Two people sit mostly naked in the snow, breathing deeply. They remain quiet and still for a long time.
At least it feels like a long time to one of them. The other –
a more advanced student – rests in comfortable contemplation, focusing deeply on sending healing energy throughout his body.
The first one wants to send healing to his body, too. If only it wasn't so damn cold! As the minutes pass, he begins to fear that bits of him must surely be freezing off. His anxiety escalates until he feels compelled to flee for the warm cabin.
An outside observer would say that these two men shared the same experience. But really, their individual feelings about the time they spent couldn't be more different.
One experienced a tortuous ordeal.
The other experienced a nourishing moment of calm.
Before that, there wasn't much need. Horses rarely ran into each other, and most people traveled by foot. There were no speed limits, no lane markings, no directional signage, and few street name signs. Traffic control was not a thing.
The first stop sign was an intervention. More cars led to more accidents, and something had to be done.
Since then, our understanding of how to manage traffic has evolved. Today, the stop sign is one of many internationally recognized signals. We enjoy sophisticated, continually evolving systems for routing traffic.
Left: The first stop sign was installed in Detroit, Michigan.
Source Right: Traffic control on SW Moody in Portland, OR in 2020
Source
Like rapid travel, meetings used to be an infrequent activity. Courtiers, guild masters, and bishops met. Everyone else went about their business with no need to draft an agenda or call anyone to order.
“Let’s have one or two guild meetings this year.
50% business, 50% ritualized drinking, of course. All in favor?”
Image Source
While the 20th century saw a rise in the management class, it wasn't until the 1980s that most of the workforce held jobs that required regular meetings.
As the percentage of people in manufacturing and agriculture declines, the percentage attending regular meetings increases.
Source
Still, there wasn't too much traffic running through the conference room. Most companies shared a few meeting tips with leaders, then expected everyone to work it out.
Then the 2020 lockdowns arrived, and meeting traffic exploded. Calendars became gridlocked with overlapping, back-to-back video conferences. Software that analyzes calendar data saw increases in meeting time ranging from 13-148% (Sources: National Bureau of Economic Research, Microsoft). So many meetings!
Two years later, employees everywhere are crashing and burning out from sitting in endless meeting traffic jams.
Screenshot from a real calendar, blurred for privacy. This person contacted support hoping for an easier way to figure out which meeting to attend when he was invited to several at once.
The Great Resignation is hitting some companies harder than others. Companies with a well-designed Meeting Operating System - a system that directs meeting activity to ensure meetings flow effectively and efficiently - enjoy calendars that look a lot like they did before the lockdown. Those embracing asynchronous communications have even more time free for other work.
Earlier this year, we were contacted by the team at Railsware about a meeting method they'd developed that they call BRIDGeS. We invited them to share their method here because we think that:
This is a great example of the kind of practices teams can develop when they purposefully design their meetings, and
It's a useful method that more people should try!
Read more and download their helpful guide below. ~Lucid Meetings Team
Want to quickly make an enormous impact on the meetings in your organization? Roll out an effective strategy for your Team Cadence and Progress Check meetings.
Too much time wasted in unproductive meetings. Meeting overload. Zoom fatigue. Article after article decries the plague of too many meetings gobbling up our time.
Looking for data about how awful this problem is and some recycled quick tips?
No problem! These are just a few of the articles published on this topic in the past few months.
If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? (Jan 10, McKinsey)
The articles keep coming, but the challenge persists.
One reason: these complaints don't actually apply to all meetings. People are not upset that they spend too much time meeting with clients, or have too many solution design sessions.
The problem is all the status meetings, the team meetings, and the ad-hoc "synch-ups", "check-ins", and "touch-bases" that drag teams down.
Last week's invasion of Ukraine resurfaced this conversation. Looking back, the Notre Dame fire seems merely unfortunate in comparison to the events of the past several years. We've been bombarded by tragedies, and many teams have developed better ways of processing these events together.
Even still - when new events unfold, we need to decide: What should we do in our upcoming meetings?
Should we begin by acknowledging what's happening, even though most meetings deal with entirely unrelated topics? And how can you NOT talk about it?
As a meeting leader, you may feel it's important to address something that you believe is or should be on everyone's mind before diving into your agenda.
You might be right, You might also be making an assumption that could derail your meeting.
I enjoy planning meetings. I also enjoy large, easy jigsaw puzzles.
I love it when a successful plan comes together!
When you know the basic shape you’re going for, and you have a bunch of the pieces handy, it can be quite satisfying to get them to all fit together into a nice, coherent picture. With a jigsaw puzzle, it’s very clear that the value is in the activity itself. People who puzzle do so because they enjoy spending their time figuring it out—not because they’re genuinely curious about what the end picture might be.
Like the picture you see when you finish a jigsaw puzzle, most of the plans you get at the end of a planning meeting aren’t really meant to last.
Right now, many teams are dealing with massive turnover. Reports on the "Turnover Tsunami" and "The Great Resignation" reveal staggering volatility across industries and countries. Have you driven past the restaurants in your area recently? If so, you've seen the desperate billboards advertising hiring bonuses, increased wages, and pleading with customers to forgive their limited services.
It's not just the restaurants, as seen in this text message.
Why is this happening? Lots of reasons.
According to Gallup, it may have nothing to do with the organization, the manager, or the team; this is part of what happens when major events force people to re-evaluate their life choices. Normally, major events like graduations, marriages, births, and deaths are infrequent and sprinkled randomly across the workforce. During these last 18 months, every single person experienced a major life event all at once. Everyone is re-evaluating their life choices, and a lot of them are deciding it's time for a change.
In short, it may not be about you right now.
Of course, if your whole team just quit, it might be entirely about you. Your company might be a terrible place to work. You might be an awful manager. Gallup also says that the Great Resignation is made worse by a pervasive Great Discontent.
Whatever the reason, labor shortages are making it hard to get work done.
The cascading failures are unraveling the supply chain. Whole teams are walking away from complicated systems, leaving their replacements with no one to tell them how it all works. This makes the new jobs especially difficult because customers haven't relaxed their expectations. Kindness, unfortunately, is not as contagious as Covid-19.
While many are leaving their jobs, it's likely that boredom, loneliness, or finances will drive them into new jobs soon.
What does this mean for employers and people leaders?
Most organizations host regular meetings involving everyone on their teams. These meetings go by many names: all-hands, all-staff, all teams, town halls, business update meetings, Teatime, TGIF, and more. This form of meeting, where you gather everyone in your tribe at the same time, is thousands of years old and practiced by every kind of group. Unfortunately, none of these names provide much guidance about how to make these meetings worthwhile.
Like every meeting, the key to a great all-hands meeting is to clearly define the purpose and intended outcomes in advance. Why do you host these meetings? What should be different afterward as a result?
"All Hands" just describes the attendee list.
I've been asked how to improve all-hands meetings by several clients over the years. In this article, I've pulled together all those separate bits of advice in one place.
So let's talk about those things you need to do to run great everyday business meetings with your teams. And yes, I'm going to share some guidelines you may already know.
Hopefully, you'll be inspired to follow them.
It's worth the effort. The leaders we've met who follow these "rules" enjoy more productivity, more loyalty, more engagement, better decision making, and less BS drama between team members than everyone else. And frankly, none of this is actually that hard to do.
Here are five rules for team meetings that I share with my business clients, and that I wish someone had taught me when I started my business.
What happened? So what does that mean? Now what should we do going forward?
In a retrospective meeting, you and your team work to answer these three questions together. When you’re reviewing a short event that just happened, your retrospective meeting might be very short as you all simply work to answer these questions directly.
When you’re looking at something as long as a year or something involving lots of complex interrelated parts, it doesn’t work to just ask “So, what happened in 2020?” That’s more likely to encourage day drinking than useful insights.
For something as 2020 as 2020, you’ll need to put a bit more structure in place if you want a useful result.
Introducing Enrico Teotti
That’s why we're thrilled to introduce you all to Enrico Teotti. Enrico hosts the This is Retrospective Facilitation podcast and is an active leader in the agile facilitation and coaching community.
As his holiday gift to us all, Enrico put together a meeting template we can use to try and make some useful sense out of 2020 with our teams. Check it out!
~ Team Lucid
Running an End-of-Year Retrospective
How was your year?
In this short post I'll describe one way to run an annual retrospective so you and your group can reflect on what happened this past year, discuss what you make of it, and begin to decide what the next wise actions to take next year might be.
Too much time wasted in unproductive meetings. This remains a top contender on the list of workplace complaints, as it has been for at least 700 years.
Some folks wrestling with this complaint assume that the solution is to simply reduce the amount of time spent in meetings, ideally through the elimination of as many meetings as possible. This is a tidy, easily measured approach, which can yield a quick claim to victory.
How is your organization going to survive and thrive in the emerging economy?
That's the question on everyone's mind right now.
Later when we look back, it will seem so clear. Our grandchildren will shake their heads and say:
"If I was alive back then, I totally would have...."
And then the smug little darlings will fill in the blank with whatever proves to be so very obvious in hindsight. Whatever that is, it's not so obvious now.
All we have are clues. Historic events that share some of the same patterns. Bits and pieces of evidence that, if we could just summon enough inner Sherlock, we could see a perfectly correct, elementary solution.
We have a fogged-over, dirty window of opportunity. We can't see what's on the other side of this window, and we're racing towards the future at full speed.
We have no choice but to move forward into this uncertainty. We can't wait for the answers, because if we do, we'll miss the opportunity to be a part of creating those answers.
If you're a trainer, workshop facilitator, faith-community leader, event planner, or consultant, you convene groups for a living.
You've probably designed your work assuming you'll be in the same room with the group you're serving.
Now, like everyone else, you need to figure out how to deliver your services online.
You're working fast and feeling a lot of pressure to have an answer for your clients now. You also want to keep your existing contracts intact as much as possible. It was hard enough to get these sessions scheduled in the first place, so you really don't want to have that discussion again.
Unfortunately, this desire to keep the transition from in-person to virtual as simple and direct as possible is driving many experts to make some poor choices. They're also missing some big opportunities.
Here are three of the most important mistakes we see experts make when they first redesign in-person events for online delivery, and some tips about what to do instead.
How often should your team meet, and how has that changed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic/economic upheaval? We collected data from teams around the globe to find out!
Research Background
This isn't a question researchers can easily answer, because the answer depends on so many factors.
When we've looked at this question in the past, we had to rely on the published advice of business consultants and process experts, most of which was designed for teams meeting as part of their business-as-usual operations.
In our own research, we've talked with groups that meet just once per year because they must; it's mandated by law. Otherwise they wouldn't bother. We also spoke with one retired general who once had his teams run After Action Review meetings every 30 minutes during an especially intense training drill.
Finally, we know that in times of emergency, the group in charge of a coordinated emergency response will keep their communication channels open all day. Think of the war rooms you see in movies, or mission command, and you'll know what we're talking about.
These observations suggest that when you need to get people working together in a complex, rapidly evolving situation, you should meet a lot. We've recommended daily meetings at a minimum under these circumstances.
On April 1, 2020, we hosted a webinar with principals at the Mission Critical Teams Institute. We explored the communication practices business teams can learn from mission critical teams (firefighters, military, medical, and others who handle emergencies for a living) as we all work to adapt in times of rapid change.
Introducing Mercer Smith-Looper Mercer is the Head of Support at Appcues, where she manages an all-remote team of customer support representatives. In this article, Mercer describes the meetings she's found to be most helpful for keeping her team aligned, happy, and productive. — Team Lucid
Running a remote team can be challenging. It’s easy for remote teammates to lose focus, or to feel ignored and unappreciated. Wouldn’t you if you rarely saw or spoke with the people on your team?
This blog is full of advice for running a great meeting. Of course, teams don't run just one meeting. Teams run lots and lots of meetings.
Now, if you have oodles of spare time, you can design each and every one of your team's meetings from scratch using the advice you'll find here. No one has those oodles, however, which is why—despite the ready availability of all this super practical how-to goodness–lots of folks just make stuff up.
Other teams find a better way. They design their meetings up front, then codify these designs into a Meeting Operating System that makes it easy for them to run those meetings over and over again.
It doesn't matter what kind of team you work on or what you're trying to do - if you can't get that team to all agree and do their part, you fail.
Teamwork is the practice of agreeing on a shared goal and then dividing the work required to achieve that goal amongst the team members. To get that agreement and coordinate all that doing, you've got to communicate.
We're coming up on our 10th anniversary here at Lucid, and over all those years, we've done our fair share of failing. One of our more painful failures came about through a failure to effectively communicate.
A Meeting Flow Model is a form of process documentation that highlights the main meetings used to achieve a business result. In the previous article, I introduced the Meeting Flow Model (MFM) concept and described some of the benefits enjoyed by teams that use a defined MFM. Meeting Flow Models are super sweet.
You and your team can get these benefits too, but only after you start using an MFM and then work to refine it for your unique needs.
How do you get a useful Meeting Flow Model for your team?
By doing some Meeting Flow Modeling.
Meeting Flow Modeling is a multi-step process that takes teams several days–and often longer–to complete. In our Quickstart program, we walk teams through this process over the course of several weeks. I'm sharing this in case you think the process below looks a little complicated at first glance. Please keep in mind that this isn't something you're going to knock out in an afternoon.
For every significant goal your company needs to achieve, your team meets. In most companies, these meetings get very little forethought. They're just part of what happens as you do the work.
In other companies, teams plan out the meetings they'll use to achieve their goals. They design each meeting, just like they design the forms they use for capturing data and the reports they'll use to measure progress.
This meeting design work is a critical but often neglected aspect of successful business process design.
Here at Lucid, we call the design of a series of meetings related to a specific business process Meeting Flow Modeling. If you've ever heard me talk about the three parts of an effective Meeting Operating System, you may recognize this term.
Meeting Flow Model
A Meeting Flow Model is a form of process documentation that highlights the main meetings used to achieve a business result.
