WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
People will call new meetings or continue to have existing ones because they’re upset about a previous failure, or they fear a future one. As a result, meeting agendas get stuck in a very small part of the design process loop: considering and applying a single approach. That stagnation crowds calendars with standing meetings and leads them into standing boredom and standing confusion. To alleviate that stagnation, apply a design process to meetings with the following four steps.
1. Identify the problem that the meeting is intended to solve and research the problem before committing to a meeting.
2. Consider more than one approach to a meeting.
3. Make small changes to a meeting based on observed improvements or failures.
4. Know when the meeting has done its job and then walk away from it.
By asking these questions, you should be able to figure out when a standing meeting is a good idea and when it isn’t. Once you’re sure a meeting is going to do the trick, the next step is to take a hard look at what a meeting is composed of and start iterating and making those small changes.
We don’t reflect on our collaboration nearly enough. How could we have worked together better? How could we have gotten to this outcome sooner? What was a good use of our time? Where did it sort of drag on? We need to actually sit down and take it apart.
—JARED SPOOL MAKER OF AWESOMENESS, CENTER CENTRE AND UIE
In case it wasn’t obvious, this approach applies to any kind of meeting. It illustrates the differences between the problems a single meeting (or series of meetings) is intended to solve and the larger intentions of a project, or even an organization. It goes without saying that those intentions vary greatly based on the kind of work, the position within the organizational hierarchy, and the organizational culture. These are the constraints placed upon meetings, which are explored more extensively in the following chapters. However, before considering multiple approaches, you need to do step one, which is to understand the problem as bounded by its constraints. And there’s one constraint that all meetings share, which you’ll learn about in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 2
The Design Constraint of All Meetings
Jane is a “do it right, or I’ll do it myself” kind of person. She leads marketing, customer service, and information technology teams for a small airline that operates between islands of the Caribbean. Her work relies heavily on “reservation management system” (RMS) software, which is due for an upgrade. She convenes a Monday morning meeting to discuss an upgrade with the leadership from each of her three teams. The goal of this meeting is to identify key points for a proposal to upgrade the outdated software.
Jane begins by reviewing the new software’s advantages. She then goes around the room, engaging each team’s representatives in an open discussion. They capture how this software should alleviate current pain points; someone from marketing takes notes on a laptop, as is their tradition. The meeting lasts nearly three hours, which is a lot longer than expected, because they frequently loop back to earlier topics as people forget what was said. It concludes with a single follow-up action item: the director of each department will provide her with two lists for the upgrade proposal. First, a list of cost savings, and second, a list of timesaving outcomes. Each list is due back to Jane by the end of the week.
The first team’s list is done early but not organized clearly. The second list provides far too much detail to absorb quickly, so Jane puts their work aside to summarize later. By the end of the following Monday, there’s no list from the third team—it turns out they thought she meant the following Friday. Out of frustration, Jane calls another meeting to address the problems with the work she received, which range from “not quite right” to “not done at all.” Based on this pace, her upgrade proposal is going to be finished two weeks later than planned.
What went wrong? The plan seemed perfectly clear to Jane, but each team remembered their marching orders differently, if they remembered them at all. Jane could have a meeting experience that helps her team form more accurate memories. But for that meeting to happen, she needs to understand where those memories are formed in her team and how to form them more clearly.
Better Meetings Make Better Memories
If people are the one ingredient that all meetings have in common, there is one design constraint they all bring: their capacity to remember the discussion. That capacity lives in the human brain.
The brain shapes everything believed to be true about the world. On the one hand, it is a powerful computer that can be trained to memorize thousands of numbers in random sequences.1 But brains are also easily deceived, swayed by illusions and pre-existing biases. Those things show up in meetings as your instincts. Instincts vary greatly based on differences in the amount and type of previous experience. The paradox of ability and deceive-ability creates a weird mix of unpredictable behavior in meetings. It’s no wonder that they feel awkward.
What is known about how memory works in the brain is constantly evolving. To cover that in even a little detail is beyond the scope of this book, so this chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive look at human memory. However, there are a few interesting theories that will help you be more strategic about how you use meetings to support forming actionable memories.
Your Memory in Meetings
The brain’s job in meetings is to accept inputs (things we see, hear, and touch) and store it as memory, and then to apply those absorbed ideas in discussion (things we say and make). See Figure 2.1.
FIGURE 2.1 The human brain has a diverse set of inputs that contribute to your memories.
Neuroscience has identified four theoretical stages of memory, which include sensory, working, intermediate, and long-term. Understanding working memory and intermediate memory is relevant to meetings, because these stages represent the most potential to turn thought into action.
Working Memory
You may be familiar with the term short-term memory. Depending on the research you read, the term working memory has replaced short-term memory in the vocabulary of neuro- and cognitive science. I’ll use the term working memory here. Designing meeting experiences to support the working memory of attendees will improve meetings.
Working memory collects around 30 seconds of the things you’ve recently heard and seen. Its storage capacity is limited, and that capacity varies among individuals. This means that not everyone in a meeting has the same capacity to store things in their working memory. You might assume that because you remember an idea mentioned within the last few minutes of a meeting, everyone else probably will as well. That is not necessarily the case.
You can accommodate variations in people’s ability to use working memory by establishing a reasonable pace of information. The pace of information is directly connected to how well aligned attendees’ working memories become. To make sure that everyone is on the same page, you should set a pace that is deliberate, consistent, and slower than your normal pace of thought.
Sometimes,