My New Default Meeting: 15 Minutes

I had a call with a social tools vendor the other day, getting the basic lowdown on the tool, the tool’s differentiation, and his immediate plans. I asked a few questions, agreed to getting a demo in a week or two, and we said goodbye. 17 minutes had passed.

I am not the only one who is working to get back time by making meetings dramatically shorter:

Glenn Engler, 15 Is the New 60

I’m trying my best to get rid of 60 minute meetings.  They are a crutch — if you block off 60 minutes, it will probably take 60 minutes.  My regular 1-on-1s are now 30 minutes.  If we need more time, we’ll make it — but we’ve all found that focusing on 30 minutes makes them productive.  While there are a few longer meetings on the book — client-facing, or our monthly All-Hands meeting, 30 minutes are ample time for the bulk of the other ones.

But what about 15?  If you embrace the concept of tight agendas, prepared, and solutions-focused, we can go faster.  I love it tackling a 30 minute meeting in 15. We look at each other and say “anything else?”  And the answer is “no.”  We just gained back 15 minutes.

So 15 in my new normal. 

I also noticed a feature in Google Calendar settings called ‘speedy meetings’, as I was setting the default meeting length from 60 minutes to 15. It trims time at the end of longer meetings, so that a 30 minute meeting ends 5 minutes early, and so on.

Source: bostinno.com

18 January 2013 7 Permalink

Do Meetings Make Us Stupid?

Meetings really do decrease our cognitive abilities.

Attending meetings lowers IQ, makes you stupid - Rebecca Smith

Meetings make people stupid because they impair their ability to think for themselves, scientists have found.

The performance of people in IQ tests after meetings is significantly lower than if they are left on their own, with women more likely to perform worse than men.

Researchers at the Virginia Tech Crilion Research institute in the US said people’s performance dropped when they were judged against their peers.

Read Montague, who led the study, said: “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain-dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain-dead as well.

“We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ. Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”

Students from two universities with an average IQ of 126 were subsequently pitted against each other, and told how they were performing in comparison to the others after answering each question.

Researchers found that most people performed worse when they were ranked against their peers, suggesting the social situation itself affected how well they completed the IQ tests.

[…]

The study raises questions over how intelligence is measured and whether it is fixed, experts said.

Co-author Steven Quartz, professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, said: “This study tells us the idea that IQ is something we can reliably measure in isolation without considering how it interacts with social context is essentially flawed.

“Furthermore, this suggests that the idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.”

There is a growing body of evidence for social cognition, showing how tightly our reasoning is linked to social context and interactions. Obviously, learning what makes us more productive is primary, but seeing proof that some behaviors have negative impacts on our reasoning — like small-group competition of the sort that can occur in meetings — means that we should be reorganizing work to minimize those effects.

Source: independent.ie

27 November 2012 17 Permalink

Shooting From The Hip Is Not Strategic Thinking

I read this piece by Liz Webber, and I thought about so many terrible meetings in the earlier part of my career. Why are meetings generally of low value? One reason is that executives aren’t really prepared for them, and they wing it:

Leaders Need to Learn to Think So They Can Speak the Truth Clearly by Liz Weber | Switch and Shift:

I’ve observed far too many staff meetings and planning sessions in which the leaders ramble on about the teams’ failings, lecture individual employees, or otherwise berate the teams on theoretical, non-specific changes needed. Are their comments interesting? Somewhat. Helpful? No. Demoralizing? Absolutely. So why do leaders continue to do it?  From my perspective:  it’s habit; it’s quick; and most importantly, it doesn’t require any work or change by the leaders. The leaders spew and the employees are expected to react.

Here’s the real problem though, in these situations, the leaders aren’t viewing their responsibilities correctly.

The leaders in these circumstances view the employees as pawns, workers, doers or some other beings that work to produce the organization’s services or widgets. The leaders lead; the doers do. That’s fine in theory, but if leaders truly want doers to “do” at a higher level, the leaders need to learn to lead at higher levels as well. And, that takes time, work, and changes on the part of the leaders first. And that requires the leaders to think, to analyze their current situations, to assess the various drivers of the problems, to assess their roles in creating the situations and drivers, and to assess the teams’ actions, reactions, and needed new actions.

After all of that thinking, the leaders need to develop clear ways to communicate those thoughts to their teams. It means the leaders will have thought, specifically, about what they want and need to say so it’s truly helpful to their team members.

They’re no longer just spewing ideas and words and expecting the team members to form some meaning from them. They no longer practice the behavior of: You need to figure out what I’m trying to say because I haven’t taken the time to get my thoughts and words straight before I open my mouth. 

The best leaders listen more than they talk, and when they open their mouths 90% of the time they are asking questions.

7 May 2012 1 worktalkresearch Permalink

Meetings Suck

Best finding: 9 out of 10 would rather communicate any other way than meetings.

18 October 2011 31 Permalink