs on information kept vague or unaddressed until it can be produced as evidence. Meetings play it both ways: the manager who never stated what "tell me early" means, and the specialist whose warnings were too diffuse to act on. The payoff is blame placed or blame escaped. The project pays in trust: after two rounds, people protect themselves with copy-to-everyone messages, and real early warnings drown in defensive paper.
"Look how hard I tried" converts effort into the result under discussion. Hours and visible strain are presented where the milestone should be, and the room is invited to grade commitment instead of progress. The payoff is recognition without the danger of a measurable outcome. The project pays in standards: once effort outranks delivery, a candid "this will not be ready" becomes harder to say than another heroic week.
The triangle ties the three together. In the chain customer — contractor — project manager, the same person rotates: rescuing the project on Monday by absorbing someone else's task, persecuted by the customer's deadline on Wednesday, persecuting the team on Friday for the delay the rescue created. The roles feel like reactions; in fact they are the game's timetable.
How to use it in a team
The exit Berne pointed to, and the business literature keeps, is not accusation but a direct transaction plus a contract. A direct transaction says, from the Adult, what is actually being asked: "I need a decision between the two options that remain, or a statement that we are escalating." That sentence names the hidden level without shaming anyone. Naming works best early and behaviourally: describe the sequence, not the person — "the last three suggestions each met a 'yes, but'; let us stop generating and start deciding."
Then contract the meeting itself: purpose, decision rights, and rules of exchange, written where everyone can see them. A workable meeting contract answers four questions in advance. What decision or product must this meeting leave with? Who decides, who advises, who is informed? What counts as raising a risk — a named owner, a date, a size — so that "I mentioned it" becomes checkable? And who may call a game when it starts, in what words, without it counting as an attack?
With that contract, the games lose their cover. Option-defeating is interrupted by the decision rule the room accepted. Undelivered warnings are answered by the risk format: owner, date, impact, request — a warning that fits counts; one that does not is returned, kindly, for completion. Effort reports are honoured as effort and then redirected: "The work counts. Now the milestone: what is ready, what is not, what do you need?"
Teams often build a map of their recurring games — names, usual players, usual price — and review it monthly. The map is not a wall of shame; it is the relational twin of the risk register, and entries close when the pattern stops costing money.
Where the method stops
Not every objection is a game. "Yes, but the environment is not ready" is sometimes simply the fact that saves the release, and a leader who labels every unwelcome fact a game will train the team to stop bringing facts. The test is repetition: a game repeats the same sequence to the same ending despite new information, and somebody leaves with a feeling instead of a decision. Not every silence is concealment; some warnings are badly heard, and the fix is a better reporting line, not a motive. And where a game is run by the structure itself — bonuses for heroics, punishment for bad news — contracting the meeting helps locally, but the honest address is the organisation's agreements, above the meeting's pay grade.
One step this week
Choose one recurring meeting and listen for a single game. Afterwards, write down the opening move, the sequence, the ending feeling, and what the project paid in time or trust. Then draft one sentence for the meeting contract that would close that game's favourite door — a decision rule, a risk format, or a line that separates effort from delivery. Propose that one sentence at the next meeting, as an experiment for a month.