Discover the Stinky Fish

Uncover the Stinky fish is a template created by CEO Gustavo Razzetti of Fearless culture.

Find out more about this template in the following blog post: https://fearlessculture.design/blog-posts/uncover-the-stinky-fish-canvas

How to uncover, unpack, and solve the issues your team members don’t want to talk about?

It’s impossible to avoid conflict – every team has issues or stinky fishes they need to discuss.

Conflict can be detrimental to your team. The longer colleagues avoid it, the stinkier things will get.

The Stinky Fish is a metaphor for issues your team fails to address. The longer everyone avoids conflict, the quicker it will rot. 

The Stinky Fish metaphor reminds us that unattended issues don’t magically vanish – they end up contaminating the entire team.

The best approach to managing conflict is to address it right away.

This visual canvas provides a set of questions to uncover different problems. 

Why addressing the Stinky Fish is critical

Identifying and dealing with conflict is critical to managing a high-performing team. Conflict significantly impacts teams, affecting productivity, relationships, and morale. Solving issues in person is difficult enough. When it comes to remote or hybrid teams, it’s even more challenging to identify and resolve conflict. 

When working in person, it’s easy to spot signs that trouble is brewing. In a virtual space, signals are harder to read or more confusing. The solution is to not only promote transparency but also to encourage people to address conflict in the open.

Addressing the stinky fish early on will prevent your conflict debt from piling up. The longer issues remain undiscussed and unresolved, the more the conflict debt piles up. 

Conflict is not bad for organizations; it’s data that helps team members learn and grow together. It helps us understand team dynamics through different lenses.

The Stinky Fish exercise helps build the psychological safety muscle, helping colleagues feel safer to address tensions in the open. 

Uncovering team issues with the Stinky Fish

This activity invites people to identify the issues affecting them and the team. Some issues might be individual, others team-related. Many could result from systemic company problems. By integrating everyone’s stinky fish, you can get the whole picture – the sum of all problems affecting team performance.

Identifying stinky fish is an effective exercise for both individuals and groups to face the issues that are getting in their way of success.

The Stinky Fish Canvas © helps teams identify four types of issues:

• What everybody is thinking but no one is saying (silent problems)

• Uncertainties that make people feel that they've lost control (unknowns)

• Things that are making people feel nervous or anxious (anxieties)

• Past issues the team can’t get over (what we cling to)