You’ve been there: Monday morning, look at your calendar and feel your stomach drop like you’re on a roller coaster… only this one has no fun and just makes you feel like screaming. You might as well have a seat restraint for your desk chair because you see the next eight hours of the next five days devoured by meetings. Like MJ and the Chicago Bulls, you are going Back-to-Back-to-Back.
I worked for a company that took this problem head on with a swift and sudden blow. The tinkerer-optimizers devised the equivalent of a house fire for decluttering – an amicably named calendar bot called the Chaos Monkey cleared every employee’s calendar completely, and reduced hundreds of thousands of hours of meeting time.
The aforementioned company was very proud of this achievement.
Okay, great. Those with their finger on the Chaos Monkey button deserve credit for their resolve, much like the feeling of tossing a crate of dusty old childhood sports trophies and selling your grandparents’ crystal vases that you’ve been keeping in your basement for a decade. The Chaos Monkey flung its … banana peels … at years-worth of mindless, procedural meetings and this bold action tilted the cultural scales toward asynchronous info-sharing. Unbooked time (like newly liberated space in your basement) is a valuable commodity, and the Monkey did a valiant job at increasing its quantity.
¡BUT!
There’s a big piece missing here. I mean really, really big, like Chaos Silverback Mountain Gorilla big. While the monkey was flinging its banana peels and deleting meetings, everything became the latest fantasy of Scientific Management. The easiest thing to measure had been reduced – there were objectively fewer hours booked for meetings. But what about meeting quality? The Chaos Monkey and its aftermath heightened the company’s intolerance to meetings, but this entire thing is built on the assumption that a meeting must suck.
After many years of being a victim of meeting drudgery, I can say confidently that many meetings do suck. But also, after years of designing and leading the highest leverage hours for groups coming together, I can confidently say that meetings can be the most valuable time of a team’s week or month.
And happily, there are things you can do to make your meetings pay dividends.
We’ve all heard of investment, right? That basic idea that you can spend your money wisely, like converting your basement into a rentable apartment, or building a scale model of the solar system in your backyard… okay wait that last one isn’t a good example... but you get the idea – spend something intelligently up front, get even more in return.
Every meeting or gathering has a cost, and if the time is thoughtfully designed and well facilitated, it can be a great investment. You and your team can get far more done, build trust, feel more motivated, uncover important blindspots, and a whole whack of other important stuff.
As an executive gathering designer, thinking about this is a big part of my job. The Chaos Monkey experiment (which I observed on three different occasions over 7 years) revealed a lot about how people think about coming together. In most cases what I saw was the obvious (and lazy) response, which was shying away from meetings like rotten bananas, and even casting some lightweight aspersions on those who resorted to meetings too quickly.
Yet much like life on earth in this nauseatingly vast universe, in all the chaos there are glimmers of brightness and order. Seeing the opportunity in The Monkey’s wake, a few teams approached me, seeking to design their time together. To slide the proverbial fulcrum and get the absolute most leverage out of every minute they spend together. Meeting intelligently demands effort, but it pays dividends.
Just like Benjamin Graham, the godfather of value investing would say, there’s a world of difference between investment and gambling. You NFT-crazed folks in the back, you may not know what I’m talking about here. For the rest of us – we’re talking about investing time, not gambling with it. So a team deciding to spend an hour to shape the way they spend their next 15 hours is likely the equivalent of building that basement apartment.
This is a two-part post. Read part 2, where I get into Return On Time Spend (ROTS) and describe how I led a Shopify Engineering Leadership team through one of those meeting-design meetings (so you can steal it and make an infinite fortune).
I totally agree with your investment vs gambling analogy. In the life of every team, there’s a time for investment with a skilled and talented facilitator to get aligned and focused on where they’re heading and their priorities to get there.
They also need skills training and coaching to be able to navigate their way forward on their own.