I wrote down all the insights from the interviews on post-its and started to put them together in themes.

Themes

Intense feeling avoidance

It is hard to share the most intense feeling regardless if it is anonymous or public.

Professional persona

It is different to share feelings in a personal setting versus in a professional setting. You always want to be your best version at work.

Follow the (happy) herd / Won’t spread bad energy

Follow the herd (or peer pressure) is a well known cognitive bias. In this setting, it also connects to the fact that people do not want to spread any bad energy in the room. You don’t want to be the one sharing ”negative” feelings if everyone shared ”positive” feelings.

Fear that the emotion won’t remain anonymous / Fear of being judged

When you share something anonymously and everyone can see that sharing, it might not be as anonymous as one might think. If it sticks out (like above) then it might spark curiosity and people might get curious to find out who shared it. If the sharing becomes public, people are then afraid they might be judged.

Team size matters

This is not something that I can change though.

Other

It is hard to show vulnerability, sharing = trust, and there might be a domino effect when people start sharing.

Comfortable / Uncomfortable / Hard to identify emotion

The general feeling I got was that it is very sensitive to share emotions, but I still got 50/50 on people saying that it is comfortable to share and that it is only sometimes hard to identify the emotion.

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Final thoughts

What is the feeling of full anonymity?

I think a lot of the themes are connected to the definition of feeling anonymous. If people share their emotions, through Mentimeter (anonymously), and the actual words of the emotions are shown on the presenters screen, I would like to call that semi-anonymous because there is a possibility to figure out who is sad (by body language for example), if everyone else shared happy emotions.

No labels on presenter’s screen?

If we say that no words show up on the presenters screen, only some sort of visualization, it might lower the fear of people figuring out who shared what, following the herd-mentality, the resistance of spreading bad energy and the fear of sharing intense emotions, since there are no words to connect to people/to follow/nothing to be scared of being judged for. When we remove the actual labels on the presenters screen, we can instead focus on the individual reflections, which is also the priority. A sharing is not worth anything if people are not true to themselves.

Evaluate the emotion sharing?

The counter argument for removing the labels of the emotions might be ”but then we can’t evaluate if there is a problem, and no chance to improve?”. But, why should we focus on solving peoples emotions? ‘cause the emotions might not even be work related, they might come from one’s private life. Just venting emotions have positive effects, so, there is no need to push it too hard.

Reflection from Taylor

• How could emotions be visualized without labels?
• Is it possible –with viz– to generate a feeling without some insight into what exactly was reported?

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