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276 - Rebecca Hinds: Designing Good Meetings · Coaches Rising

• 0:00
  [UNKNOWN]: Thank you for watching.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: welcome back.
• 0:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the coaches rising podcast and I am delighted to be joined today by a Rebecca Heinz.
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rebecca is the author of a new book called Your Best Meeting Ever.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Seven principles for designing meetings that get things done and I want it to invite Rebecca
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes it can feel like meetings start happening to me and I wanted to change that and I'm interested in this topic of wise agency at the moment and so therefore how can we revolutionize the way we think about meetings to get the most of them?
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and our clients do a lot of meetings as well so for me this conversation is a deep dive into topics such as what criteria genuinely constitute meeting and when should we not meet you know what what reasons do we meet the often aren't good reasons for meeting and how can we how can we have a productive meeting what are the ingredients for that and what cadence is work
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: this is a real deep dive and you can really see, I love this book of Rebecca's, I think it's a fantastic book and you can see Rebecca's thought about this deeply.
• 1:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, just to say a little bit more about Rebecca, other than being the author of this book, she's a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: She founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana, and the Work AI Institute at Glean, her workers featured in top tier publications, including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: She speaks globally at events like Dreamforce, SX, SW, and Rebecca is a trusted advisor and educator appearing on many podcasts and programs such as Adam Grants, Work Life, helping organisations navigate hybrid work, AI adoption and organisational change.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that all being said let's dive in here is the podcast with Rebecca Hines.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Rebecca, it's a delight to have you on the podcast.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: First of all, how are you today?
• 2:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm doing well.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a Tuesday after a holiday.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's refreshing.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's refreshing to always start the week.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I was just sharing my excitement about having you on the podcast before we hit record.
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meetings have been a really live topic for me because I have a company and we meet and sometimes
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: meetings can feel, you know, like not not conducive or I come out of meetings and I at my energies low or so I've been thinking about this topic and you've written a book about meetings, your best meeting ever and first of all I just really recommend it to people.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a really packed full of big ideas and
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: like tools and tactics.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I want to unpack the big ideas in the book today and could you tell me why you wrote this book and why do a lot of meetings suck?
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just kind of like unpack why you wrote the book really.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I've long been fascinated by teamwork and collaboration in organizations.
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think there are many reasons for that.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: One big one is I was a summer going up competitive summer and.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: have always been fascinated by the power of team and the science and art of team.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do you bring a group of people together in a way that you extract the best out of every single person and create something that's bigger than the sum of the parts?
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And as I was transitioning from an athletic oriented career to an industry oriented career,
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I started to think about how can we take some of those great models of great athletic teams and we've all seen them, the underdogs who went against all odds and apply some of those same frameworks or processes or science foundations to how we design our organizations.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so collaboration has been that thing that I keep coming back to both because I'm fascinated by it and because it's so important.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: When we think about knowledge workers, we spend 85 to 90 percent of our time collaborating with other people at work.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We often think about it and we don't often optimize it.
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's something that we go through the motions, but
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: collaboration is so invisible that it happens through so many different people processes, places, technologies.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's very hard to study it and optimize it, especially if you're a leader within your organization.
• 5:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in many ways, meetings are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the most common collaboration practice.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the most dysfunctional, and from a research perspective, that's pretty fascinating to have this activity we spend so much time on.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's largely unchanged for decades and decades in terms of how we enact these things within our organizations.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yet, any other business activity, we're measuring down to the dollars and cents for some reason, and there are a lot of them.
• 5:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: We close our eyes and we surrender to bad meetings as an
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why do you think we do that?
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then what are some of those reasons?
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: We just, we don't really think about it, or surrender to it.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are a few big ones.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is, by human nature, we seek out real-time collaboration.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: It goes back to the early tribal activities of humans where that's our natural default motive communication.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And even as we've accumulated more digital tools,
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: pervasively, during the pandemic, when we had more digital tools than ever before, what we didn't have was clarity in terms of how to use them.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when we don't have clarity in terms of how you use new digital tools, we default to what's familiar and what's familiar is that face-to-face interaction.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's also the most reliable way to get someone's attention.
• 6:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can snooze an email, you can snooze your slack message, you can ignore an email.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: But if you schedule the meeting and people are in the room, it's a very reliable way to hijack people's attention and get the information you need or do the thing you need.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Regardless of whether that's an efficient use of time.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: The even bigger one I think that is perhaps the hardest to change from a culture perspective is we as humans have a visibility bias, we associate visibility with value and presence with productivity.
• 7:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when we think about collaboration in general, it's typically invisible.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: These acts of collaboration that we do for most of the day are invisible outside of meetings.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: In meetings, it's highly visible.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Often we can see the packed calendar
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can see whether someone's double booked.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can see them in the conference room.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can sometimes see the Zoom window.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they're this very visible form of communication, such that we see a busy calendar.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And our association is, that person is busy, that person is important, that person must have high status within the organization.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: In organizations where in particular, there's a lack of clarity.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: don't know what their response will for, how their work connects to company goals, a meeting becomes this way to show that you're doing something.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Perhaps nothing meaningful has happened in the meeting, but at least you've sat there, you have evidence on your calendar, and there's perceived progress being made.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a big reason why we continue to have these bloated
• 8:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: They symbol productivity in a way that can sometimes be easy as clicking a button and yet often this perceived productivity is highly, highly dysfunctional.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the reasons why I really love what you're pointing to here because it's so tied with our identity, being in meetings, being productive, and that's not, you know, being in a meeting is not the same thing as actually being productive or getting things done.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's why this topic fascinates me and also that we just kind of habituate,
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: around that we have to do meetings.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's now become part of our identity and status, and it's as if the meetings are happening to us.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So is that something you recognize as well?
• 9:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Absolutely.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's a fear of missing out if you're not in an important meeting.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's, if we think about how would we feel if our calendar was bare, you know, we'd be worried regardless of who you are in the organization, because it doesn't symbol that progress is being made.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And often it's this perception that we feel that others feel, you know, if I, if I see someone's packed calendar, I have a different
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: default association of them, then if it's the reverse, and it's a dangerous, dangerous perception game because it incentivizes the wrong behaviors, it incentivizes
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, outputs versus outcomes.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: It incentivizes time, spent in meetings, versus time on meaningful work.
• 10:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's dangerous, it's harmful.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And especially so, because we spend so much time in meetings, this isn't an activity we do once a week.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an activity that most people are doing every day for several hours.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So before we look at inside a meeting, how we could improve it, I wonder if you could just speak a little bit about actually doing meetings, so the cadence of meetings or having space in the calendar, like how can we start to think about that in a way that can free us from those habituated relationships we have,
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's a chapter in the book on rhythm and how important the rhythm of our meetings are.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: because when we think about us as humans, we're hardwired for rhythm, right?
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: The way we talk, the way we walk, our heartbeat, our brainwaves, they all follow a natural rhythm, and yet for some reason, and again, there are a lot of them meetings or something that we stuff into the calendar where there's an open space.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: We default to every Tuesday or every other Tuesday.
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we don't think strategically about the rhythm of our meetings.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think when we are taking a new lens in terms of applying rhythm, there are several different rhythms that we should be considering.
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is the strategic rhythm of our organization.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: There is
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: what our fiscal calendar looks like, how we set goals, and our meetings should be designed in service of those goals.
• 12:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So when we think about quarterly business reviews or annual planning sessions, right?
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are ways that we can structure those meetings in particular to harness the power of rhythm that is so innate to humans.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: The other one is the operational rhythm within your organization and the tactical rhythm within your organization.
• 12:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So thinking about what are the projects that are mission critical for your organization?
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And often, I'll see teams naturally default to scheduling that weekly project check-in or the weekly project meeting when we know from the research,
• 12:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are some parts within the life cycle of a project or the life cycle of a team that matter disproportionately more than others.
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should be optimizing our meetings to take advantage of those specific
• 13:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: points and harnessing the natural energy that comes with them, rather than defaulting to this cadence that probably doesn't make sense for most of our projects.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite examples is the midpoint of our project.
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we know from fascinating research dating back years and years and years that whether your project lasts six days or six weeks or six months, the halfway point.
• 13:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: and the deadline, it has this weird psychological power, such that abundance turns to scarcity.
• 13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've used up half the time, and because of that, you see this natural drop of energy happen in teams.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: If we can schedule a meeting to take advantage of that burst of energy exactly at the midpoint, we're harnessing something pretty powerful that wouldn't have the same power if we were
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: and so recognizing that, you know, all timing isn't equal.
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: and thinking about rhythm as something we strategically design.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: This has to do with the day-to-day as well, building in meeting blocks or no meeting days overwhelming evidence to suggest that that could be very effective in reducing our overload overwhelmed and helping us show up to the next meeting more ready to contribute and re-value from it.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask you in a moment about how one of the steps to refresh our relationship to meetings and you've talked about, I've got in the name, but the kind of doomsday clear all the meetings.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I just, this question actually just comes to me with, it was like,
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: is there evidence saying that the amount of meetings you do is a team makes you more effective?
• 15:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is that metric that actually is more revealing to what a effective team is and what's the relationship to meetings and being an effective team?
• 15:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we know that our relationship to meetings in
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: whether meetings are effective for us as individuals, that is a significant driver of employee engagement and as a bright product, organizational performance.
• 15:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: What we have less clarity on is what is the ideal mix.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think part of that lack of clarity is driven by the fact that it's so dependent on the organization, the industry, whether you're customer facing, whether you're a manager, whether you're an executive, an individual contributor.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's interesting research that I cite in the book from a company called Work Litics who I've done some work with over the years and what they see is on average a sort of threshold happens at 10 hours per week in meetings.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So once you get above that threshold, which many people are living and breathing every week, once you get above 10 hours per week, a whole host of different
• 16:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: come in, you know, focus time declines, your engagement declines.
• 16:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, 10 hours per week can be a benchmark, you know, on average.
• 16:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But again, it's so dependent on who we are in the organization.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's important to understand our priorities as well.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And think about.
• 16:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, what are our priorities as a leader, as a team, as an organization, and does our calendar reflect that?
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So often, I'll have, you know, leader is, and I say to example of in the book of how to think through this, you know, map out your priorities, and map out the time you should be spending, the proportion of your time you should be spending,
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: on each activity, strategy, customer relationship, team development, personal growth, and look at your calendar and categorize how you're spending your time according to how it says you are on your calendar because those are your real priorities and usually there's a massive disconnect.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beautiful.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we can, yeah, we can kind of take an inventory basically of of the way we're spending
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that actually does tear that question a little bit then of, you know, like, like we're articulating a lot of people are just in these meetings weekly, bi-weekly meetings, they're on the calendar, whether you actually need it or not, you're just showing up doing them.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, and you write about some more radical approaches to meetings and how, you know, kind of wiping agendas clean of meetings.
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Could you say a little bit of how we can play around with that and, you know, what it might reveal to us when we take a more radical approach to how we schedule.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, the premise of the book is
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: We need to treat meetings as a product.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization, and yet as we've spoken about, they're the least optimized.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Each of the seven chapters of the book walks through a product design principle.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: applied to meetings because if we are going to treat meetings like the expensive important product they are, we should be learning from the best products, the world's best products in terms of how do they delight customers?
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: How do they generate ROI?
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: and apply those same principles to meetings.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the first principle in the book is cutting your meeting debt.
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just as we have technical debt in our products, we have legacy code that builds up over time, we have shortcuts, we have half-hearted fixes where you often end a sprint and a quarter end a year, and you have all of this technical bloat in debt,
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: fix the problem.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: The same is true with our meetings.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We build up and we all feel this.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have legacy meetings on our calendar.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've forgotten why they were scheduled in the first place, but we show up.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: We go through the motions.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have to week month after a month.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: A meeting doomsday helps to clear out that meeting debt.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, despite the sort of playful name, it's a very intentional activity that you do as a team or ideally as an organization.
• 20:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: You ask employees to delete their recurring meetings for 48 hours and then they rebuild their calendars from the scratch.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: So they decide which meeting should never come back on the calendar and for the ones where there is some value
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: They think very carefully about how can we redesign these meetings for the current state of our business and our current priorities to be more valuable, so often that involves thinking about the length, the cadence, the attendees, the agenda items, and what this does is a couple of things.
• 20:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: It jolted people out of inertia and we've done the the comparison in terms of how does this compare to a meeting audit where the meetings are still on your calendar year and we all have done this in our our career surely in some shape or form where you're going meeting by meeting and deciding you know should I tweak this can I cancel this.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: often the result is you know you often decide that they still deserve to be on the calendar because they're still there.
• 21:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas meetings give you the permission and they give employees the permission and this is a significant difference from other calendar cleanses where it's top down a box comes in and leads all the recurring meetings.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is purposely not that.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: It gives employees the autonomy to make many of those decisions in terms of how to rebuild their calendar.
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It jolt some out of inertia.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It triggers what sometimes called the IKEA fact.
• 21:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know that we value things more when we build them ourselves, whether that's a IKEA desk or a newly rebuilt calendar.
• 21:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the third thing it does that's really important is it gives people that social permission to decline meetings or no longer attend them.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: We are so often we feel a psychological pressure to accept the calendar invite, keep the meeting on our calendar.
• 22:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: We feel like
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: declining the meeting is declining the person.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a very personal act, meeting doomsday helps to give you that permission in a way that makes it normal, makes it encouraged to decline these meetings that perhaps were once valuable, but no longer are in service of the current ways of working.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of this feels like it's putting people back into their sovereignty, you know, back into intentionality.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm thinking as well, like, you know, I thought of what it's like to look through my cupboard at my clothing, you know, and, you know, I want to get rid of clothing, but when I start looking through, I'm like, oh, you know, that I want this once, like three years ago, you know, I should just put it back.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know,
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I can imagine if you if you if you clean the meetings out and then you can actually see their like what what it you know what's that shirt that I need to put back on what's that what's the meeting we actually need so This is so important for me for coaching because so much of the time
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: we get habituated into certain rhythms, and that's fine, you know, because that's, you know, some kind of routine and habituation helps us to free us up, but it's, but we don't, what happens is we don't pay attention to that.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think we've inherited, and I think we've
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of ideas about what it means to be effective and productive from an industrial era, you know, and do we really need to be in an hour long meeting?
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Would it, would a 15-minute meeting actually work?
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I think playing around in this sense is just so important.
• 23:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And having control over your calendar is so important.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's the most valuable resource we have.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should be relentlessly protecting it.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And rhythm, routine is absolutely important.
• 24:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it's way more effective to think about, okay, what's that rhythm, routine of focus blocks or customer interactions?
• 24:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, map it to our business priorities
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, are largely defaults in not intentional design?
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's look inside a meeting now and, you know, you said, treat it like a product.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: How can we start to design meetings?
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, maybe, you know, I've heard you speak about this as well.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: How do we know when it's like worthwhile meeting, you know, like what constitutes?
• 24:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is, hey, we shouldn't be around this and, and then how can we design meetings so that they are productive, effective, enjoyable?
• 25:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can we even use that word like, you know, so inspiring?
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they absolutely should be, and I talk in the book about how every meeting should have at least one moment of joy, which is a unique combination of delay and surprise, because if we do use meetings properly,
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: be highly, highly human, right?
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: If we can do something outside of the meeting, often this comes in the form of information exchange, right?
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should move everything that's not a human a human connection and touch point.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: outside of the meeting and use the meeting time for those uniquely human things that do require synchronous interaction.
• 25:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so in the book I walk through a test that I call the four DCEO tests to decide whether a meeting should actually exist.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's a two-part test.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: The first part of the test is a meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide to be discussed or develop yourself or your team.
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: So many meetings will not pass that first test.
• 26:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Status updates don't pass the test.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Broadcast briefing don't pass the test.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Even brainstorm meetings don't pass that test.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a second test, so even if it does pass this first
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: for detest, it should pass the CEO test, which is a meeting should only exist if the content is complex.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So there's enough ambiguity, enough unknown unknowns where it is going to be more efficient for you to get together live in a meeting synchronously.
• 26:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: emotionally intense.
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So if you're having to navigate emotions, read emotions, your negotiating, your persuading, your delivering, or receiving hard feedback, we need to bring our empathy, our trust, our body language, often in meeting is the right mechanism to do that.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then O comes from Amazon.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So is it a one-way door decision?
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meaning, once we walk through the door,
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: to reverse course and go back the other way.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Most of our decisions are not one way door decisions.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: For the ones that are, it's usually the right move to get in a room for 15 minutes ensure that everyone's conflicts are resolved.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everyone's asking that last question that might actually lead to a pivot in the decision, that's another third check in terms of whether
• 27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's like a pretty stringent set of, you know, check points to check whether a meeting's on hold.
• 27:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I can even feel in me like the part of me that wants to say, but you know, so this is because this has been a conversation and our team, you know, who we up do updates in meetings, you know,
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes that can lead to creative strategic conversations, but sometimes it can often feel flat, you know, as if, you know,
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: there's a kind of going through the motions, like when you could just read something offline.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why I love doing this podcast because I can ask the questions for me that help me in my team.
• 28:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: What would you say to somebody who said, like, well, we're not doing any updates in meetings.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where do we do them?
• 28:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And hey, you know, on some of those updates,
• 28:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: like important, to set context for the meeting, what kinds of metrics should we share in meetings about the performance of the organization, how would you respond to some of those questions?
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's, and these are questions that we should be asking.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, sometimes the answer is not black and white, but I find often it is when we start to have these conversations amongst ourselves and with our teams.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Status updates in particular, I think, are great example, because so many status updates tend to be routine and monotonous and ones that people dread and find ineffective, largely because there's no complexity associated with them.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're reporting on something, it's often business as usual, it's often something people can self-serve outside of the meeting.
• 29:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: central source of truth, employees need clarity on where they can self-serve that information and perhaps they're getting asynchronous nudges in terms of this is the update this week.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then for any parts of the updates and often I'll find, you know, an organization's 90% of the status update can happen asynchronously in a way that is much more effective and meaningful for employees in terms of how they're spending their time, but 10% deserves to be in the live meeting and it's okay to schedule that 10 15 minute check in.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: that was once an hour long status update for those things that deserve synchronous communication.
• 30:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so if there's an update where there is a lot of ambiguity around it, there's a lot of unknown unknowns.
• 30:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've seen revenue numbers, nose dive, and no one sure exactly why, and you've done the context work to try to understand it and that real-time discussion is going to be valuable.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you're celebrating someone, you know, you've ended the the quarter and you've hit all your numbers or your goals.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: That warrants a live in person meeting often because it's emotionally intense.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're celebrating someone, you're commending them.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a highly human human activity that it does pass that E on the CEO test.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, the one-way door decisions where, you know, we've seen something in the number is that is now
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: causing us to explore a completely new product line or a fundamental company pivot, right?
• 31:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's when we bring those status updates into the live meeting for discussion.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the live time, that expensive synchronous time, shouldn't be spent on the things that are not complex, not emotionally intense and not riskier high stakes.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And usually status updates, because they're routine norm within our organization, often they default into those categories.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So finding an asynchronous method of updating on status updates.
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know, like, loom or how do you recommend doing those dates?
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Loom is great.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I currently work at Glean, so all of my status updates come through the platform all query the platform.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it will give me a status updates.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: My team members will do the same.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Previously, I worked at Asana.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: We had a similar mechanism within the tool, where
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, increasingly with AI, the AI can generate at least that first draft of the Satis update.
• 32:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: It can then, you know, go to the leader for edits and approval.
• 32:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you're sending it out through, you know, your project management tool, sometimes email, sometimes Slack.
• 32:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: But the key pit fall I find organizations often make is usually associated with status updates.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's some action item that needs to happen or some next step.
• 33:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: If that's not in a dedicated tool, if it's not in a dedicated coordination tool or project management tool or work management tool,
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: it'll get lost.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: If it's just in Slack, if it's in email, it'll get lost and it won't get done.
• 33:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: The key here is if we're going to move things to be asynchronous, which we should, we also need a mechanism to ensure it's very clear who's doing what by when and why.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there's clear accountability through technology for ensuring that action item gets done.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, again, some kind of personal accountability ritual throughout the organization, combined with how that's embedded within some kind of platform that supports things getting done.
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to like, because I'm thinking of how we were like examining our blueprint one time as a team of like, you know, the way that we,
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: react, you know, let's say the way we react and habituate around things.
• 34:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the teams is really funny.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're like, yeah, what we do, you know, if we create a handbook, because I want to the things we do is we just chuck things and slack, you know, and then kind of, that's it, you know, like, if I just put it in slack, tell a team, you know, then I've ticked it off
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we were able to laugh at our relationship with Slack and actually therefore improve like how do we want to treat Slack and not just use it as this kind of dump of everything.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's important and I want to come to this topic of asynchronous kind of platforms in a moment.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I want to stay.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I'm going to keep that thread, but I want to come back to the thing you said about in meetings themselves.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you said also brainstorming is not great in meetings.
• 35:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think for a lot of people, that's also maybe surprising.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, let's come together brainstorm what's the research or what do you think about the effectiveness of
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: brainstorming in meetings and if not in meetings where.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a great question, and again, so many of our work practices, you know, we've come to believe their normal and the right way to do things because we have these very human associations.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I find this with collaboration.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: The word collaboration has a halo effect.
• 35:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It, you know, we associate it with teamwork, we associate more with better, same with brainstorming.
• 35:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we have these mental models
• 35:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: everyone gathering around the table, sticky notes, white boards.
• 36:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, that's our model of an effective brainstorm session.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: When overwhelmingly the research points to the fact that we are more effective, we generate more ideas and more creative ones when we brainstorm independently.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes it's called brain writing.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: before coming together in a group.
• 36:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when we again go back to the four DCEO test, if we're brainstorming and doing that independently, that's going to be much more effective because we're going to minimize group think we're not going to be swayed by the loudest person in the room.
• 36:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: As a first check point brainstorming independently,
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: But once we brainstormed, and then we're ready to discuss the ideas, debate the ideas, now we've passed into the 4D CEO test, and absolutely we should be having that meeting, building off of each other's ideas, understanding these new broader perspectives that once have come to the surface had we not taken that time to brainstorm independently.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's another great example I think of, you know, a meeting, a brainstorm meeting that perhaps has a very important purpose within the organization, but perhaps we can take parts of that meeting and probably a large part of that meeting, move it to be asynchronous, and then use the live time, shorter live time for the things that are going to be more effective
• 37:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: How can we get the best of that then that time when we are together?
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe in a way, you know, it's revealed through the 40 CEO, you know, that deciding, discussing, debating, developing its complex, it's emotionally intense, it's a one-way decision.
• 38:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those are all like elements.
• 38:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And do you recommend, maybe this is contextual, it depends on what type of meeting it is,
• 38:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is there a way you would invite people to sit down and design a meeting itself like from beginning to end or
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's one of the most effective practices we can do within our organization is normalizing effective meeting design and putting it in the hands of attendees in particular.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So often, you know, there's a reason why we see the organizer of the meeting leave the meeting more satisfied than anyone else is because they've designed or haven't designed it all, but they've structured
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: meeting according to what they think is going to be best.
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should be designing the meeting for the attendees, the users of our meeting product, and because of that, we should be having these conversations, these collaborative conversations around what is the best way to design this meeting and have people co-create that.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's highly dependent on the team, the level of risk associated with what you're discussing, your asynchronous communication channels, right?
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you don't have strong asynchronous tools and norms,
• 39:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: you're going to need to have more meetings.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Whereas if you do have stronger asynchronous muscles, then your meetings will be designed in fundamentally different ways, more effective ways.
• 39:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we can't forget how heavily driven meeting norms are, based on
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: our culture as team, as organization, as industry, I do work with higher ed and oil and gas companies and very different cultures that we see and very different ways of scheduling meetings depending on the industry culture.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we need to be designing, you know, to extract the best of that and minimize the worst aspects of those cultures that tend to often lead to meeting bloat.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are some great things that you've seen make for great meetings?
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, for example, like people checking in, just sharing how they are at the start of a meeting.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: What kind of things have you seen that bring out the best of meetings?
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, fundamentally, the design, you know, if a leader and organizer of a meeting shows up and it's very clear to the attendees that that meeting has been intentionally designed.
• 40:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: they show up differently, right?
• 40:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's an act of reciprocity where you see, you know, when you've gone into a meeting, whether the organizer has taken the time to design that meeting, or they've just shown up and gone through the motions.
• 41:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you, whether very consciously or subconsciously,
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: change your behavior in meetings according to that assumption you're making.
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: The design needs to be multifaceted, it needs to consider, you know, the length of the meeting, the cadence, who's in the room, the agenda items, how you structure the agenda is very important.
• 41:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: It also needs to include measurements, right?
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: You need to be consistently as a meeting organizer, measuring whether your meetings are effective.
• 41:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there are lots of ways to do this, some much more effective than others.
• 41:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: But at a minimum, you should be asking employees after I recommend 10% of the meetings you run, was this meeting worth the time you invested, and what could I do that would improve your rating of the meeting.
• 41:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's such a simple, you know, 30 second pulse needs to be done anonymously in most cases, but it gives you valuable information that we would approach our products that we sell to customers and exactly the same way.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We would never deploy them without measuring and beta testing and AB testing, and yet we don't take that same rigor and discipline to meetings when there's so much opportunity to do so.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, again, kind of continually being and remaining intentional with our meetings.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you said, the way we prioritize our agenda for the meeting, you know, it sounds like we can do that in more or less affected ways.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So could you say something about that?
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cause I think, you know, for us that's a common way to me.
• 42:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, hey, what's our agenda today?
• 42:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why are we here?
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You get the things down.
• 42:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: You discuss through them.
• 42:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You try and, you know, get to an outcome for each point.
• 42:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, how can we relate to that?
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a great question.
• 43:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I first became fascinated by the role of agendas, reading my colleagues research, Stephen Rogelberg on on agendas and essentially there's no compelling evidence, no solid evidence that having an agenda actually improves our meetings.
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's because it's not just about having the agenda, it's about how we design it.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is one of the biggest problems that organizations succumb to is Amazon Jeff Bezos, in particular, will say, you know, it's process as a proxy.
• 43:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: We think that just doing the thing is enough, just holding the meeting, just throwing
• 43:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's not right.
• 43:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all about the design.
• 43:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know that whatever's first on the agenda list will disproportionately take up more time.
• 43:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know that if we have a trivial topic on the agenda, it's disproportionately going to take up more time because.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's easier, everyone feels safer to weigh in, whereas the riskier higher stakes topics will get less airtime.
• 44:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sometimes this is called the law of triviality.
• 44:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, we spend the more trivial a topic is, the more time we spend on it.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so thinking about, how are you designing this agenda so that in particular, every agenda item has a job to be done?
• 44:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: just as every feature of our products need to have a purpose, so should our meeting agenda items.
• 44:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of my favorite tactics is convert every single agenda item into a combination of a verb and a noun.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what that does, so instead of saying team budget, you're saying decide on the Q3 budget item, or debate this aspect of the budget, or align on this, you're being very specific in terms of what is the action, what is the job, that that,
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: agenda item needs to do in the meeting and that also gives you clarity in terms of when to move on.
• 45:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: You're not endlessly discussing the budget, you're discussing the very specific portion of it, or you're doing the specific thing in a way that often will make the meeting much more efficient.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we'll trigger, I've experienced healthy conversations in terms of if we're struggling to convert
• 45:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: probably that's an indication it can be moved asynchronously outside the meeting.
• 45:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Amazing, this is gold to me, this is gold.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are there any other ways we can think about that shift in, because I think people listening, I don't know if they're like me, but I'm listening to this and I'm like, goodness, like so many meetings feel 50% effective in terms of what they're actually intending to do.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like we,
• 46:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: things don't get fully clarified, things get opened up, but they don't get closed down.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, we're not actually moving things forward.
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're not fully clear why we're here.
• 46:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, all of this feels so empowering in terms of, yeah, you know, we have a precious,
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: finite and my of time on this earth you know and like let's just let's make that time useful and and you know if we don't need to meet we can be out doing other things that are enriching so what other things like the verb idea you just offered can help us to make meetings useful really like there's this kind of momentum that builds from
• 46:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are so many, and many of these are small everyday shifts that anyone can make.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, fixing our meetings requires, I believe, this holistic approach, and it is hard work, but some of these design tweaks that make meaningful difference are simple, and something that people can put into practice today and tomorrow.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another one, you know, thinking about the length of the meeting, often I'll encourage people to think about what my colleagues Bob sat in in Lighty Clots called the rule of HAPS.
• 47:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So pick a meeting, pick a dysfunctional meeting or a meeting that you know is not optimized, take the length and cut it in half.
• 47:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that does a couple things.
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: One, often overwhelmingly, you know, people will realize that
• 47:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: The time they originally allocated for the meeting is too long.
• 47:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Usually, you know, it can be shorter often.
• 47:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It can be the 15 minute meeting instead of the 30 minute meeting.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: We also know that meetings suffer from what's called Parkinson's Law.
• 48:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So work is going to expand to fill the time a lot.
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you give a meeting 30 minutes, probably going to take 30 minutes.
• 48:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there are lots of strategies that you can especially as the organizer put into practice.
• 48:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I studied an individual in the book who ran 27 minute meetings.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: that helped to draw to his team out of inertia.
• 48:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: People start to, again, when we're making that assumption of whether the designer of the meeting has been intentional, if you see a 27 minute meeting on your calendar, you know, the natural questions are, why isn't this 28 minutes?
• 48:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why isn't it 30 minutes?
• 48:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, there's been some level of care put in to the meeting design and not just defaulting to 30 to 60 minutes
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what our calendar says should be a meeting, thinking about, you know, can we use the rule of halves?
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's also applicable for the attendees.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So try to, you know, schedule that next meeting with half the attendees.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Probably you'll find that some of the original people in the meeting didn't need to be there.
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: The meeting moved forward, just fine.
• 49:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: And perhaps they were glad they weren't in the room.
• 49:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: The agenda item is the agenda items are in another way, you know, often you'll have ballooning agendas, can you cut down the agenda items by half and have the conversation be much more meaningful and efficient, cadence again is another is another lever we can play both in terms of, you know, moving that weekly meeting to a monthly meeting and in terms
• 49:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: getting rid of, you know, in most cases, these pre and post meetings, where there's one meeting, but it quickly, you know, becomes a three-part series in a way that, you know, usually the pre-needing work, usually the debrief, the post-meeting work, much of that cannon should be done asynchronously.
• 50:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let me, the questions are bubbling up fast.
• 50:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So something like in Holocrystia where they have this meeting structure and triage.
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what I like about it is that the triage is focused on is there a challenge?
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is there something you need to help you take a next step?
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: That you can't solve just by asking someone
• 50:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: to people or so.
• 50:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what do you think about something like that?
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because what that does is it cuts out like consensus, like endless consensus, conversation around the topic, because the owner of that triage issue is, you know, they just need to get something.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they've got what they needed, then then you can move on, you know.
• 50:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, on the one that creates efficiency, but on
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: sometimes like meetings become so brief and almost like unrelational.
• 51:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like people want that time to kind of breathe and be allowed to muse together.
• 51:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, if you can lose a bit of the humanity, someone does it.
• 51:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this again, you know, digging into in general, the more we can raise the bar for what deserves
• 51:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: in terms of being much more deliberate, making it more effortful to decide whether a meeting should exist.
• 51:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a very healthy practice in all of our organizations.
• 51:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then thinking about, I think two key questions.
• 51:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is, what is the purpose?
• 51:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is the purpose?
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is the purpose of this meeting, too?
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: develop relationships, is it to bond as a team, is it to establish the human human connection, or is it to exchange information, or to be something that is less emotionally intense?
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: And another critical question that often I'll find in more of the wholeocracy-oriented cultures that can be helpful is are you optimizing for yourself,
• 52:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: as an individual or the team in organization because often just because we can use a meeting to do something in our benefit doesn't mean we should.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in particular, usually there's a lot of things that we can self-serve in our organizations where perhaps it's more efficient for us to schedule that live meeting and have that conversation, get that piece of information, but at what cost, it's the cost of five or 10 in some cases, other attendees,
• 52:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should be thinking about the bigger picture that that systems thinking lens in terms of can I self serve information, perhaps it takes me as an individual 10% longer, but it then frees up my entire team to not only not spend the time in the meeting, but we also know that meetings tend to have and lead to.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: what my colleagues and I call meeting hangovers, where it's not just the time you spend in the meeting, it's all of the fog and, you know, inefficiency that that then triggers, especially if the meeting has been taxing,
• 53:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: because you continue to illuminate about the meeting.
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in particular, if you've sat in a meeting that hasn't been worth your time, you start to have this negative spiral where it impacts everything you do for the rest of the day, often you'll vent to your colleagues in a way that has a domino spiral effect.
• 53:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so taking that systems level view and optimizing for the team and organization versus ourselves as individuals,
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: is a really important line that we should be putting on our meetings.
• 54:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, that's why I love this topic because that's an identity shift as well.
• 54:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like inviting you into a wider sphere of concern and consideration.
• 54:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think that that kind of thought can also be applied to like Slack posts.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So in many different places, really.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like, yeah, thinking about the bigger picture.
• 54:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's, you know, that's a hallmark of great asynchronous communication is are you spending more time thinking about how other people are interpreting the message versus what you want to get out?
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: is efficient versus are you structuring the communication for efficiency in terms of how you're pushing that message or broadcasting, you know, push and pull and designing for the audience, designing for the attendee because if you don't, you're going to have more and more meetings to resolve the low context that you've transmitted through that interaction.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: high-context really important, strong written communication, you know, oversharing, transparency, all of these aspects of our communication culture matter significantly in terms of, are we not just using the tools, but are we using them in a way that then allows us to spend less time in these expensive meetings.
• 55:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's a good segue into the asynchronous kind of relationship, that relationship between being together and the asynchronous.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you said this already in our conversation that if you're going to be intentional and design meetings and not just go for emotions and
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's important that you kind of clean up and kind of mature around your asynchronous communications and you've already shared a few powerful kind of ideas about how to do that.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: What's important, you know, what's important and how we approach our asynchronous
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: platforms because, you know, just before you named this so well, it's like, before you know it, you've got slack, but then you've got, you know, Monday, you've got Zoom, you've got, and there's a, you know, it can get unwieldly, you know, and it can feel overwhelming.
• 56:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, again, there, there's so many strategies that are effective and that we should consider to be non-negotiable
• 57:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: that the first step in many cases is clearly outlining for your employees.
• 57:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is our core communication stack as an organization, recognizing that individual teams will always need purpose-built functions, specific tools.
• 57:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: But what is that standard text stack that we're using to communicate coordinate and collaborate as an organization?
• 57:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Outlining that, making it explicit, what is email used for?
• 57:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is the expected response time?
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is Slack used for?
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: When would I use Slack over email?
• 57:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is the expected time for responding to a Slack message?
• 57:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: If we don't have that clarity, people associate urgency with importance, they start to, you know, become lazy in terms of where they're putting information and likewise for meetings and often a great good check is ask five of your team members or five of your employees, what deserves to be a meeting in our organization.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you're getting more than one different answer, you know, probably there is room for improvement in terms of how you're structuring and communicating that communication system to your employees, having that clarity and sharing that you're not using Slack for decision-making or action items, it's not designed for that.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's designed for quick, rapid communication that requires an urgent response that often you don't need to then follow up on after the fact.
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Remote first companies tend to do this very well and you'll go into and I've had the privilege of studying many of the greatest remote first companies and
• 58:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is crystal clear what the purpose of these tools are for.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they'll say explicitly, you should be treating slack like a digital water cooler.
• 59:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Once you say something at the physical water cooler, you're not going back to the water cooler and retrieving that.
• 59:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It happens in the moment we should be approaching slack with a similar mental model.
• 59:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Often it has a very important place in organizations.
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that place that role needs to be clear or routes we're going to get into the situation where we're spending our days scavengering for information and resolving duplicative information in multiple places.
• 59:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: That clarity is really important.
• 59:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Leadership is critical.
• 59:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Leaders living that, you know, leader is following
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: The structure of the communication system, the written communication system is very important communicating with high context, you know, if you're putting an emoji.
• 59:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: in a chat message or an email and it's ambiguous, put in brackets, you know, this is what I mean by this and be very explicit because digital communication opens up much more ambiguity in general than than the face to face because you can ask the follow up in a much easier way than the virtual communication, we should be indexing on
• 1:00:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: high-clarity, high-contacts, specify the due date, specify the why, link to the documentation, even if we know what ourselves is the transmitter of information, thinking about is the recipient likely to have that same context that I do.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:00:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very powerful.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I remember getting taught about, you know, with emailing, you know, that my email can reduce the amount of emails we need to exchange by.
• 1:00:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're being very precise about the information I need to include in there that they've got there so that there's only one response needed or maybe no response.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, you know, that's a really great.
• 1:00:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: measure of, you know, not having to expand more and more emaily.
• 1:01:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what needs to complement something like Slack so that you, you know, I guess that this is familiar, you know, in Slack, sometimes it's like, where was that, um,
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: post with, you know, the seven principles that we decided upon, you know, and I'm like scrolling back through, what do we need to complement with Slack in order that we, you know,
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's often helpful, I find, to think about communication and coordination collaboration in those buckets.
• 1:01:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so what are the tools that you are going to invest in as a team, as an organization, that are aimed at communication, right?
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's a mechanism to
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: transmit information.
• 1:01:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Slack falls into that category, email falls into that category.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Fundamentally, you know, our phone, text message, all of these things are fundamentally about information exchange.
• 1:02:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: We should decide which ones we're going to use and commit to those for the purpose of communication.
• 1:02:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: You also need tools where they're enabling collaboration.
• 1:02:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: So this is activity that requires that back and forth, there's a lot of interdependence.
• 1:02:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can't modularly break out the process.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: It needs to require that synchronous real-time interaction.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Meetings are one of those, but there are others as well that we should be investing in, you know, tools.
• 1:02:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Figma for design or Google Docs for example, you know, these platforms that enable two or more people, it's, you know, multiplayer mode to coordinate or to collaborate synchronously and at real time.
• 1:02:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the third bucket, which is often the bucket that I find organizations don't appreciate enough is that coordination bucket.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So what is the tool?
• 1:03:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is the platform that you're using to coordinate work?
• 1:03:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Who's doing what?
• 1:03:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: By when?
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why?
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: How?
• 1:03:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: All of the the question, the context behind that often, you know, I worked at a sauna for for many years.
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm a.
• 1:03:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: massive fan of the platform in terms of that coordination layer within organizations.
• 1:03:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Everyone is very clear in terms of who's doing by one and why and how.
• 1:03:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: There are lots of other platforms as well.
• 1:03:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, Microsoft has a suite of tools, Trello for dev teams.
• 1:03:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Something that it's very clear, what is the status of work and what am I responsible for in that larger picture?
• 1:03:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, sometimes it's team dependent, but there should be some organizational default where regardless, and I'll often use this test, if you're a marketer and you're an engineer, you should be using the same platform,
• 1:04:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: if nothing else than by integrations to coordinate work because our most important work within organizations is cross-functional and yet we often invest in our tools in silos in a way that doesn't set us up for this very important critical mission critical cross-functional work that is at the core of our best products and services.
• 1:04:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this is like a kind of crash course MBA in operationalizing meetings, but how do we get things done?
• 1:04:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's so rich this conversation.
• 1:04:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to ask like three more questions.
• 1:04:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is about, as I'm hearing you speak,
• 1:04:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is what comes up for me.
• 1:04:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is like being designing meetings, so I can imagine that there's like two sides to that.
• 1:05:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is it could take quite a lot of bandwidth to keep designing meetings.
• 1:05:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So is there a way that we
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, on the one hand we, it's, it's, it's both like we're actually designing redesigning our cadence of meetings.
• 1:05:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we don't need to keep redesigning those, but there's a certain, we've refreshed the intentionality, the structure, so it's useful.
• 1:05:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, and then on the other hand, no, there are, there are memes that are like, we'll have to design because they're coming round and they're unique or, uh, you know, so they'll be kind of both.
• 1:05:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll have to get good at codifying what, the process of important meetings and then also good at kind of designing regularly meetings.
• 1:05:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: If that makes sense to you, I'm not sure if I'm explaining it completely clear, but no, it, it makes a lot of sense and it's, it's very important.
• 1:06:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is why I think,
• 1:06:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: The more we can each see our role in the organization, regardless of whether we lead any meetings, regardless of whether we're at the top of the word chart or the bottom, we all have a responsibility to design better meetings.
• 1:06:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's why, you know, I truly believe the most high leverage thing an organization can do right now.
• 1:06:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: especially when we're seeing AI maker meetings worse, more than better, is invest in that training around good meeting design.
• 1:06:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because if you have an employee base who knows how to call out a bad meeting and regardless of their power knows how to steer a bad meeting back on
• 1:06:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: develop this culture where it's not just you as having the onus for designing better meetings, you have a whole group of people who can poke holes in our encouraged to poke holes in question, you know, this meeting.
• 1:07:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: probably isn't worth the time we're investing in.
• 1:07:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: That type of culture, healthy, you know, callouts of great meeting design is so important in having this be something that is just part of our culture and not a hugely taxing effort.
• 1:07:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: The most important aspect of design is what happens in those early stages of the recurring meetings in particular, just because
• 1:07:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: they take up most of our time, and so if we're going to invest our time and effort into designing meetings, we should focus on those recurring meetings when we're designing at the onset, one on one meetings between managers and individual contributors are arguably the most important.
• 1:07:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: in terms of how we design them, there's nothing more important than having that check point and a well design checkpoint between the manager and the individual contributor.
• 1:08:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: But once you've been reasonably intentional about designing the meeting at the onset, then you can start to use these metrics through both the meeting technology and through asking employees after, you know,
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: real time feedback in terms of is this meeting valuable.
• 1:08:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: You start to get into a cadence where, you know,
• 1:08:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: If everything is going well, you should be seeing that the ratings are high time and time again.
• 1:08:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then making a commitment to every January, every February, we're gonna do that meeting doomsday because even if we have been intentional about designing the meetings, our business has changed so much in a way that we don't often appreciate the small things that change that add up to the bigger things that often,
• 1:09:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: do warrant a new meeting or warns that the old one is taking off the calendar.
• 1:09:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I think it's the design at front of the recurring meetings.
• 1:09:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's the awareness and education and permission for everyone in your organization to steer bad meetings on track or call out bad meetings and design better ones.
• 1:09:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then it's the annual or every six month commitment to clearing the slate
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know that our business has changed so quickly.
• 1:09:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's wanted to do that type of research.
• 1:09:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You just kind of alluded to my second question, which is AI coming in and you said actually, I think there's evidence that it's making meetings worse.
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Could you say, how can we use AI in meetings to actually make them better?
• 1:10:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's it's something that I worry a lot about and the evidence is still very early.
• 1:10:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: The research is very early in terms of exactly how AI is is transforming our meetings.
• 1:10:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: but we're experiencing, again, a lot of the negative ways we approach meetings become amplified with AI.
• 1:10:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in particular, you know, if we have a culture where showing up to the meeting is enough, you know, we're in that checkbox culture, the productivity
• 1:10:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: AI makes ideas even easier because we can send our note-taker bot to the meeting, we can not show up ourselves, we can multitask our way through the meeting because we know the transcript is coming at the end of the meeting, even though we're probably not going to read it.
• 1:10:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so this cognitive offloading often becomes both more tempting and more dangerous when AI is brought into the room.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: We talked earlier about optimizing for yourself versus optimizing for other people.
• 1:11:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a classic example of this where, you know, I'm going to bring my AI note-taker bot to the meeting because it's more efficient for me, you know, Joe is also going to bring his and Sally's going to bring hers.
• 1:11:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we have three very distracting bots that crowd out the real humans in the room.
• 1:11:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: We have slightly different versions of reality at the end of the meeting.
• 1:11:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're not sure where the source of truth is.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: getting three different transcripts.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a sign that you haven't designed the meeting because if you had the organizer just as they should with the human attendees should figure out what is the role for AI to play and if it is to capture notes which can be a very healthy role for AI to play there should be only one AI.
• 1:11:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: doing that activity.
• 1:11:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It shouldn't be everyone optimizing for themselves.
• 1:12:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: It should be this holistic systems level view.
• 1:12:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I'm very excited about several aspects of AI that can improve our meetings in a particular
• 1:12:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: the measurement aspect.
• 1:12:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's fascinating and I've worked with several organizations who are leaps and bounds ahead in terms of thinking very carefully about what are those aspects of meetings that we've never been able to measure before, but reliably predict team outcomes and team performance,
• 1:12:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: the diversity of the words you're using in the meeting, to measuring air time, to measuring engagement levels, to measuring your charisma in the meeting.
• 1:12:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, this never should be about surveillance.
• 1:12:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: It should never be about policing, when making sure that the people are speaking out or they're speaking too much and calling out that behavior, what we're starting to see in the research is that visibility into meeting behavior.
• 1:13:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: encourages, in some cases, not at all, but in some cases that I think we should learn from.
• 1:13:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It encourages people to self-police and self-correct bad, needing behavior if they're seeing that they as the meeting organizer are
• 1:13:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: consuming 70% of the airtime in the meeting or the women in the room are speaking for 20% of the time versus 80% or 90% of their meetings are starting late because people aren't showing up on time and probably because they're not considering the meeting to be important.
• 1:13:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: All of these signals we can piece together in a way that if we do it intentionally,
• 1:13:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: we can become much more data driven about understanding how to design meetings and start to quickly course correct.
• 1:14:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And again, with the precision, we would approach product development design our meetings.
• 1:14:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that's very, very exciting.
• 1:14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mm, amazing.
• 1:14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, also I found taking a high end,
• 1:14:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: having it's like a look at several meetings in a row and give feedback on the meetings, both in terms of how it went, but also take a meta view on the strategic content that's being discussed in order to offer like themes is very powerful.
• 1:14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course to be always
• 1:14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: kind of mindfully related to, as you're describing, but at the same time it's thrilling to see the possibilities that emerge.
• 1:14:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: And everything we've spoken about today, Joel, you know, the...
• 1:14:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: The 4DCO test, the verb noun agenda items, all of these things we can have AI, give us insight into if we're following these practices.
• 1:15:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I ran a meeting master class last week and had the group use AI with a detailed prompt to
• 1:15:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: identify the most dysfunctional meeting on the calendar, given the principles we had talked about.
• 1:15:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And hey, I is remarkably well-suited for that type of task where often we'll have the human biases.
• 1:15:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: But if you have a good sense of the great meeting design principles and how meetings are structured in your organization or ought to be structured, AI can give you some nudges in terms of pointing you
• 1:15:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: don't align with the principles that don't follow the rules, that don't follow the expected norms, and pretty quickly, you can start to re-jigger your calendar so that your designing meetings to be much more effective.
• 1:15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The final question I want to ask you, let me see if I can formulate it.
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a mixture of things bubbling up.
• 1:16:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is,
• 1:16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: something we talked about in our team was inspiration in the meeting, you know, so as a kind of almost heuristic.
• 1:16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when are we going through the motions and when is that sense of inspiration kind of coming through what we're exploring together?
• 1:16:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because it feels like that is in a sense
• 1:16:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: If we are coming from our inspiration, if we're tapping into it, the ideas have a different feeling, what we just saw, the decisions are different, and that's a competitive edge.
• 1:16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I wonder about designing in for that.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also,
• 1:16:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: how to design for serendipity or emergence.
• 1:17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes the best things that break through you know, maybe it's like, maybe it's like,
• 1:17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: not falling into a trap of like over-designing, feeling like now I need to make everything work efficiently and better, which actually could maybe have a kind of suffocating effect.
• 1:17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, maybe it's like what's a more like radical ways you've seen people hold meetings or a forward space for emergency or this idea of inspiration that I just brought in.
• 1:17:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's so insightful and you know, I'll often say the purpose of making our meetings more efficient is to create space.
• 1:17:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I learned this from my colleague Bob Sutton and long-time mentor.
• 1:17:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the purpose of that is to make space for the things in work and life that shouldn't be highly efficient.
• 1:17:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: And creativity and inspiration, that's one of those two of those things where
• 1:18:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: We know that inefficiency is part of the project, is part of the magic, and we're starting to see evidence this is why AI can be dangerous in terms of when you inject it into the creative process, because often we'll strip away that wrestling of the idea, the inefficiency, and
• 1:18:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: you know, working through an activity where we know that that labor of love, that wrestling and pushing through is part of the creative process.
• 1:18:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so thinking about, you know, how are we designing meetings to ensure that we're not losing the best parts of humanity?
• 1:18:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: in terms of inspiring our teams being creative, being innovative in your best meaning ever.
• 1:18:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: I walk through several different aspects that I think are important in thinking about this aspect of design.
• 1:19:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Walking meetings can be, you know, very beneficial.
• 1:19:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's overwhelming evidence that walking meetings encourage
• 1:19:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: cognitive wandering, we're, you know, looking at our stride, we're looking at our colleague stride, we're looking at the tree, that type of cognitive wandering often will lead to more creative innovative outputs and outcomes.
• 1:19:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: the design of the meeting room.
• 1:19:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I talk about plants.
• 1:19:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I talk about the color of the walls.
• 1:19:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I talk about the lighting.
• 1:19:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: All of these things often seem trivial, but they absolutely matter, and we need to think about, okay, how are we creating space for these great inspirational innovative outcomes?
• 1:19:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of the ways we
• 1:19:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: is designing the physical environment, fascinating research on, you know, why certain colors make a difference, why natural lighting makes a difference, why the shape of the table makes a difference, seemingly trivial, but, you know, consistently the research points to the value of that.
• 1:20:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Another really great hallmark of effective teams is they recognize when they are creative.
• 1:20:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they recognize that within all of our day-to-day work, sometimes it's every day, sometimes it's every week, sometimes it's once a quarter, we have these natural bursts of energy where in the best cases, people come together often spontaneously,
• 1:20:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: with that activity, that idea they've thought of last night or the idea that is surface through a lunchtime conversation, and they're intentional about blocking off parts of their calendar to harness that serendipity.
• 1:20:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: It might be a formal meeting, it might be a block on the calendar,
• 1:21:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: But we know sometimes it's called burstiness, where creative teams will operate in bursts, they actually don't collaborate at consistent.
• 1:21:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: paces through the day, through the week, through the month, the highly effective creative teams in particular will collaborate in these bursts where they have high intensity interaction followed by long periods of deep focus work.
• 1:21:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: And if our calendars aren't designed to enable that, if we don't have the space for the bursty time and then the space for the post bursty time with
• 1:21:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, we're not going to get those creative outputs and outcomes.
• 1:21:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: So thinking about, you know, is your calendar designed to enable spontaneous collaboration outside of needing time?
• 1:21:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Is I think a practice in particular for creative teams that matters a lot?
• 1:22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: really inspiring.
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we're kind of we're coming to the end of our time and I just want to share like this is incredibly rich.
• 1:22:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like the conversation for me has been it's like looking at your book reading your book.
• 1:22:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's so many ideas in here that are
• 1:22:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: both revealing and reveal that habituated kind of relationship we can have with meetings and how we can change that.
• 1:22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's such a core part of how we work together.
• 1:22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think this conversation should be like listening
• 1:22:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know people coming into organizations for people leading teams so I just want to thank you Rebecca for for being so generous and coming on today.
• 1:22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a really great conversation.
• 1:22:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you for having me.
• 1:22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been a great conversation and I believe in it and I think there's you know, one of the aspects we didn't talk about was just how valuable this can be for you as an individual in, you know, holding a meeting, attending a meeting is an act of leadership and
• 1:23:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think often we don't appreciate how much that can move, not just our teams forward, but our individual careers and people recognize a great meeting leader because they're few and far between right now and that can give you such a competitive advantage in your career now and certainly in the future.
• 1:23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, beautiful topic.
• 1:23:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe that's telling us a part two at some point.
• 1:23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
• 1:23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, where can we find out more about the book and your work?
• 1:23:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the book is is on Amazon, as well as all your favorite bookstores.
• 1:23:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: My website is Rebeccahine.com and I'm on LinkedIn as well.
• 1:23:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Awesome.
• 1:23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, thanks again Rebecca.
• 1:23:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you so much for having me, Joel.
• 1:23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here we are, we're at the end of the podcast.
• 1:24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just a heads up again, if you're not on our mailing list and you want to stay in the loop about other things we create, then head to coachesrizing.com, put your name in the sign up box there.
• 1:24:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'll also find some of our other offerings, our online trainings for coaches there.
• 1:24:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And just want to end by wishing you well, and I'll see you again next time.