If you have too many meetings, think like a gardener. Pull the weeds–the meetings that don’t enable creativity, shared awareness, or productivity. Then improve the rest using the DAVID techniques. You’ll save your team hours of wasted time and get better outcomes and engagement.
People spend a ton of time in meetings these days, and too many meetings are just a waste of time. In this episode, Peter and Richard talk through how to determine which meetings are worth having and which can go asynchronous, and they introduce the DAVID approach to ensuring the meeting you do have are worth the time.
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Episode transcription
Peter Green
Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show. Today we’re talking about meetings.
WAIT, WAIT, WAIT! Don’t skip the episode! We agree with you. We’re having too many meetings, and too many of them are a waste of time.
Richard Lawrence
But we can’t just throw them out. Meetings are just multiple people getting aligned and making decisions interactively. No async technology can do this job as well as a good meeting. So, the key move is to learn how to have effective meetings.
But, before we get to how to do that…This show is a free resource sponsored by the Humanizing Work company.
Peter
Humanizing Work exists to make work more fit for humans and humans more capable of doing great work. To that end, we do training and coaching in three areas:
- We help leaders lead empowered teams and individuals more effectively
- We help product people turn their ideas into good visions, experiments, and backlogs
- We help teams collaborate better to produce meaningful outcomes on complex work (including how to facilitate better meetings and working sessions)
Richard
If you or your organization would benefit from better leadership, better product management, or better collaboration, and if you find our vision for doing that in a human-centric way, we have capacity to take on a few new clients in 2024. So, visit the contact page on humanizingwork.com and schedule a conversation with us.
Peter
All right, back to the meetings:
The number one complaint we hear from most people is that we have TOO MANY MEETINGS! And that’s probably a true statement. We’ve seen some crazy calendars! But instead of just doing “no meeting Fridays,” or just moving all meetings to an async tool like Slack or Teams, kind of the slash and burn approach, we recommend you think like a gardener: which of these meetings are weeds that need to be pulled, and which are flowers that we should nurture?
Richard
Those meetings that are the sort of flowers to protect and nurture probably enable at least one of three things that couldn’t happen as well any other way:
- Good meetings enable creativity. They allow something new to emerge in a way that could only happen live, with these people. Those things could include an idea, a work product, a plan, a decision.
Peter
Sometimes when a team says, “We should just eliminate all of our meetings and then we’ll be more productive,” We’ll share the example of a comedy writer’s room. There’s a really interesting episode of Adam Grant’s show, which we’ll link to in the show notes, called “The Daily Show’s Secret to Creativity.” And in that show, they have actual audio of the writers working on the monologue for that evening’s show. That’s not something that could be done asyncronously, where everyone just sends in their ideas, then Trevor Noah kind of pulls through them and decides what jokes to tell. New ideas emerge through the discussion. While your team probably isn’t writing jokes for a TV show, you probably do need to be creative, and creativity often happens as a result of those different perspectives and ideas and backgrounds rubbing off on each other. And meetings enable this kind of creativity better than any other approach.
Richard
OK, second, good meetings can create shared Awareness: They allow everyone to hear the same message at the same time, and potentially discuss and interact with it.
Peter
One of our clients, Geonetric, had a long-standing practice of bi-weekly board meetings. But not the kind of board meeting you’re probably picturing here. The board in this case was a rolling white board, and at these meetings, teams at Geonetric would take turns wheeling their white board with all of their plans, their progress, and other visualizations to a shared space and then presenting them to the full company for Q&A. I remember attending one of these meetings, which were optional, and then being surprised that nearly the entire company attended. I think I saw maybe two or three people who weren’t able to attend. And then they listened to the update from that week’s team lead, which, in this case, included a skit about a new product release that the team had been working on, and then folks just peppered them with questions to get better clarity. An emailed status report would never create the same level of shared awareness.
Richard
The third thing that good meetings can do is enable a specific kind of productivity: They can act as a forcing function to get something done that requires participation from multiple people who are otherwise busy and wouldn’t get it done together.
Peter
At our company, we have a quarterly meeting that shows up on the calendar as “Plug-in update extravaganza.” [Richard adds, which makes it sound more fun than it is] At this meeting, we all get together and slog through the very tedious process of updating WordPress plugins on our site. We update them on stage, then we test the results, then we push to production and test them again. Having many eyes on the problem makes the testing better. But just as importantly, NO ONE WANTS TO DO THIS WORK, and we have to do it anyway. Having the meeting on our calendar is a forcing function for us to do the right thing, even when we all mildly dread it. The social pressure to show up and work together leads to a healthy outcome. Bug Triage Meetings used to be like this on software teams I’ve worked on, and listeners probably have some other examples that come to mind as I describe this category.
Richard
So, if you have meetings that don’t accomplish those three things—enabling creativity, or decision making together, creating shared awareness, or making space for productivity together—you probably don’t need a meeting. So pull that weed!
Peter
If you do need a meeting to do one of those things, there’s still no guarantee it’ll be a good meeting! In our experience, and no doubt in yours, the vast majority of meetings are poorly facilitated if they’re facilitated at all. They’re rambling and unfocused, they’re not very participative, they don’t result in great decisions or outcomes, and they often have no clear action at the end. To be blunt, most meetings suck, and they’re a waste of time. But they don’t have to be that way, and it doesn’t take very much effort to change them.
Richard
If you need a meeting, and you want to make sure it’s a good one, get some help from DAVID. Who’s DAVID? Well, DAVID isn’t a who, David’s an acronym for 5 practices that increase your chances of having a productive, worthwhile meeting. Big shout out, by the way, to our friend John Miller here, who constantly inspires us to come up with better acronyms to help remember important things! Thanks, John.
Peter
All right. The acronym DAVID stands for: Define, Arrange, Visualize, Insulate, Decide. Let’s dive into each part of that.
Define: Always, always, always go into a meeting with a defined purpose for the meeting. Don’t get a group of people together and pull them away from other work unless you have a good reason. When you send the invitation and kick the meeting off, start by reminding everyone why we’re meeting, every time, so everyone knows what the meeting is for and how they can contribute.
Richard
BTW, if you can’t come up with a good purpose for the meeting—a reason why it needs that group of people together in the same conversation—maybe it should be an email or Slack message instead. Like we said a moment ago, not everything needs to be a meeting.
Peter
The A in DAVID stands for Arrange: Have a plan for how you’re going to run the meeting to achieve that purpose—don’t just get together and talk, hoping it’ll end well.
Richard
When it comes to the structure of a meeting, we really like ORID around Gamestorming as a default, unless you have a reason to do otherwise. Let me explain what that meant. ORID is a concept from a book called “The Art of Focused Conversation,” which is our single most favorite facilitation book. It’s an acronym for four kinds of topics to cover in a particular order in your meetings.
O stands for Observation. So you start by getting shared, objective data so everyboy’s working from the same information. (and, by the way, you can bring in some of this data, so it’s not necessarily generated in the meeting, but it’s pulling it together; everybody is looking a the same thing.
R stands for Reflection. People have feelings about the data. Some things are exciting and motivating. Some are frustrating. That’s important data itself, and it’s gonna affect the rest of the meeting anyway, so do something to make it part of the shared information.
I stands for Interpretation. Make sense of the data together. Look for patterns and meaning.
Finally, D stands for Decision. Do something to end the meeting with a decision based on the interpretation. So, that’s ORID, Observation, Reflection, Interpretation and Decision.
The book “Gamestorming” layers a nice model on top of this. The authors of that book suggest that meetings go through one or more cycles of divergence (generating ideas and options), exploration (where you make sense of the ideas and options), and then convergence (where you narrow things down and make a decision). So, you might use brainstorming early in a meeting as a divergent activity, and voting late in a meeting as a convergent activity. And, I think most importantly here, you should be aware that in the middle, that exploratory part, can feel like what is sometimes called the “groan zone,” and that’s normal and ok.
Peter
As you work through those various structures, I think it’s important to pay attention to how you’re including all the participants in useful ways. When you facilitate the meeting to include everyone, you get the benefit of their contributions and you create more of a sense of connection between everyone in the room, and a commitment to the outcome of that meeting.
Richard
And the last thing I think we’d call out on “arrange,” is if it’s a big, long, one-off meeting, it’s particularly important to test your space or your tools in advance. People often complain about frustration with the room or with the virtual meeting tools. And while that’s always important, the more people you have in a meeting, and the longer it is, the more painful tool issues can feel.
Peter
All right, to the middle of “David,” V: Visualize: Make info visible somehow.
Richard
And while there’s lots of ways to do this; it could be sticky notes, Miro, a Google Doc, etc. Do something so people can reason together about shared info and so you only have to talk about each item once. It drives me crazy in meetings when we’re circling back over things because nobody is making it visible. So make it visible.
Second, sometimes it makes sense to share info in advance, if it already exists in a structured form, can be a good approach for some meetings. Then, focus the meeting on engaging with the content. A warning though. Be careful, this one only works if everyone comes prepared, it’s really frustrating to be the one who prepared and than have to sit there while the others catch up–so it depends on a certain organizational culture that you might have to build over time if you don’t already have it.
Peter
All right. Onto the I, Insulate: Insulate the meeting from distractions and tangents that’ll keep you from achieving the purpose.
Richard
I like to us a parking lot for this, but how you use a parking lot matters. Let me explain: A parking lot is a place to put things that are worth discussing but aren’t worth discussing right now in this meeting. They’re a side topic or a deep dive that doesn’t require everyone. So, when one of those distractions comes up, you ask the person bringing it up, “Hey, this seems to be off our track towards (whatever your meeting’s purpose was that you talked about earlier). Should we park this for later discussion?” Notice that that depended on already establishing the purpose. So, when you ask this question, typical responses might include:
-
- “Ya, you’re right, let’s park this for later.”
- “Actually, it’s relevant because…”
- “There’s just a small part of this that’s relevant to our purpose, so let’s focus on that”
Each of those three responses, in different ways, redirects focus back to the meeting’s main goal.
Now, as I said remember, establishing the meeting’s purpose upfront is crucial for this. Without it, steering discussions to the parking lot can seem authoritarian—it’s just the facilitator exerting power; but with a shared goal, it’s seen as facilitating effectively in service of the group.
And, finally, if you’re going to use a parking lot, don’t forget to revisit it at the end of the meeting. Allocate time to address those points, determining who should be involved and scheduling follow-up discussions. This approach reassures participants that their points won’t be overlooked, which fosters trust in the parking lot system for the future.
Peter
All right, let’s wrap up. The final D in DAVID is for “decide.” Decide what’s next. And, BTW, you may need to decide how you’re going to decide.
Richard
Right. A big part of the sense of whether a meeting went well or not is how it closes. So don’t just let your meeting drift off or run over. As the scheduled time limit approaches, move towards a decision. Now, you might not yet have solved the problem your meeting was supposed to solve. And that’s ok sometimes. In that case, make a clear decision about what’s next, and make sure that that decision is explicitly informed by whatever happened in the meeting so it doesn’t just feel like running over.
I’ll give you an example: In our quarterly OKR planning, we got near the end, and realized we were not going to get through all the key results for the things we wanted to focus on, so we used the last few minutes to say, “Based on what we’ve learned in this meeting so far, what’s the next step that we want to take?” and then we made a plan for what we were going to do, and we finished the meeting strong and on time.
Peter
And, as I mentioned, you may need to decide how to decide. Any decision you need to make in the group, we want to know in advance how you’re going to make it. When you try to figure out how to decide in the heat of the moment, it’s a lot harder to do it. So we like teams to establish a few different ways to decide ahead of time. Otherwise, it’ll default to consensus, which is the source of many bad meetings, takes forever, leads to bad results.
There are really 4 ways for a group to decide something, and you should pick one of them as your default and then talk about when you’ll use a different one. The most efficient of those four is “One person just decides.” That might not be the best result for a meeting, because people will say, “Then why did you even have the meeting?” So making that clear up front, is important. So one person just decides, and the next would be “One person decides after seeking advice.” That’s a great way to have a meeting. You could frame the meeting that way; “Our purpose today is for me to get advice from you on the decision that I need to make.” The third way that you could just choose to decide is “Majority wins.” Or “We’re going to dot vote, and whatever the dots say, that’s what we’re going to do.” Something like that. And then, finally, “Consensus.” And there are a few times when consensus is the right way to decide something. Say, a team working agreement is not really an agreement if everybody is not in consensus on it, but those are actually few and far between.
Richard
If you have too many meetings, and too many of them feel like a waste of time, don’t just slash and burn your calendar and declare “no meeting Friday.” Instead, think like a gardener. Pull the weeds—meetings that don’t enable creativity, shared awareness, or productivity. Then improve the rest using the DAVID techniques. If you only fixed one recurring meeting using these techniques, you’d save you and your team hours of wasted time and you’d improve the outcomes and engagement on your team in a big way. That’s worth an hour or two of thoughtful planning!
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