Buzzword bingo for your next meeting

How to play buzzword bingo in a meeting

1. Before the meeting, start a room and send the link to everyone who’s coming. There’s nothing to install and nobody signs up.
2. Everyone who opens the link gets their own card: 24 phrases around a free centre. The cards differ, but every phrase comes from the room’s 36, so when someone says one of those 36, about two in three of you can mark it.
3. Tap a phrase when a speaker says it, and tap it again if you marked it by mistake.
4. The first full row, column or diagonal wins. The free centre counts, so the four lines through it need only four phrases.
5. Call it quietly. Type it in the side chat, or work “bingo” into a question for the speaker. Shouting it is also traditional.

Meeting bingo on Zoom and Teams

Keep your card in a browser tab beside the call, or on your phone. Your marks stay in this browser, so a dropped connection or a reload doesn’t cost you the game. Keep the room link handy too. 57% of meetings are “got a sec” calls that never make the calendar.

The side chat is where the game lives. The meeting runs on the main screen and the players run a second one underneath, where every “bingo” gets called. Afterwards, go easy on the praise to the organiser. Tell them it was the best session all year and it comes back weekly, cards and all.

For an all-hands where phones stay in pockets, print corporate jargon bingo cards instead: up to eight different cards, two to a page.

Bullshit bingo, meeting bingo, buzzword bingo

Whatever your office calls it, the name comes from an internal Silicon Graphics tool that principal scientist Tom Davis built with Seth Katz in early 1993. Chris Pirazzi put the first public version on the web that year, and a Dilbert strip on February 22, 1994 showed it being played in a meeting.

How much of the week meetings take

The average professional sits through 17.1 meetings a week, 14.8 hours in all, or 37% of working time. Each runs 51.9 minutes on average, which leaves eight to find the next room. A block marked focus time doesn’t count as a meeting, so it’s the first slot on the calendar that someone books over.

Half of all meetings start 75 seconds late, and 64% of recurring meetings have no agenda. That’s a minute and a quarter of “can you see my screen” before anyone gets to “synergy”.

Tuesday carries the heaviest load, with 23% of the week’s meetings, and Friday the lightest, with 16%. Tuesday is your best day for a full card.

Meetings that could have gone better

Meetings are ineffective 72% of the time, say the people sitting in them. 77% often sit through one that ends by booking another, and 80% say most could be done in half the time.

Say so in a meeting and watch what comes back. The usual reply is to put a pin in it, take it offline and circle back later. That’s three squares and one more meeting.

Which meetings fill a card fastest

The weekly numbers hour is a safe bet. Everyone reads out a figure, then the senior half of the call chats until the hour is up. Attendance is required and opinions are not, which leaves plenty of time to listen.

A floor that has just come back to the office is better value. You hear the next team’s stand-up through the partition, and your own team calls you on video from the next cubicle. Even the 1:1 with the boss in the next room happens on Teams. House rule: a phrase from someone else’s meeting counts if you heard it clearly.

Where the squares come from

Every square is a piece of corporate jargon. 41 of the 56 made at least one recent list of the phrases office workers hate most. The other 15 are office staples those lists skipped, such as deep dive, north star and hard stop. Hard stop is the square you’ll hear twice, because the first one didn’t take.

All 56 squares, each with what the speaker means.

• circle back talk later, or never
• synergy working together
• touch base a call that could be a message
• bandwidth time to do more
• low-hanging fruit the easy wins
• take this offline not in front of everyone
• leverage use
• agile we'll change the plan
• reach out get in touch
• ping me message me
• move the needle make a measurable difference
• pivot the plan failed
• per my last email you didn't read it
• think outside the box try something new
• on my radar I know, and that's all
• game changer a small change, said loudly
• deliverables what we hand in
• please advise tell me what to do
• cadence how often we meet about it
• double click look closer
• thought leader posts opinions online
• moving forward from now on
• boil the ocean do everything at once
• blue-sky thinking ideas with no budget
• swim lane your part of the job
• peel back the onion look layer by layer
• paradigm shift a new way of working
• best practice what others do
• run it up the flagpole test the idea
• reinvent the wheel redo what exists
• ducks in a row organised first
• put a pin in it pause this
• get the ball rolling start
• hit the ground running start fast, untrained
• balls in the air too many tasks
• push the envelope go further
• mission critical it breaks without this
• bleeding edge new and risky
• subject matter expert the one everyone asks
• learnings lessons, one syllable longer
• out of pocket unreachable
• deep dive a close look, in a long meeting
• level set agree on the facts
• north star the main goal
• headwinds it's going badly
• wheelhouse what you're good at
• hard stop I'm leaving at this time
• new normal worse, and staying
• give 110% unpaid overtime
• boots on the ground the people doing it, on site
• idea harvesting collecting your ideas for their slides
• spidey sense a hunch
• change agent hired to change things
• empower you decide, you're blamed
• we're like a family stay late for free
• win-win good for them, fine for you