Why Reading about Meetings is like Dancing about Architecture

If your meetings are awesome, read no further.

If they are not, I bet you have already read quite a few articles (like this one), books, perhaps even took a course or two.

Yet, most chances are your meetings still suck. (as some of the book titles above suggest...)

This article is about why books don't help, and how the #MeetingSpicer can.

Most articles and books I've read about meetings have quite a complete list of what meetings lack: Agenda, Timeboxing practices, Followup, etc. some advice is backed by statistics, and most of it makes sense, right? Yet reading this probably won't help much, here is why...

1. Putting ideas to practice is hard

Reading diet books won't make you lose weight, the only way to diet is to change your eating habits. The same is true for meeting-books, the only way to transform your meetings is to change your meeting habits.

Most meeting-books talk about the importance of the following things:

A clear Agenda shared upfront; Inviting the right people; Starting on time; Having a Time-keeper; clear Time-Boxing protocol, Visual-management; End on time; Follow-up on your action-items.

Some of them may even produce an acronym to help you remember it (like AISTT-VEF :-)

Yet, reading them and understanding why they are important won't make you change...

The reason Meeting-books don't work is this: the most effective way to learn is practice.

Let me repeat: the most (and possibly - the only) effective way to learn is practice.

And that's what books can't make you do.

2. To improve you need to accept you are not perfect

Before putting ideas into practice, you'd have to admit that your meetings are not perfect. This is twice as hard for meetings since you'd have to admit it publicly because it affects all of your meeting participants, and the changes you would like to put in place would have to have the team's buy-in in order to be effective and sustainable.

3. Changing habits is hard

Darn human nature... did your organization ever decide all meetings will start on time? or that all meetings will have an agenda sent in advance?

Most of these initiatives don't last very long. After a few meetings, someone forgets to send the agenda. or too many people arrive late. and just like new-year resolutions, the decisions fade before turning into a habit.

If you are not convinced, here is a small experiment:

Read this article (which I find exceptionally rich), and then take a minute to sincerely think - what will be the effect of you just reading it on your meetings a year from now?

4. "Best-practices" don't exist

Unlike some book-titles suggest, there are no best-practices; no silver-bullets exist that suit all meetings. Not all meetings require a clear agenda, not all meetings need to have a summary or produce action items, some meeting even justifies taking longer than planned.

There is just one thing all meetings require...

All effective meetings require the participants to be preset.

The secret sauce that can make or break a meeting is the involvement of the participants, having them implicated, having a sense of ownership. but this deserves a separate section...

5. Team ownership is a key

A meeting does not belong to its organizer, it belongs to the whole team - all the people involved. hence any decision to change the meeting's dynamics should be owned by the team. Otherwise, decisions will dissolve as soon as the person enforcing them is not there.

Hence, for an idea to take effect, the whole team has to share the experience, reading it by yourself is not enough.

An article in Forbes claims the 5 Reasons Meetings advice doesn't help are:

1. Typical advice assumes meetings are the problem.
2. Typical advice focuses on tools.
3. Typical advice creates rules to control people.
4. Typical advice prescribes roles.
5. Typical advice does nothing to address the root cause of ineffective meetings.

While a real change requires something else, it requires

• A change in approach and mindset, a reframing of the problem you are solving.
• common clarity of the desired outcome, a vision of how a perfect meeting should look like

and mainly

• A process that takes you there.

In the past three years, Regis and I have been working on the #MeetingSpicer, a simple tool in the form of coaching cards, a set of 30-second micro-workouts to help you painlessly hack your meeting culture.

?Here it is:

What is the #MeetingSpicer and How can it help?

The #MeetingSpicer is a tool that consists of about 100 micro-practices of 30 seconds each.

Its principles are based on the fact that practicing daily for one minute may be more valuable than spending a few hours reading a whole book, and that the element of surprise can help the perseverance of a habit.

Over the past three years, we have carefully curated this set of exercises that teams can practice, using the following guidelines:

• No preparation is necessary: The exercises are designed to practice during the meeting, up to two practices per meeting, at its start or its end.
• Gamification: The activities are randomly drawn, hence there is an element of surprise, no one knows what today's practice will be, and no one (except the Meeting-gods) can be 'blamed' if (for example) today all phones are put aside.
• They are non-judgemental. for example - you are asked to state if the meeting will have a summary, and if so - who will write it. but it doesn't mean a summary is a good practice, we just want you to be explicit about it.
• They are short. each practice takes up to 30 seconds, so if the team tries one practice at the beginning, and one at the end, no one can claim the meeting time was wasted.
• They might make the team smile a bit, imagine how the team will react if "this meeting will end 5 minutes before the planned time".
• They fall into one of three categories: stating a fact (such as, what time it is), trying something (such as changing places at the beginning of the meeting), or a silent reflection that is not shared (such as thinking if my presence in this meeting is mandatory)
• They provide the team a space to reflect, such as asking at the end of the meeting to think (privately) of the energy level one has at the end compared to the beginning.

Here's a small thought experiment:

Pick a random green card from the photo above, and imagine you would have read it out loud at the start of the last meeting you had...

What would the impact be?

Would it be worth the 30 seconds it takes?

The #MeetingSpicer is designed to be a painless workout, allowing the team to practice different aspects of running a meeting (such as having a meeting without laptops), keeping the meeting's dynamic lively and let ideas that resonate sink-in and become a team-habit.

Would you like to try?

If you'd like to test the #MeetingSpicer (for FREE), just drop us a line at [email protected] to receive a DIY pack.

You can also (for the price of a book) order a full kit here.

Alternatively, if all you want is just manifest how much you hate meetings, you can buy this scented candle...

May all of your meetings be great!