How to: Daily mess up the Daily Standups

Daily Standups - An opportunity to pause, take a step back and do a status-check - "Are we on track?" "Are we going to make it?" "Are we going to meet the commitment we made to the Product Owner?" "Shall we declare a failure early enough rather than waiting to actually fail?" "Shall we buy more work into the current sprint?" "Are we going at an unsustainable pace?" ... these and many more such questions are answered in a quick, crisp ceremony called the Daily Scrum, or as we lovingly call it - the daily Standups.

Unfortunately, more often than not, this seemingly simple and highly valuable ceremony is misunderstood, misused and abused. It pains to see how the ceremony (in fact the entire practice of Agile) is twisted to reduce it to a waste-of-time meeting loathed by everyone.

We have enough pearls of wisdom out there on the internet discussing how to ensure value in the ceremony of daily standups, so let me not talk about that. Let me, instead, list a few simple, easy, common and effective ways to sc**w it up. Here goes:

1. Treat it as a justification meeting: Everyone justifies to everyone, what did they spend their 8 hours on and why that work took 8 hours. An excellent way to break the team gel and trust. It helps us become suspicious about every other team member - really effective and common!
2. One-to-one status "reporting" meeting - Rather than being a team discussion and strategization opportunity, everyone reports their status to "THE Scrum Master Sir".
3. Treating it as a problem solving session - Rather than spinning off problem solving sessions, have the problem solving discussions here and now!! Hours of discussions. This helps ensure that everybody on the team loathes this "meeting".
4. Chicken (read it as "PO" or if you come from a traditional setup abusing Agile, you can read it as "PM") speaking up, cross-questioning individuals as they give (or attempt to give) their updates, reducing it to a dreaded ceremony to be followed everyday.
5. Voice-only updates over phone or "the Polycom": This is an excellent way of catching some sleep. Who cares if while listening to the person (I mean the "voice") on the other side, I catch up some useful sleep - it may increase my efficiency and productivity, you see! Caution: Don't forget to "mute" the microphone, lest it catches your snoring... Since there is no video or face-to-face communication, the other person, of coarse, won't make out when I say an "OK". whether I meant "OK, I got it!" or "OK, whatever..., anyways, all your murmuring goes over my head"

The list goes on... I may add another 100 items to it which are highly effective in rendering the standups ineffective! But before we go that direction, let's take a pause and think... Can we improve the situation and have a bit more disciplined and valuable ceremony called Daily Scrum?

All inputs (more than) welcomed...