Meetings Are The Worst

Yet collective intelligence gives us a path to less painful, more productive meetings.?

TLDR Summary

Even after new innovations like Slack and Zoom, we still dread ineffective meetings. Collective intelligence research has identified key design principles - employed by the decision-making platform HiveWise - that directly target the main issues negatively impacting most meetings. You may never learn to love meetings, but now you can start to hate them a lot less.

Do you ever get the feeling that we still haven’t figured out how to make meetings actually work? Why do so many of them feel like a waste of time for nearly everyone involved except for (and often including) the person who called the meeting? A friend of mine refers to her weekly schedule as being dotted by little black holes that only serve to swallow time and resources.?

Obviously, this doesn’t apply to every meeting. But even in our post-pandemic work environment, after an influx of new tools such as Slack and Zoom… why are we still walking away from meetings feeling like we just lost an hour of our lives we will never get back?

One thing is clear: our current approaches simply haven’t yet addressed the most common meeting pain points. If you look across the myriad surveys available covering the top reasons why people hate meetings, those common pain points include…

• No clear agenda
• No clear conclusions or outcomes?
• Not discussing the right things?
• The same few people talking the whole time?
• People talking over each other?
• Inability to add value (due to lack of opportunity or lack of clarity on roles)
• Key stakeholders left out?

Sound familiar, right? Interestingly, these issues have a couple underlying themes - namely a lack of structure (agenda, lack of conclusions, etc) and ineffective participation (same people talking, inability to add value, etc). Yet those two themes are connected… it’s very difficult to create a space where everyone can work together effectively without good structure in place.?

Key: While Zoom and Slack are optimized for engagement, they provide very little (no) structure to ensure that this engagement is effective. This makes them very good for bringing work groups together (regardless of location), but not that great at enabling those groups to work together to efficiently solve problems. And it’s this lack of structure (and the resulting lack of effective participation) that is at the heart of each of the pain points listed above. All this adds up to more than just minor annoyances. Meetings cost your organization too much money to be missing out on opportunities to gather new ideas, identify and reduce risks, and get real buy-in from key stakeholders. To get a better understanding of the financial cost of sub-optimal meetings at your organization, check out this meeting cost calculator .?

New Mindset, New Approaches

To help facilitate a shift to more participative and valuable meeting time, researchers are highlighting new approaches - particularly in the field known as collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is the study of how humans can better work together to solve complex problems. These researchers seek to define new, effective design principles that break down the barriers to problem solving within groups of people ranging in size from 2 to 20,000+.?

One of the leading commercial platforms to come out of this space is HiveWise , which is based on the work of Mark Klein, PhD , a lead researcher at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence . With HiveWise, teams are able to work together with:

• Clear Agendas
• Collective Creativity
• Collective Analysis
• Measurable Results

Let’s walk through what a meeting is like using HiveWise.?

1. Clear Agendas: Questions, Not Topics

One key design principle of HiveWise is to focus on answering questions versus simply discussing topics. Topics are open-ended invitations for unfocused conversation. Questions, on the other hand, have a clear point - to determine the answer. Thus, setting your agenda in HiveWise is a matter of defining which questions need to be answered in that meeting.?

Some quick note on question-based agendas:?

• Many questions are too big for a single meeting and need to be broken down into smaller questions that fit the scope of the meeting. For instance a team tasked with defining a succession policy focused their kickoff meeting on the smaller question “What are the key steps we need to take to define this policy?”
• Some questions can’t be fully answered because the final decision maker isn’t present. For example, another team using HiveWise in this situation simply restated their ori question as, “Which steps should we recommend to [Decision Maker’s Name]?”
• Not all agendas need to be fully set before a meeting starts. There are many instances where the first question of the meeting should be “what are the most important questions we should answer in this meeting?” It’s hard to complain that we don’t talk about the right things if you actually help set the agenda yourself.?
• Certain agendas are repeatable, so key questions can, and should, be saved as templates. For example, a client thoughtfully developed their own approach to project retrospectives based on an Agile model. Since then, their teams are able to re-run that best practice agenda as a standard operating procedure.?

2. Collective Creativity: Broaden The Set of Alternatives

Another design principle from collective intelligence is that whenever possible, each stakeholder should have the opportunity to explore possible answers for each question.

Seventy percent of strategic decisions are focused on only one option (should we do X, or not?). Yet researcher Paul C. Nutt showed that corporate decisions which explore more alternatives are six times more likely to be rated as successful.?

Thus, HiveWise enables every participant to see existing answers, and to add any new answers that the team may not have thought of yet. In fact, it’s this ability to expand alternatives that can lead to outside-the-box ideas leading to real innovation.?

And since participants enter these ideas directly into the software, nobody talks over each other, no single person or single idea dominates the process.?

3. Collective Analysis: Filter Alternatives Freely

Next, just as HiveWise enables teams to expand the options considered, it is also designed to efficiently filter those ideas. For this, HiveWise uses the key concepts of author-blind assessment and weighted argumentation. Let’s break that down.

• Author-blind assessment: In most cases, it’s very helpful to evaluate alternatives without knowing who’s idea it is. For example, I know in my own organization, it can be very intimidating for a junior team member to point out negative aspects of an idea that I (the CEO) came up with. (Personally, i don’t know why, I’m such a nice person.) But whether it’s an issue of hierarchy, gender, personality or other factor, we want to remove biases and barriers to clear, straightforward analysis of the ideas themselves.
• Weighted argumentation: When making an important decision, it’s often important to not only understand which alternatives stakeholders rate the highest (and lowest), but also WHY. HiveWise provides the ability for participants to explain their ratings with pro and/or con arguments that themselves can be rated from low (nice to keep in mind) to high (game changer). This of course takes a bit more focus from each participant, but (as we will see) the resulting clarity and common understanding is significant.?

This approach levels the playing field for participation and creates the space for each person to rationally and succinctly express their perspective. For example, in a recent meeting on ideas to increase customer revenue, this ability to broaden alternatives and author blind filtering resulted in gathering several important and highly rated ideas - not from senior executives, but rather from engineers that were invited to participate.

4. Measurable Results: Clarity Leading To Conclusions

With neatly organized input (sometimes referred to as a decision “map”), the team can quickly review the results for each question at a glance. The alternative answers are arranged from most supported to least, each backed by the pro and con arguments that explain the overall results. To go deeper, you can even break the results into segments to understand the difference in perspective from different groups (like how sales views the issue compared to engineering, for example).?

Back to the team defining the succession policy, as their meetings began to involve different departments and levels in the company, it became critical to not only understand the big picture, but to be able to ensure the final policy addressed the particular priorities of different stakeholder groups. The insights gathered by comparing the ratings and pro/con arguments of these different segments were critical to the success and adoption of the final plan.

The final step for each question is for the decision maker to mark the chosen answer and annotate the reason for the selection. While HiveWise isn’t designed for decisions by committee, it is designed to facilitate decisions informed by team members who each have transparency and an active role in the process. A good example of this is a recent project prioritization meeting, where the decision maker actually decided to green light one of the lower rated project proposals - yet did so after reviewing all stakeholder input and sharing her reasoning for doing so. A move that could have been the source of confusion and angst in another context was instead clearly understood and supported.??It’s important to note here that since all of this input is captured digitally, the “map” for each question automatically becomes the “minutes” for the meeting. Yet rather than traditional minutes authored by a designated scribe, the map is a collective artifact co-authored by all participants that can immediately be exported, shared and archived for future reference.

Equally important is the idea that many questions dealt with in an individual meeting are attached to bigger strategic questions. HiveWise gives you the ability to link multiple questions together to create a larger conclusion, which is why the platform is considered decision-making software, rather than a general collaboration tool.

Finally, there is a lot of value in gathering stakeholders to work together at the same time (synchronously). However, with a bit of advanced preparation, participant input can happen BEFORE a meeting, using valuable meeting time to focus on reviewing results and finalizing directions forward. Even better, the entire process can be done asynchronously, involving as many participants as needed - avoiding synchronous meetings all together. I think we can all agree that the best type of meetings are the ones you don’t even have to go to.?

Clearly a platform like HiveWise isn’t a good fit for every type of meeting (or even entire meetings). Sometime, you just need unstructured, free-ranging discussions. But any time you’re in a meeting where the objective is to figure something out, solve a problem, create a plan, or make a decision - you have an opportunity to fully engage all participants to co-create something that feels very different than the meetings that you’re used to.

Perhaps we will never get to a point where we love to attend meetings. Yet, as more of the design principles from the field of collective intelligence become widely accepted, we should have a reasonable shot at making more meetings a lot less painful and a lot more valuable. And that’s definitely a better future worth investing in.?

To get a demo and try HiveWise out with your team, simply reach out. Looking forward to getting your feedback on this article and on how you see the potential of HiveWise for your organization.?