CEO @ The Atlantic | Co-Founder, Keynote Speaker
Meetings are becoming everpresent. Knowledge workers now spend fewer hours every day, on average, creating new things than they do talking about those new things.
I’m firmly in the “let’s do this” camp. For a significant period, I found myself increasingly frustrated with meetings that, to my execution-focused mind, seemed unproductive. However, I have since come to appreciate that these meetings may serve a crucial role in sense-making. By intentionally allowing space for meetings that prioritise understanding over concrete outcomes, we can prevent the sense-making process from impeding the effectiveness of meetings designed to drive actionable decisions. There might also be a relationship between goal clarity and the need for sense-making meetings. Clear goals can often streamline discussions, but when objectives are ambiguous or complex, sense-making meetings become essential. I have definitely experienced this at The RSA (The royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce).
Perhaps it is unsurprising that the managerial and executive classes who waste the most time in meetings talking about work other people are going to do are the ones who think nobody else gets work done when they're not in the office.
At a tech giant, as with many, we were expected to have meetings all day and do emails and analytical work at night. A short-term proposition at best - for all
Haydar Jawad
2w
Nicholas Thompson, Meetings are more influenced by culture than by necessity. We are working on a project to reduce meetings and emails. Below is a sample graph of a global organisation's emails and meetings. The white dots (when enlarged) represent each employee (active only) when data captured . Colours represent the frequencies of emails back and forth(chain), meetings, repeated meetings, CC, BCC, numbers, etc. We found that there is psychology and culture at play per region, leadership style, time zones, trust, etc. This is a 24 hour view, crazy! We are trying to see if AI , gameifaction, etc can help reduce those issues, the numbers of FTEs in lost productivity is huge!
Tyler C.
2w
Problem is not meetings, it's that people think meetings are for talking, not doing. They tend to want to "take it offline" instead of work in front of others
Tom Bue
2w
… and the vast majority of meetings could be cut in half without any loss of quality. Except for everybodys feeling of being heard. The question is: Do we today work to get things done or for self realisation?
Funny because it's true and incredibly alarming. We exist rather than live at work. My hope is all the talk about Gen AI enables us to automate tasks to stop so many meetings so we can focus on human stuff.
Spot on. I often experience this, especially when interacting and collaborating with mid- to large-sized companies. I call it 'talk the walk' instead of 'walk the talk'.
It's fascinating how the balance has shifted. Do you think this trend is impacting innovation and productivity? Perhaps there's a need for more efficient meeting structures or even a cultural shift towards valuing creation time more.
Director of Operations | Gen AI Solutions & Training | Army Reserve | 3V
2wWhen all is said and done, more is usually said, than done.