The Silent Audience
Sit through other teams’ presentations without asking a single question. Your job is done.
Commonly affects: Teams that disengage after their own presentation, participants who see the review phase as downtime, people who avoid public questioning.
The Anti-Pattern
Your team has presented. You sit back, relax, and half-listen while other teams show their work. When the facilitator asks “any questions?”, nobody on your team raises a hand. Not even when the other team made completely different decisions on the same trade-offs your team struggled with. Not even when their approach directly contradicts yours and you’re curious why.
The review phase becomes a series of monologues. Teams present, the room claps politely, and everyone moves on.
Why It Feels Right
Asking questions in front of the room feels confrontational. You don’t want to look like you’re attacking another team’s work. You might also feel unqualified to challenge their decisions, especially if they sound confident. And after the effort of your own presentation, the energy to engage has drained. It’s easy to think the review phase is “their turn” and tune out.
The Catastrophe
The most valuable part of the kata gets skipped. The review phase is where teams discover alternative approaches, challenge each other’s assumptions, and see the same problem from different angles. Without questions, presentations become performances rather than discussions. Nobody learns that there were three valid approaches to the same problem because nobody compared them.
Teams walk away thinking their solution was the only reasonable one, when in reality the room was full of different trade-offs they never explored. The kata produces isolated islands of thinking instead of shared learning.
The Rescue
Engage with other teams’ presentations as actively as you worked on your own:
- Compare decisions. Before presentations start, note your team’s 2-3 biggest decisions. When another team presents, ask about the same decision points: “We chose X for this, you chose Y. What drove that?”
- Ask genuine questions. “How would your system handle [scenario]?” is not an attack. It’s the kind of question that sparks the best discussions.
- Prepare one question per presentation. Make it a team rule. Each member writes down at least one thing they want to ask.
- Facilitators can seed this. If the room is quiet, the facilitator can model the behavior by asking the first question, then turning to other teams: “Did anyone approach this differently?”