Modern Meeting Standard

Hi there. Many of you have astutely noticed that I haven’t posted on this blog in some time. That’s because I’ve been working restlessly on a new book. I’m looking forward to sharing the details in the future (might be a while), but for now, here’s a speech I recently delivered at Google’s New York office. In it, I prescribe three keystone habits designed to change your meeting culture for the better.  As I explain in the video, these habits may seem small, but each packs a powerful punch!

If you can’t see the embedded version above, you can watch the video HERE.

Training seminar, volunteer event, reality show competition, plane crash on a desert island…

From time to time, you may find yourself on a short lived ad hoc team, often with people you don’t know very well. When you do, here are four problems you’re likely to encounter:

1. No clear leader emerges. Without one, decision making is going to be difficult, design by committee is inevitable.
2. A leader emerges too soon. One premature dominant vision squashes diversity of thought.
3. The wrong leader emerges. The person who grabs the wheel isn’t necessarily the best driver.
4. The presumed leader isn’t accepted as such. Who made her boss? some might ask.

Leaders shouldn’t emerge, they should be chosen. Here’s a process.

1. Isolate. Allow everyone to spend a little time apart. Each person should write down their vision for how to complete the project.
2. Present. Have everyone come together and let those interested in being the leader, present their visions to the group
3. Elect. Formally allow people to vote for the leader they believe has the best vision.

With this process not only will you have a formal democratically elected leader, but you’ll have the visions of everyone from the group, uncorrupted by groupthink. The leader can use these ideas to adapt his plan.

Of course, it can take guts to propose a process like this. Ironically, it takes a leader.

Some of the most wonderful collaborative moments occur indirectly. If you’ve ever been in a desultory conversation with colleagues, when the perfect solution to a collective problem or the perfect arrangement for working together seemed to magically show up, you know what I’m talking about.

The appeal of indirect collaboration is obvious: it’s powerful and seemingly effortless. So it’s no surprise that anytime we need collaboration, we’re quick to engage in a passive egalitarian exchange of ideas, and hope for that collective eureka moment. The key word here: hope.

Just recently a couple of entrepreneurs asked me to a cup of coffee. They were doing work that was complementary to mine and thought if we all put our heads together, we were bound to discover an opportunity to collaborate. So we chatted about our lives, our businesses, our goals, our dreams, and waited for the collaboration to happen. But it didn’t.

And therein lies the problem with indirect collaboration, it’s not available on demand. It happens by way of serendipity and you can’t create serendipity.  The best you can do is foster it.

Steve Jobs understood this. When redesigning the Pixar Studios complex, he famously put all the bathrooms (he decided on just two) in one central space. Sure, it was inconvenient for many, but it ensured people from every corner of the organization would frequently bump into one another, fostering lots of random conversations. The chance that any one of those conversations would lead to collaboration was slim, but enough conversations, and one of them was bound to lead to the next great project.

Clay Hebert understands this too. His new platform, Spindows, allows speed video networking between people in the same organization. Spindows  randomly connects users based on a particular topic or common interest. The beauty of the service is that it allows you to do a lot of sessions in a short amount of time. The more chats, the greater the likelihood of a collaborative breakthrough

Indirect collaboration can be a worthy long term strategy but it requires foresight and patience.

If you want collaboration right now, you’re far better off going with a more direct approach. Direct collaboration doesn’t require serendipity,  just leadership. It involves one person, putting themselves on the line, risking rejection, selling their idea to others. A champion.

Sometimes we forget that this is the way collaboration usually happens. It’s effortful not effortless. It’s often messy, seldom romantic, and can sometimes lead to broken hearts and bruised egos. But it’s much more reliable.

Every single time I get caught in the rain, I curse myself for not bringing an umbrella. But do I ever learn my lesson? Fortunately, never.

Sometimes things that look like mistakes, aren’t. Instead, they’re the inevitable negative outcomes of a high variance strategy (one that you might have never known you had).

Talk to me on a rainy day, as I stand there soaking wet, and I’ll tell you that not carrying an umbrella was a mistake.

But talk to me now, as I look back in hindsight, and I’ll tell you the truth: it wasn’t. I hate carrying an umbrella, I’ve always found it an incredible nuisance. So long ago, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I must have made a decision to stop. Because although I lose on the few days when it rains, every other day when it doesn’t, and I don’t have to bring that infernal umbrella, I win.

We all have high variance strategies like this that are working just fine. Don’t let things that look like mistakes, like missing the train, buying the wrong pair of jeans, or getting burned by a colleague you trusted, fool you into thinking otherwise. Maybe you don’t need to change your strategy, maybe you just need to realize that you have one.

When an issue comes up and responsibility is ambiguous, many good employees willing and able to take charge, don’t. Why? Blowback. Act without clear authority, and others are quick to label you as reckless, political, or insubordinate. And that’s when your actions are successful. When your actions fail, run for cover.

But in a modern, fast changing world, where issues aren’t falling so neatly within the boxes of the org chart, we can’t always wait for every stakeholder to gather in a room together to sort out responsibility. Organizational agility demands a culture of initiative where individual members feel empowered to take responsibility. Perhaps organizations need their own version of a Good Samaritan Law.

In 1959, California was the first state to pass a Good Samaritan Law when several bystanders failed to assist people who were injured, likely because they feared being sued. The law attempts to prevent any hesitation to help, by protecting bystanders from legal liability (and in some cases even requiring bystanders to provide reasonable assistance). Since then, every state has adopted some form of the law.

Does the Good Samaritan Law work? It’s up for debate. Some argue the law is too ambiguous, ensuring that shrewd lawyers who are insistent on suing a Good Samaritan, will find a way. But at the very least, the law sends a strong message: we, as a community, stand by those who attempt to do the right thing, even when it leads to unintended consequences. This kind of bold stance, even if mostly symbolic, can help foster a culture of caring, initiative, and responsibility.

Maybe a Good Samaritan Policy, at least in spirit, can do the same for organizations. If leadership declares that they will stand by well-intended members who step up and lead during times of group inaction, even when it results in the occasional failure or ruffled feathers, then those well-intended members just might act more often. And hopefully a Good Samaritan Policy will encourage their colleagues to be a bit more trusting of them when they do. Because when people are genuinely quick to praise initiative, and slow to admonish it, you may realize that your organization has more Good Samaritans than you could have ever imagined.

I’m honored to be a part of an important project initiated by Erin Giles, Business Philanthropy Coach.

It’s a book called, End Sex Trafficking — a collection of 60 essays on love, knowledge + freedom by trailblazers like Seth Godin, Danielle La Porte, Jonathan Fields, and yours truly.

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More than 27 million human beings are enslaved in the world in 2012.  Stand up for freedom. 

BUY THE BOOK HERE. And then tell the world. Thanks.

Instead of writing a thoughtful memo to communicate to her staff, one executive I know calls a meeting to save herself time.

She thinks it’s a great idea. Her staff would disagree.

Let’s face it. Bosses often use the meeting as a time saving tool, largely because of a culture in organizations that encourages us to work in a way that maximizes the time of those higher up the org chart. Sure, there’s value to this approach. Your boss’ time is, as a matter of fact, comparatively expensive. It makes sense to try to preserve it for high value activities. But calling a meeting, which involves sacrificing the time of multiple other people, just to create more time for yourself is a distortion of this principle. After all, is your time really more valuable than all your meeting attendees combined?

Probably not, but still, it’s tempting for those at the highest levels of the organization to feel they’re the exception. Because in some cases, their time is exceptionally valuable. But here’s the problem with that logic: in an organization, the more valuable your time is, the more valuable the time of those you probably meet with.

Let’s look at the most extreme example: the President of the United States receives a daily briefing report every morning of the day’s security intelligence. But rather than reading the report before the daily intelligence meeting, some past presidents have chosen to be orally briefed at the meeting itself.

Now, the President’s time is arguably the most valuable time of any person in the world. If including an in-person briefing at the meeting saves him time, we shouldn’t think twice, right?

You might think so, until you realize that the people at the meeting who are doing the briefing are some of the highest ranking CIA and intelligence officials in the country. Their time is pretty darn valuable too.

That’s the fundamental problem with using the meeting as a time saving tool. The time saved is obvious. The opportunity cost is not.

 

Side note: My friend John Jantsch, bestselling author of Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine, has a great new book out called The Commitment Engine. It’s about establish lasting commitment in your employees and customers and contains fabulous advice on culture, purpose, meetings and much more. Do yourself a favor and check it out.

An organization’s culture is made up of the collective habitual behaviors and thoughts of its members. Change the habits and you’ll change the culture.

Unfortunately, it’s easier said than done. Habit change requires an incredible amount of willpower. And focusing on multiple habits simultaneously is a surefire strategy for failure. So, where to begin?

Begin with the habit that has the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as it moves through the organization. Charles Duhigg, brilliantly refers to this as the keystone habit.

When Paul O’Neil first became CEO of then struggling aluminum corporation Alcoa, he didn’t concentrate on profits, productivity, or efficiency. To the dismay of everyone around him, he decided to focus on worker safety.

Unorthodox? Yes. But Paul understood something that his colleagues didn’t: the process of improving worker safety, would create a cascading effect causing other changes: attention to detail, quality control, individual responsibility, open and honest feedback, etc. These new habits would create the culture of productivity and efficiency necessary to turn the company around. And they did, quickly making Alcoa one of the world’s most profitable companies.

So what’s your organization’s keystone habit? What habit might provide the most leverage for changing your organizational culture?

I have a suggestion: meetings. Meetings are at the heart of how organizations communicate, collaborate, and make decisions. You can’t change meetings, without affecting other habits.

When meetings are purposeful, decisions are made quickly. When unecessary meetings go away, teams are forced to trust one another more. When meetings are short, intense, and run ruthlessly on schedule, attendees walk away with a sense of urgency.

Changing your meetings might just change your entire organization.

According to the General Medical Council’s Guidance on Good Practice:

You must tell patients if an investigation or treatment might result in a serious adverse outcome, even if the likelihood is very small.

Sounds like good advice. Seems to ensure the patient makes the best decision. But does it?

Our brains aren’t designed to handle tiny probabilities. When we focus on them, our mind overestimates their significance. For example, if I told you there’s a .0001% chance you’ll die from a certain treatment, statistically you should ignore that piece of information. But you won’t. Death, after all is scary, and anything above a 0% chance of occurrence is impossible to ignore completely. This focusing illusion might steer you towards a bad decision.

So, should doctors withhold all information about extremely rare outcomes? Perhaps, but it’s a difficult question to answer, with both legal and ethical considerations.

In organizations though, where decisions aren’t normally matters of life and death, the question isn’t as difficult. The devil’s advocate, who is usually expected (and encouraged) to voice every risk imaginable, should be a bit more disciplined. She should avoid presenting a catastrophe scenario so unlikely, that the benefits of consideration are outweighed by the focusing illusion it will inevitably create for others.

Now, if you’re the devil’s advocate, reading this might make you nervous. You might think, “But what if it turns out to be the one time the rare event actually does occur?”

Take a deep breath. That’s the focusing illusion talking. It’s insidious.

“If you could please send me that report sometime soon, that would be awesome.”

Why do we say strange things like this, instead of the more direct, “Send me that report, please”?

Linguist Steven Pinker explains:

It’s a bit of a social dilemma. On the one hand, you do want the salt [in our case, the report]. On the other hand, you don’t want to boss people around lightly. So you split the difference by saying something that literally makes no sense while also conveying the message that you’re not treating them like some kind of flunky.

Unfortunately, this politness can produce unintended consequences. A one page memo turns into three. A twenty minute meeting, turns into sixty. The cumulative effect: a whole lot of wasted time and unnecessary delay.

Vineet Nayar, Chief Executive of HCL Technologies understands these costs:

So, my meetings are not polite. They are fairly blunt on both sides, and they really come down to the crux of the issues, and we are done with it pretty fast. I’ll ask right in the beginning, “What do you want?” Sometimes it’s “I need your approval.” Approved. Thirty seconds, meeting is over. Go and do what you want to do.

In the interest of speed, most of us need to learn to be blunter, when necessary. And the best way to start is to give others the permission to be blunter with you when necessary.