Doom Circles, in short, are as follows: someone is the focus of attention, and the circle will, one by one, point out their “doom”—this is something like “this is what your Hamming problem looks like to me” or “this is your core problem” or “if you fail at your goals, it will be because of X.”
The main goal is something like exposing your blind spots, or calibrating you on how much things matter / how much various problems you have are visible on the outside.
I’ve also personally benefited a lot from doom circles.
At the last CFAR reunion I experimented with a modified version of the protocol based on the idea that a surprising amount of doom circle feedback is projection (which doesn’t mean it’s not true), which I called “doom mirror circles” at the time: after each person gives doom, they point a mirror (in this case we used a phone camera) at themselves and then see what happens when they apply the doom to themselves. Worked pretty well, but I haven’t tried it since.
This is good! Keep going! Bringing awareness of projection into circling should also help ameliorate some failure modes. This works best when you experience it (via doom mirror in this case) than just think about it.
An element that’s easy to leave out in a description, but which I understand to be fairly critical, is the deliberate over-the-top nature of it. You don’t just say “That is your doom”, you go DOOOOOM, DOOMY DOOMY DOOM between one person receiving doom and the next. I believe its function is to both allow for people to be more extreme than they would if they didn’t have the vague feeling that anything could be taken as exaggeration, and simultaneously to lessen the emotional impact of the criticism.
Doom Circles, in short, are as follows: someone is the focus of attention, and the circle will, one by one, point out their “doom”—this is something like “this is what your Hamming problem looks like to me” or “this is your core problem” or “if you fail at your goals, it will be because of X.”
The main goal is something like exposing your blind spots, or calibrating you on how much things matter / how much various problems you have are visible on the outside.
I’ve also personally benefited a lot from doom circles.
At the last CFAR reunion I experimented with a modified version of the protocol based on the idea that a surprising amount of doom circle feedback is projection (which doesn’t mean it’s not true), which I called “doom mirror circles” at the time: after each person gives doom, they point a mirror (in this case we used a phone camera) at themselves and then see what happens when they apply the doom to themselves. Worked pretty well, but I haven’t tried it since.
This is good! Keep going! Bringing awareness of projection into circling should also help ameliorate some failure modes. This works best when you experience it (via doom mirror in this case) than just think about it.
An element that’s easy to leave out in a description, but which I understand to be fairly critical, is the deliberate over-the-top nature of it. You don’t just say “That is your doom”, you go DOOOOOM, DOOMY DOOMY DOOM between one person receiving doom and the next. I believe its function is to both allow for people to be more extreme than they would if they didn’t have the vague feeling that anything could be taken as exaggeration, and simultaneously to lessen the emotional impact of the criticism.