Meetings (and the importance of Show Stop)

I redden with shame when I think of some of the meetings I used to chair in a previous role. Every week we would have a selection of large group status meetings. One meeting in particular would have a standing agenda which was, basically, a series of verbal status updates from each team within my department.?

The meetings were scheduled to last an hour and had an average nine people in each of them. The cost to the company, including getting to / from the meeting room (pre-Covid of course) wouled therefor have been about 9 x 1.5 = 13.5 hours. Or more than 1.5 days of work. Total cost to the company for each meeting was around ￡800. Every. Single. Week. Add that up over a year and we’re well over ￡40,000.?

A ￡40k annual spend on something that rarely actually achieved anything.

We learn. We grow.

This is not an unusual occurrence. In fact, it’s boringly regular in almost every company.

Meetings in and of themselves are not the enemy. Bad meetings are the enemy and should be hunted down and should be sought out and squashed as such.

The single biggest productivity boost you can give to your team is to ban verbal updates. Completely. Make them absolutely verboten. Make them less socially acceptable than being the guy who’s just run his commute and wants to join the meeting in person before showering. If you give a verbal update then you will be judged just as much as Sweaty Simon (or Crimson Chris in my case) who has come stretching and perspiring into the fetid conference room.

Why? Verbal updates are disgustingly inefficient. Play out the scenario in your head. You’re all sitting around the table, 50% of people are paying 50% of attention because they all have their laptops open and it comes to your turn to give the update. You know broadly what you want to say but haven’t really prepped anything in advance because, hey, it’s just a verbal update, you can wing it right?

So it takes you about 30 seconds to get everyone focussing on you, then you start with a bit of a preamble, then Simon comes back in after his shower, so you start again, then you meander through your key updates and get to the end, then you remember the important thing that you just thought of before you got in so you add that on the end with a bit of padding to make it make sense in the flow and so it doesn’t look like you forgot it.

Time taken? About seven minutes. Multiply that by the nine people in the room and we’ve exceeded our allotted meeting time before anyone has discussed anything.

Meetings are for discussion. Discourse. Chat. Brainstorming. Problem solving. But if you follow the pattern above (and most people do) then you have zero time for that. You can also guarantee that 50% of the people would have only got 50% of what you said because, you know, laptops are out.

Please, please, for the sake of your team, just try a different approach.?

Require all status updates to be written down in a shared agenda document before the meeting. They don’t need to be works of literary art, they just need to have the content, links to further reading and any data that’s important for everyone to know.

Then, Borrow from Bezos. Carve out 10 - 15 minutes at the start of the meeting for everyone to read the updates. Do it live, either in the room or on Zoom. Encourage people to comment in the document and respond to comments. Ask people to make it clear when they are finished. If a chunk of people haven’t finished by the end of the time, extend the time. If its just one or two people then suggest that they come back and read the rest at a later date. Then use the remaining 40 minutes of your time to actually discuss what was in the updates. Agree action points. Deal with the thorny issues. Do the meeting stuff.

I promise you that after doing this two or three times (once people realise that they really won’t be allowed to give a verbal update) you will be wondering why you ever did it differently.

Show Stops

In July 2014 I was in charge of the medical cover for the pit area and crowd at The Pogues & Libertines in Hyde Park. An unfortunate fan suffered a cardiac arrest in the pit right in front of the stage in a very dense crowd. Alongside my amazing team, we saved his life. He sat up the next day in hospital.

One of the most important factors in the successful resuscitation was an effective Show Stop taking place which meant the crowd became compliant, my team could communicate more easily and we were able to complete the chain of survival.

A Show Stop in a live event situation is when the performers stop what they are doing. The music turns off and an announcement is made to inform attendees as to what is happening.

They should never be done lightly. At large events there are a lot of consequences. You interrupt peoples’ enjoyment, you might make them feel unsafe, you could end up closing late and disrupt transport away from the event and, in some instances, you could end up with sub-optimal crowd behavior.

However, failing to implement a Show Stop can, and has, have tragic consequences. Through my volunteering (and past career) I have a serious interest in crowd safety. Almost every year we hear of a tragedy at a live event which could have been mitigated by stopping the show. The most recent infamous example would be Astroworld, but these are, sadly, not rare events.

So why is it so hard? Basically, humans. Or, more formally, Human Factors. A large live music event is a complex beast. You have tens of thousands of people in attendance. You have a large event footprint. You might have unreliable comms. Abnd then… you have individuals. You have artists, you have artists management, you often have artist security who may or may not be in conflict with event security, you have drink (and other things) taken by punters and performers alike. You have noise. You have adrenaline. You have money to consider.

Knowing exactly who has the authority to order a Show Stop and them knowing in what situations they should do so is vitally important.?

If you have a relatively small event where the delivery team all know each other then this is fairly simple. In the pre-doors briefing you make it clear which individuals have Show Stop authority. At large events with big casts of performers this doesn’t work.

The best practice solution now though is pleasingly simple. Individuals who have authority and responsibility to stop the show are issued with a brightly coloured addition to their security pass which simply says “Show Stop” on it. That way, they can show it directly to anybody on site and everybody immediately knows that they need to follow the instruction. Simple. Pleasing.

To bring this back to the world of business operations, it’s very important to not only know who is responsible for making big decisions but make it abundantly clear to everybody who that person is. Decisions not only need to be done, but also, seen to be done.