Embracing the Detailed Agenda

I've said it before, and I will say it again, I am a huge fan of the Mochary Method. Whilst we have not adopted it fully yet at Write of Passage we are making great inroads and we hold dear many of the principles that it embodies.

In particular, we are meeting skeptical. This has driven the biggest increase in my productivity that I can remember (beating out Get Things Done and walking & talking to myself). I look back in horror at the way I defaulted to meetings in previous roles. An update meeting for this, a regular weekly for that, a quick 15 stand up, a 30 min touch base… and then all of a sudden my week was gone.

I shudder when I recall the unstructured rambles that many of those meetings were, standing agendas involving 10 minute updates from various teams and individuals. None of which were prepared in advance and all of which could have been a memo.

Not any more! Meetings, and in particular large meetings, are the scourge of productivity. They sap the motivation of people who want to get things done and they provide the perfect camouflage for those in the team who are content to coast. It’s easy to hide a lack of meaningful progress or contribution behind a packed calendar.?

That doesn’t mean I no longer have meetings. Actually, I still have a fair few in my diary each week but I no longer dread them. I welcome them as refreshing bursts of effective collaboration with my colleagues. They’re super smart and lovely people. It’s delightful to see their faces and solve problems with them. And that’s because of the second half of our Way of Working:

Meeting Skeptical: The biggest killer of productivity and joy at work is meeting for meeting’s sake. Meetings pull us from deep work and tether us to our screens. We want to avoid big, recurring meetings in particular. A one-hour meeting with six people is actually a six hour meeting. But when a meeting needs to happen, it needs to happen, and we make sure it happens well.

We make sure it happens well. And boy do we do that! I was delighted at the start of the year when we were trying out a new format for our sprint retro all hands meetings. Afterwards I got some detailed, thoughtful and thorough feedback from a trusted colleague based around the middle 10 minutes of the meeting not feeling like the most productive use of time. 10 minutes! Somebody in the team felt that 0.42% of their work week was not being used effectively and took the time to write some detailed thoughts on why and how it might be improved.

Six weeks later a different colleague said after the same meeting:?

Wowza, gotta say we’re really locking in and amping up how to make these Sprint calls both highly effective AND human. Such a great sendoff to close the 2 week cycle.

A lot goes into a good meeting some of our key practices are:

• Strict requirements to stick to pre-submitted agendas until AOB (if time allows).
• All agendas are linked to calendar invites for meetings. If a meeting invite doesn’t have an agenda people will decline it.
• Make time in meetings for the reading of written updates rather than reading those updates out.
• Nobody can provide an update that was not written in advance.
• Presentations should be as short as possible backed up by Loom videos or written memos where more detail is needed.
• Big meetings are precious - the leadership team will always meet for 15 minutes right before each one to sync on agenda, hand offs, focus etc.

The most important one and the one that has saved me the most time is the level of detail that needs to be included in an agenda item in advance. Our leadership team meeting each week is an hour, always a very busy hour but we cover everything. We are able to do that because 50% of items submitted are resolved by the time the meeting starts.?

This is simple to achieve. It comes down to including detail in your agenda items. Here are two examples:

“Discuss timing of cohort”

When we reach that agenda item, I would verbalise my suggestion, a discussion would ensue and we would reach an agreement. Total time spend of 3 - 5 minutes, with 4 people in the meeting equals 20 minutes of time.

Nowadays the above submission would be gently ridiculed. The comments in the Google Doc in advance: “What about the timing?”... “Which cohort?” or simply “?????”.

Imagine instead:

“Spring Flagship cohort looks like it will clash with a week that David is planning on being away. We have three options: we can pull it forwards by two weeks that would mean it would start on the XXth of XXX or we can push it back by two weeks so it would start on the XXth of XXX or we can carry on as planned and do it without David for a week.”

Comments abound and when we arrive at the meeting consensus has already been reached. We have won back time. If consensus had not been reached then we know that discussing further is a useful use of precious meeting time.

This practice really really works. When I introduced our Management System 2.0 back in January of this year, I was met with some of the expected, gentle eye rolling. Chris has a new bee in his bonnet… But, by gentle prodding, role modelling good behaviour and good natured nagging; we gradually saw adoption of detailed pre-written agendas throughout the business.

Once you lock it in, it begins to function like magic. It feels like another cheat code for doing business. So simple, yet so powerful.

Embrace the detailed agenda.