Modern Meeting Standard

The Aeron is the bestselling office chair of all time. Though when it was first designed, people inside the organization hated it, outside designers thought it was hideous, and facility managers who make the bulk purchasing decisions were disgusted by it. But someone gave it the green light anyway. That person was a tastemaker.

Most of us are tasters. We know what we like and what we don’t like. But as Malcolm Gladwell explains in Blink, our preferences are highly unstable particularly when what we’re evaluating is potentially revolutionary or game changing. We just don’t have the vocabulary to describe something that’s so different, and so it’s easy to label it as ugly or weird. What we don’t realize is that not long after, under different circumstances, we’ll love it.

So what does this mean? Our own initial gut preferences, our “taste” is often an unreliable indicator of success. That’s why we’re in awe of taste “makers”. They seem to have the uncanny ability to sense, not how something tastes right now, but how it will taste in the future, in a world where preferences inevitably evolve.

But is taste-making skill or simply bravado? Hard to say, but one thing’s for sure, if we want game changing innovations, we need it.

Every now and then, at the meeting to determine whether the project gets the green light or not, someone has to stand up and say, “It’s different, but I can see how it might work. We should try it.”

Someone has to have the guts to be a tastemaker.

If not you might be missing the greatest opportunity of all: the chance to give the market something they never knew they wanted, something even you never knew you wanted.

For the longest time, the meeting has been a tool for communication and decision making. No more.

The Modern Meeting serves two very different functions.

Here’s a speech I recently gave at the Association of Fundraising Professionals Conference in Vancouver (brought to you by 12 Gurus Charity) where I explain what those two new functions are:

If you can’t see the video above, click HERE to watch.

(side note for hockey fans: I spoke on the same stage as Wayne Gretzky!)

When people don’t read your memos, it’s not because they don’t like you, it’s because your writing is dreadful.

In a world of text messages, tweets, and eom e-mails, our standard for reading anything longer than three sentences has gone way up. Here is a hodgepodge of tips that might help:

1. First, focus solely on creation. Get all your thoughts onto a page in their most primitive form (I know of no better tool than freewriting for this). Organize those thoughts into a first draft.
2. Editing isn’t next, rewriting is. Your first try will almost never be as good as your second. If a memo is worth writing, it’s worth rewriting at least once.
3. Now edit. Eliminate every unnecessary word, sentence, or paragraph. Check for spelling and typo errors. Have someone else edit your work too if possible.
4. Use only one space after periods. If you’re still using two, people might be secretly making fun of you behind your back.
5. Formatting is astonishingly important. If you pack everything together as tightly as possible, people won’t read. White space is your friend.
6. Don’t be afraid to bold key information or highlight the call to action. Make it as easy for the reader as possible.
7. People love numbered lists and bullet points. Don’t you?
8. Don’t try to build suspense or take people on an emotional journey. This isn’t creative writing. Get to the point as quickly as possible.
9. Summaries and appendices are great because they give people the option to read less or more, respectively.
10. Could this be better done with recorded video or audio? Voice over slides is another viable option. Have the courage to ask this question right before you’re about to send. Sometimes you won’t realize it until the memo is done, but just because it’s already written doesn’t mean you should send it.
11. Humor is great. Unless someone died or is getting fired, use it liberally. Joel Spolsky points out that even bad humor works. People will laugh with you or at you, either way, at least they’re still reading.
12. Diagrams and pictures are heavenly and can dramatically reduce word count.
13. Use plain informal language. Read the memo out loud to yourself. Do you talk like that? If you don’t then why are you writing like that?
14. Read a writing blog. Someone that will push you to improve your skills regularly. Jeff Goins has a good one.

What makes a book club special? Everyone’s read the book.

Members are literally on the same page, and for that reason the quality of the session goes up dramatically.

Compare the quality of Oprah Winfrey’s book club discussion with Eckhart Tolle to any author interview on Good Morning America where viewers haven’t read the book. Notice the sophistication of the questions, the energy, the level of interaction, the intensity, and the learning that takes place.

There is no comparison.

In most events, the pre-work (if there is any at all) supports the event.

But in a book club, the event supports the pre-work. I think there’s an opportunity to design more events (trainings, off-sites, conferences, etc.) around this idea.

Side Note: Thanks to the IBM Competitive Edge Book Club, open to all sales, marketing, and communication professionals at IBM, who voted my book Read This Before Our Next Meeting as their Q1 2012 selection. I’m in the extraordinary company of past winners like Marshall Goldsmith, Dan Pink, and Charlene Li.

Management for the last 100 years has largely been about preventing surprises. Verification, observation, control, have successfully reduced the likelihood of error, aberration, screw up, and failure.

But it has also reduced the likelihood of positive surprise, or what we might call innovation.

Innovation is fueled by creativity, and creativity is a destructive process. Every magnificent product, work of art, invention that you can think of at one point looked like hell.

When given the autonomy, the artist is free to embrace those low points and battle through them. That struggle is critical, because it’s the absolute lows, that make possible the absolute highs.

But what happens when we verify? Even when we take just a little peek to make sure things are on track, we risk compromising the creative process.

No artist wants someone to see their work in its worst stages. So when the artist senses an observer he can be compelled to make the lows, look not as low.

Dave Matthews has said, “Once you stop the painting and show it to someone else it no longer belongs to you.”

And to give up that ownership prematurely can corrupt the work. I think it’s the reason that some of the great artists of our time have gone into isolation, deep into the woods, or on top of a mountain to do their work. Free from even the potential of observation, they knew they could own the process.

Does this mean in organizations we should let all of our people roam free, all the time to do as they wish, without any control?

Of course not. But it should be the job of every manager, team, and organization to regularly practice getting out of one another’s way.

I call these autonomy experiments.  Even in the most command and control oriented organizations, there are countless opportunities to let people go, and find out how creative they can be. Of course you have to be willing to actively look for those opportunities.

For a long time, the cost of a negative surprise far outweighed that of a positive one. But in our new digital hyper-competitive world  where innovation is what makes us stand out and the cost of failure is dropping everywhere we look, the scales are tipping in the other direction.

Any organization who even marginally cares about innovation should be constantly pushing the limits of the autonomy. How little can we verify and how much can we trust? Answering that question is the only way to find out where the edges are.

And it’s at the edges where creativity is the strongest and innovation is the most game changing.

Malcolm Gladwell frequently points to a famous study done by Stuart Oskamp.

In the study, Oskamp organized a panel of expert psychiatrists, and had them read a short description of a patient he’d been working with. He then asked the experts to fill out a questionnaire, designed to test their ability to successfully diagnose the patient.

Next, Oskamp gave the panel two more pages of information, and had them do the questionnaire again.He repeated this process multiple times, each time giving the panel more pages of information, until finally he had divulged the entire patient file.

Here’s what was surprising: more information didn’t increase the panel’s performance on the questionnaire at all.

Here’s what was shocking: each time, before filling out the questionnaire, the panel was asked to estimate how many questions they think they’d get right. That estimate went up dramatically every time they received more information!

This phenomenon is called miscalibration.

When making decisions, we often overestimate the marginal value of extra information.

We assume that more meetings, analysis, people, case studies, reports, will lead to a better decision.

But it’s not necessarily true. And all that information comes at a cost (time, money, focus, energy).

It can be extremely difficult to catch ourselves miscalibrating, so it’s critical others call it out when they see it.

Do they? Do you?

Never receive feedback and evaluate it at the same time.

Let’s face it, when receiving feedback it’s almost impossible not to get defensive.  You’re likely to enter a heightened emotional state, where it’s extremely difficult to objectively evaluate the criticism in a rational way.

So don’t even try.

You’re only job when first receiving feedback is to understand it, and to say “Thank you.”

Don’t worry, just because you’ve listened to the feedback without causing a fuss, doesn’t mean you’ve admitted guilt or committed to any follow up action. (If you’re concerned, make this point crystal clear to the person before the feedback is given).

Later, once you’re in a calmer emotional state you can revisit the feedback, judge its merits, and make the necessary changes if you wish.

Feedback can be a highly combustible process. It’s often a major source of resentment, upset, and bad blood in organizations. It’s worth getting good at this.

The Seattle Weekly News reported that nine human feet, all still wearing shoes, washed up on the shores of British Columbia over the last five years.

It baffled police.

The phenomenon was so strange, many believed these deaths had to be connected by a single cause. There were many theories:

• There had been a recent nearby plane crash, could these feet belong to victims?
• What if the feet belonged to illegal immigrants murdered by their smugglers?
• And maybe the most dreadful possibility, was this the work of a serial killer who dismembered feet as a perverse calling card?

But none of these were true at all. After a thorough investigation it was just recently found that all individuals had died, either by committing suicide in the river, or by falling into the water accidentally.

But why the feet?

It turns out the modern sneaker is so well constructed, that it protects the foot from the deterioration that happens to the rest of the body.

Now is a good time to remember that the human brain is a pattern seeking machine. It loves connecting the dots, even when they ought not be connected.

Hats off to the Coroner’s office of British Columbia for their great investigative work, and for teaching us a valuable lesson:

When a problem perplexes us (and even when it doesn’t), ruthlessly challenge the underlying assumptions.

Opinions?

Listen primarily to the experts. People who have experience, knowledge, or skill in the area. But please don’t confuse a fancy title or big salary with expertise.

Assumptions? (when trying to challenge them)

Listen closely to the non-experts. The experts are often so used to the status quo it becomes invisible to them. The lay person sometimes has the objectivity and distance that allows them to see that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

Facts?

Listen to anyone who has them. Real facts are indisputable. It doesn’t matter who provides them, if we can establish it as a fact, the messenger doesn’t matter.

On December 8, 1987, just before President Reagan signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, he uttered these famous words:

“Trust but verify.”

To say this phrase caught on would be a gross understatement. It was everywhere, from military platoons to corporate boardrooms to t-shirts and mugs. To this day, it remains embedded in American culture.

Not terribly surprising. It sounds like the ultimate deal: benefit from all the upside that comes with trust, while limiting the potential downside through verification.

But this is a fundamental misunderstanding. Trust and verify are two completely opposite strategies.

Trust is high variance. It comes with great potential for speed and innovation, but it also increases the chance that things won’t end up the way you want.

Example: Zappos trusts their call center reps with an unlimited budget for serving customers. Reps can act much quicker, with more spontaneity and humanity this way, but every now and then they make some costly mistakes.

On the other hand, verify is a low variance strategy. It’s more expensive, it’s slower, but you retain more control and there are less surprises.

Example: Many decisions at the BBC require six levels of approval. It’s hard to make mistakes when you have that much oversight, but getting even trivial issues resolved can take extraordinary amounts of time.

The INF treaty required both the United States and Soviet Union to inspect each other’s military installations extensively to ensure both parties were honoring their agreement.

It cost both countries tremendous time, money, energy, and focus. Don’t get me wrong, considering the immense risks involved, verify was the right strategy. But don’t get it twisted, it wasn’t trust.

The reason you trust is so that you don’t have to verify.