Irrational frustration: when you accidentally close a Chrome tab instead of minimizing it

Totally fair frustration: when someone critiques your idea and then everyone in the meeting piles on

When unstructured, group feedback is dicey on its best day. But if you can figure out the right framework, it becomes a valuable tool for pressure testing ideas and incorporating unique perspectives—all before you institute a big change, go live with a new product, or unintentionally become the office villain by setting a deliverable deadline for December 31.

Here are our top three ways to structure team feedback:

Leave it to the Braintrust. Besides giving us heroes like Lightning McQueen and Boo, Pixar has also gifted us the “Braintrust.”

• Basically, a bunch of writers and directors watch a Pixar movie in draft mode, and then they spill their thoughts to the director in charge.
• A meeting with this much radical candor might sound like your worst nightmare, but one of the reasons it’s so effective is because Braintrusts separate you from your ideas—which reduces the spice level.

“Walk the store.” This one goes out to anyone who’s still haunted by their days working retail. Financial tech co Stripe developed a process for cross-team walk-throughs (prelaunch) from the user’s perspective—just like your manager at American Eagle was supposed to “walk the store” before customers arrived.

• One brave soul will share their screen and pretend to use the product like a customer experiencing it for the first time.
• Meanwhile, a bunch of other teams are noting hang-ups (and positives) in what CTO David Singleton calls a “friction log.”
• After the walk-through, everyone reviews the log and discusses what can still be improved before the product launches.

Be a realist and use a premortem. You’ve probably sat through a postmortem or retrospective meeting for a project once it’s over, but why not flip the process?

• Premortems are meetings that tackle potential issues that might crop up, just like in a postmortem the team highlights the sh*t that actually went down. Reflecting on what could go wrong helps your team manage risk and stay aligned.
• Dive deeper into the proactive process in six steps here.

Group feedback can be as deeply unpleasant as your family group thread telling you how terrible your cranberry sauce was this year. But many hands (and opinions) make light work, so next year use one of these frameworks to get the fam’s input early.—CS

Starting a boardroom coup is as ill-advised as watching Hereditary while you’re home alone. But it does create highly entertaining business news.

For all our readers who’ve been under the spell of green bean casserole and Black Friday deals recently, here’s what happened when the board members of tech co OpenAI—creator of ChatGPT and DALL-E—ousted its CEO Sam Altman earlier this November:

• Altman headed to Microsoft to lead its AI team, over 700 OpenAI employees threatened to quit, and then less than five days later Altman was reinstated as CEO.
• And there’s a new board in town, too, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Only one OG member is still hanging around.

Everyone’s been talking about the sneaky coup and Altman’s comeback story, but we’re interested in the big moves from nearly the entire OpenAI team. When those 700+ employees said “hire him back or else,” they were issuing an ultimatum—a big risk that enabled drastic change.

Can you do the same? Yes. But like bad haircuts on picture day, ultimatums are forever, so you’ve got to be careful.

If you’re ready to give an ultimatum at work but don’t want to join a show hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, here’s what to consider:

Define your ideal outcomes. What do you actually want to get out of this? If you’re telling your boss you want a salary bump or you’ll quit, you better be prepared to walk if you don’t get what you asked for. If you don’t, backtracking can lose you a lot of credibility and bargaining power in the future.

• And if you’re not prepared to quit in a huff, maybe an intense ultimatum isn’t the right move.

Consider the relationship. Giving an ultimatum pretty much always impacts your working relationships. For example, if you’ve just told a coworker to help you with a project or else, be prepared to deal with different vibes and possibly bad blood later on—even if you do get help from them this time.

Create a communication plan. Winging a big ask is about as good of an idea as deep-frying a turkey. Plan out what you want to say when you make the ultimatum, whether it’s bullet points on a sticky note or a full script.

My way or the highway is a high-risk, high-reward move—but with the right setup you could get exactly what you want without trending on social media.

The leaves have changed, the turkeys have been consumed, and the family fights have all been resolved.

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We see these company mascots practically every day, so would it kill us to get their names right?

See how well you know corporate America: We'll give you the common character, and you give us their full name.

• The Pixar lamp
• The Twitter bird (RIP)
• The Quaker Oats guy
• Mr. Clean’s first name
• The Michelin Man
• Mr. Peanut’s full name