Roast A Problem

This post comes from William Hardaway, a spectacular d.school program alum. Will is the founder and owner of WillGo LLC, a creative agency that facilitates conversations about oppression and designs authentic solutions to stop hate. Will is also an instructional designer at a public University focused on inclusive classrooms.You can connect with him here and subscribe to his newsletter, WillGo, here.

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Making fun of something can be incredibly freeing, whether you call it bagging, capping, snapping, ranking, or any other version of playing the dozens. Me, I like a good, old-school roast.

If you have never watched a roast before, they are a lot of fun. And in the right context they can be very therapeutic. I discovered the benefits of roasting a problem from conversations with colleagues of mine from the same cultural context as me. These conversations became practice.  When we discuss work, our cultural context smoothly transitions to us playing the dozens, which historically was always a commentary on oppressive circumstances. For example, if we are college professors, we might be responding to a problem or reflecting on the latest article about an issue in higher education. 

Let me give you an example of how a conversation might start:

“I had back to back meetings this morning.”
“Tell me about it. I might as well be working in Congress.”
“For real! In one of my meetings somebody filibustered the whole thing.”
“When I see these meetings on my calendar I get hot.”
“It’s like getting an overdue bill in the mail, ain’t it? You don’t even want to open the event to read the agenda.”
“I want to go Maxine Waters in there, like, reclaiming my time!”
“We need to get John Tapper or Gordon Ramsey in there to moderate these meetings.” 

And it goes on from there.

When you are unpacking a problem that you experience, it is often difficult to diverge on the various ways the problem might be experienced. With the creativity and exaggeration that comes from giving a problem a good roasting, you expand the experience of the problem. You find the little annoyances, the inequitable nuances, and you make it personal to your experience. When a room full of people do this, it is truly eye-opening. There is a creative nature that humor taps into. This process does take deft facilitation in a workshop setting, because the point is not to attack other people but to attack the problem. It takes a bit less knowledge and facilitation if you are doing it with a trusted friend or colleague.

You can roast a problem with a friend, and then take insights from the roast to share with everyone else. 

Every problem causes pain, or else it would not be a problem. In order to process the pain, you sometimes have to make light of it, otherwise you risk avoiding a deeper conversation about the hurt it causes. Roasting problems can give us deeper, more expansive insights about how problems are experienced. Research has found that humor and pain are inextricably linked. 

So, roast problems to unearth the underlying pain.

Related: Solve The Right Problem

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