Could That Meeting Have Been An Email?

A friend asked me to look at some things for them. I asked for some background and scheduled a call to talk. But the thought struck me before I started the call on how to streamline. My friend is extremely capable. The problem they’re facing is a “you don’t know what you don’t know” situation. So I decided to do an experiment. Instead of just getting on a call I put some thought into trying to understand how I would tackle the problem and seeing if I can provide some pointers for them to solve and see how much progress they can make independently.

What’s Wrong With Meetings

Oh God, please grant me the meetings that people in stock photos have // Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

You have a problem, you think someone would know how to solve it. Well, let’s get everyone together and solve the problem. People come together, there’s some time where you share what the problem is. Poll around for a solution. You might get one, or someone might propose a direction. Everyone’s happy? Well, we’ve wasted the time of 5 people, interrupted their current stream of work, and if it was anything like most meetings I’ve been to really only two people were talking, and most of the time was spent trying to figure out what we’re talking about.

Now in the right circumstances meetings can be extremely useful. But a lot of the time meetings are lacking in due diligence. And so my thoughts was what can we do with more due diligence to put ourselves in a position to be more effective.

Meetings At Amazon

One of the organizations famous for their handling of due diligence for meetings is Amazon. You can find a lot of information on Amazon 2-pager and 6-pager reports. But the key to it is they force the due diligence. First by making people do the hard work in putting their strategy to paper. They have to think about the strengths, the weaknesses, how things tie together. At this point the meeting is already far better than my hypothetical example. The person organizing the meeting has put in their due diligence.

Okay maybe a bit less due diligence than this // Photo by Beatriz Pérez Moya on Unsplash

Amazon then takes it to the next step. Amazon ensures everyone has reviewed and pondered over the document before they start discussing it. So what do they do to make sure everyone comes to the meeting prepared? I will admit to finding out about meetings when I see the reminder in 10 minutes. So how does Amazon do it. Well, they don’t. They want you to be prepared before they start discussing the document. So they require bringing a printed version of the document to the meeting for everyone. And the first 15 minutes are spent reading and reviewing the handouts in silence. So everyone can have a more informed conversation.

Meetings In Scrum

One of the first objections when implementing an agile framework like scrum is that it is very heavy on meetings. But if you look at scrum more carefully you recognize every meeting is extremely purposeful. Each of these meetings has due diligence requirements from the team and the Agilist. For example the standup requires people to regularly update the board and enter ready to talk about what they will be working on during that day. Again due diligence from everyone in the team.

Our Experience From Flux7

In Flux7 we had a very streamlined assessment process. In fact we had a customer say we made more progress in this one week assessment than we did in nine months with another vendor. So what was it that made our assessments so useful. Well, we didn’t let Architecture Astronauts spend any time doing their thing. Rather we quickly laid out a map of options, made sure all the required stakeholders were present, and came to a decision. Behind that there was a lot of combined knowledge and well-prepared guides. All designed to get through the base decisions so we can get started in doing the real work.

In my post “The Skills Gap Is A Lie — Part 3” I mentioned the German word fingerspitzengefühl. And the way that meeting was conducted leveraged the experience of the expert for what it was most useful for. Having someone that has a very good understanding of the lay of the land, and have them guide the others in reaching the desired goal.

Making A Meeting Valuable

So these are a few examples of how due diligence and preparedness result in meetings focused on delivering value. What do they have in common:

1. There was enough due diligence done before the meeting so the part that could have been an email actually became an email.
2. You have the right parties involved to make aligned decisions. You can quickly work through the points of contention as a group and everyone has enough of a background to reach a satisfactory decision.
3. Everybody is on an equal footing and is engaged. They are all brought up to speed and know critical decisions are being made on items that they are stakeholders to. And so they and invested in being engaged.

With the right ingredients in place the meeting will feel like hitting the bulls eye // Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

But, there is a huge issue with this approach. As good as it is, we have just created a large barrier in the first step. You need to have a baseline ability to do due diligence. Which means you need the help of someone with experience in the first place. And so now you’ve created a class of people not worthy enough to have an opinion. So the big question on my mind is how can we quickly bring someone to the level where they have the subject on their fingertips so they can shepherd a conversation of stakeholders to a satisfactory decision.

The Magic Of Experience

So we need to have someone operate as someone with a higher level of experience. To do that we have to distill experience into its components and see how the come together to create magic.

1. Having a large library of information you can rely on to make better decisions.
2. Having the ability to recognize what is relevant information and giving it due importance.
3. Recognizing when a decision is good enough to move forward so you can start making progress rather than overthinking.

For millennia the bottleneck was on the first issue. And that’s why we believe in millennia old methods for teaching and education. But in the past 20 years the equation has been flipped thanks to the internet and Google. But we’re still lacking in the other two criteria.

The Conversation With My Friend

When I finally talked to my friend, I took notes on what it is that they found helpful. So I could see how I can solve the other two problems for them and others.

1. I identified the areas of concern they’ll need to know and gave them pointers on tools they should look at along with a very very high level comparison behind them. Don’t think ten point pros and cons checklist. Think 2 sentence summary of that ten point pros and cons checklist.
2. I helped them prioritize in solving their problems. They had some concerns regarding scale. I told them point blank that they will hit scaling issues. But I did some back of the envelope calculations with them to show they don’t care about those scaling issues today. Rather I brought their focus back to the internal testing. And showed how it represents both a major liability and a bottleneck to their innovation.
3. I provided them with checklists and step by step instructions for some of the transformation I wanted them to make. Going from making the problem an overwhelming intangible thing to a series of concrete steps to get to the desired state.

The one thing that really stands out to me is that I never needed to gain a detailed understanding of their system. We weren’t tackling a very detailed specific problem, but everyone is at some point a beginner in every domain they enter. And so having a trustworthy source for the 3 points above can make the difference between a newbie and an expert. And the crazy part is for your first few forays it is very likely that a runbook can be created that can get you from 0–60. Although I wouldn’t think of this as a book in a traditional sense. Rather maybe one of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. After all we are trying to have you solve your own problem.

In the same way these books provided a personalized fiction experience we should be looking at creating a personalized learning experience. // Pic via Empire Online