Rebecca Hinds: Built for Efficiency- A Bold Approach to Meetings

About This Episode

This episode rethinks meetings from the ground up with organizational behavior expert Dr. Rebecca Hinds. Instead of accepting packed calendars as productive, the conversation reframes meetings as products that should be intentionally designed to create decisions, healthy debate, development, and real progress. Using product design principles, you’ll learn how to cut meeting overload, move status updates to async tools, and use simple structures and signals to measure whether a meeting is truly worth the time. The result is a bold new way to collaborate: fewer, shorter, sharper meetings that improve focus, decision quality, and human connection at work.

About Rebecca Hinds

Rebecca Hinds is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever. She is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first-of-their-kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work.

Additional Resources

Website: rebeccahinds.com

LinkedIn: @RebeccaHinds

Transcript

Defining Bold

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome to the Bold Lounge Podcast. My name is Lee Burgess and I will be your host. If you're anything like me, you love hearing inspiring stories of people who have gone on bold journeys and made a positive impact in the world. This podcast is all about those kinds of stories. Every week we'll hear from someone who has taken the leap or embarked on an extraordinary journey. In addition to hearing their stories, we'll also learn about their bold growth mindset that they use to make things happen. Whether they faced challenges or doubts along the way, they persisted and ultimately achieved their goals. These impactful stories will leave you feeling motivated and inspired to pursue your own bold journey. I believe everyone has a bold story waiting to be free. Tune in and get ready to be inspired. Welcome to the Bold Lounge. Today we have Dr. Rebecca Hines. She is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first of their kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work. Her research is consistently featured in top-tier publications and has appeared in places like Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Wired, Time, and CNBC. Rebecca has been invited to speak on major stages all across the world, including Dreamforce, South by Southwest, and Inbound, and many more. I am so excited to welcome you to the Bold Lounge, Rebecca. Thank you so much for having me. So we're gonna jump right in and talk about being bold. What does bold look like in your life? What's your definition?

SPEAKER_01 1:59

I think it's it's multifaceted. And one aspect that I think is really important is you know, a deep, unconditional belief in yourself, maybe not always your abilities, but yourself. And then I think the other important aspect of it, and I worked at an organization for a long time where one of our values was reject false trade-offs. And I think in so many ways, that is for me, the definition of being bold is so often we think in terms of these binaries, you know, it's this or that, it's either or. And I think a big part of being bold is rejecting that binary trade-off, rejecting that it has to be one or the other and recognizing that in many cases, I would argue all cases, there's a third way that is often, you know, better and and more fulfilling than either of the binary options.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Yeah, I love that because I do think a lot of times people think being bold is one thing or the other. You know, it's brush, it's bold, it's you know, it's jumping, it's not thinking, it's and it's really the opposite. It's very pragmatic, it's very thoughtful. You don't do it overnight usually. Uh, it isn't a superhero type of thing. So I love that it gives you an intentional introspection, so to speak, of like what's possible. So when's a time in your life that you lived aligned to your definition?

SPEAKER_01 3:19

So if we take that definition, I do believe it's something that I've I've lived for my life in in many capacities. And, you know, from a very early age, I was very committed to, I was a competitive swimmer and an athlete and very committed to that pursuit, but I also loved learning and academics was really important to me. And, you know, finding a way and committing very early to, you know, I'm gonna do well in both these pursuits and reject the trade-off. You know, I trained with a group of swimmers who went to a special school and, you know, focused quite narrowly, um understandably on swimming. And, you know, likewise, I had friends in school that, you know, they lived and breathed academics and trying to find a balance, what that looked like for me and recognizing that it wasn't one or the other. There was a world in which I could, you know, make both work for me.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

I love that. When you think about that moment, what do you think it led to that if you hadn't done it, it would it wouldn't have happened?

SPEAKER_01 4:21

I honestly think it has led to everything. It led to me, you know, choosing a college in in Stanford that prioritized both academic and athletic excellence in my industry, career. You know, it led to me recognizing that given my strong academic roots and passions, I could find a career path that very much blends. So I've led a couple of research centers now in organizations and rejecting that false trade-off that you can only do academic research in academia in a university, and likewise you can only do applied work with organizations in industry and finding a way through both my PhD, which was obviously in in a university, and now in organizations to blend those two different fields that so often do remain quite quite separate.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Yeah, you're kind of blazing your own trail, right? I think you know, creating your own adventure. You see these ways that people are now creating portfolio careers and creating different ways of achieving, you know, an end result that we thought there was only a one way to get there. And I think I'm always in awe of that. And I think I continue to probably push push it as well. So I'm glad for you know, people like you and also others who are out there doing their thing. And and I think ultimately it helps people see what's possible. Oh, well, she didn't take the standard route or she didn't take whatever was expected or ascribed to like what she was supposed to do. So I think when you think about being a swimmer too, like that that's a bold pursuit and a lot of dedication and discipline. What do you think is the habit that you've retained from being a swimmer, if any?

SPEAKER_01 6:03

I think the habits are, you know, the ones you would expect, the the time management, the discipline, the commitment. I'm a huge goal setter um to this day. And that's very much, you know, instilled in me from my swimming roots. But I think the bigger picture is it really instilled in me deep passion and fascination for teamwork. And how can you bring together a group of people in an athletic setting or in a corporate setting in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? And that, especially swimming collegiately in the US, you know, that was fascinating to me. How you could, you know, extract the best out of people in this team environment in a way that makes yourself and everyone else better.

Book Inspiration

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Yeah, I love that. And there's so many bold moments that we can have. And I think also for me, you know, I played sports in college and as an adult, I play sports. So just being able to understand also the team capacity to that, like the team culture piece. I think you don't, I don't think I realize it in high school playing sports or even in college. Honestly, I was just out there having fun. I think now as an adult, when I play sports, like it's interesting just to see the dynamics and it's really fun to see me and my husband play together. We're on the same team, which is really good. Um, but I think it's just it's just something that keeps evolving, like what our definition of being a leader is and what it looks like and how you how you analyze it. So when we get to this topic, which you wrote a book, Your Best Meeting Ever. Seven Principles for Designing Meetings that get things done. So I love this, Rebecca. And I think, you know, in the sense of being able to understand the best meeting ever, I think I think meetings get a bad name now. But why a book about meetings?

The Visibility Trap Of Meetings

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Well, in many ways, it boils down to my my fascination and passion for for teamwork and collaboration. You know, ever since I started to study organizational behavior and organizational design, I've been passionate about collaboration. When we look at, in particular, the last two to three decades, we've seen the time that we spend collaborating with other people as knowledge workers or desk workers, it's increased significantly. You know, 50% or more we're now spending of our time collaborating. And yet, so much of that collaboration is invisible, right? It happens through so many different people, places, processes, technologies. It's very difficult to understand and measure and improve. And when we think about 85% or 90% of our time on this activity, the opportunity is massive in terms of helping organizations fix this practice that consumes so much time. And in so many ways, meetings are the tip of the iceberg in the sense of they're the most common collaborative activity that we participate in our organizations. And from a research perspective, it's so fascinating because we have this activity, we continue to devote, you know, 10, 15, 20, 25 hours a week to, and yet it's so highly dysfunctional. And why is it that you know we cling to an activity that we know is broken, we dread, we have this visceral negative reaction to, and wanting to create uh what I think is a full solution rather than these half-hearted hacks that, you know, are often are often emitted and talked about in terms of having an agenda is not going to improve your meetings. It really does require a systems thinking approach and rethinking our collaboration and communication system.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

Okay. I love this because I think, you know, some people are in way more meetings than 25. Like 25 sounds like a sweet week for me. You know, like it's definitely when I was in the corporate study, it was easy to be in 12 hours. Yeah. And your your probably response to that was like, How do you get any work done? And it that's probably really dysfunctional. And I would agree, Rebecca.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

And it's, you know, it's it's the word, and we all use them. Yeah, and some people like to brag about it, right? Oh, that that I'm in this many meetings. And it's like, I don't look at it like that.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Well, it it's become such a badge of honor, and there are many, it's so fascinating in terms of the the psychological reasons why this happens. And, you know, when we think about collaboration, it's largely invisible. Meetings are very visible, they're the most visible form of work in so many organizations. Often we can see people's calendars, we can see them in a conference room, we can see the Zoom screen. And because of that, we know that humans naturally associate visibility with value. They associate presence with productivity. In so many cases, you know, the knee-jerk reaction, if you're unsure about making progress, if you're unsure you're being productive enough, is to put a meeting on the calendar because that is a very visible representation of progress and productivity, regardless of whether anything happens in the meeting that's that's meaningful in moving work forward.

Social Contracts And Meeting FOMO

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Yeah. I used to like celebrate when people come late, you know. So, like, you know, they'd be like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm five minutes later or three minutes later. I was like, no, that's actually great because I could like, you know, get a drink of water, I could say, you know, something to my assistant, like in that sense. So, like, again, I think there's like indicators too along the way that it's too much or too many, or things aren't really maybe the most functional. But I think individually within a system, you know, like uh I work in in healthcare. So in the sense of when we're doing consulting, it's like that system has a way of running. And I would say maybe there's a personality of some organizations to be more meeting driven, and I'll just put driven in air quotes that you all can't see, or also be email driven, or both. And so I think I've kind of lived probably in that both world, and a lot of people do. So when we think about how this is something that, you know, it's a relic. You actually say that in a book, that it's relics from a bygone era. What does that mean and why do we cling to it? I think I, you know, we did just talk a little bit about how, you know, the connection to value, visibility, and perceived productivity. Um, is that the main reason that we still do what we do and don't start to write the ship?

SPEAKER_01 12:23

I do think it's it's a key driver. Another one is, you know, we know that innately humans are social beings. And for a long time we didn't have technology to communicate. And the natural default way to communicate was face to face. And if you weren't communicating face to face, you know, it often meant you were outside of the circle, you were outside of the tribe. And we continue to have this tribal mentality associated with meetings where we know that as soon as someone extends, and we all feel it, someone extends a meeting invite to us, we feel that a social contract has been established. We feel obliged to accept that invite, even when we know the meeting is probably going to be a waste of time. And we start to feel like declining the meeting is not just declining the meeting, it's declining the person behind the meeting. And that guilt, you know, is so hardwired into us as social beings. We fear missing out, we fear being left out of the group, we fear missing information. And so part of this as well is this deep social underpinning that is established as soon as a meeting invite is is extended or or put on the calendar.

Cut Meeting Debt

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Yeah, like you how do you decline your boss's invite, right? When you know, like, wow, I could probably do this and just uh I could probably record a Loom video with three slides, walk through it, send it to her. She could watch it in five minutes or less, you know? But I would say a lot of people aren't open to that yet. And maybe we're getting there. You know, you start with, you know, you you wrote an incredible book and it has particular principles. And there are seven principles that you have. And the very first one is cut your meeting debt. What does that mean? And kind of set us up for like how we assess our calendars or how we get rid of some of that debt that we have.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Sure. So, and the premise of your best meeting ever is meetings are a product, right? Meetings are a product, they're the most important product in our entire organization. They're where decisions get made, priorities get set, often culture gets built or broken, and yet they're the least optimized. So if we are going to treat meetings like a product, we should be applying the same product design principles that we know make the world's greatest products great to our meetings. So each of the seven chapters walks through a product design principle applied to meetings. And the first one, as you mentioned, is cut your meeting debt. Just as we have technical debt in our products, we have shortcuts and fixes that build up over time that don't often work together. The same thing happens with meetings where we have all of these legacy meetings that build up on our calendar that perhaps once were useful, but no longer makes sense given the current state of work. Often I find that when I am brought into an organization or work with an organization, the meeting debt has become so bad. It's so ingrained in the calendar. There's so many social contracts that have been established that often the most effective solution is a complete calendar cleanse. I sometimes call it a meeting doomsday, in terms of resetting the slate, canceling those recurring meetings for 48 hours, and then giving employees both the permission and the tools to recreate their calendar from scratch in a way that is going to be most valuable for them given the current state of the business.

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Yeah. I think I started doing this probably around, I want to say almost 10 years ago with my schedule. And what I had found, and it was more so just from a pain point perspective, is that I couldn't keep up with how many direct reports I had with my one-to-ones and my own work and all the other meetings. And like literally, I don't think I ever had less than eight a day in my entire kind of corporate role setting. So the one thing that I realized is that I was having these one-to-ones with my reports because I value them. I want them to know they have time with me. But I realized that one, they didn't need to be that long. And two, maybe they didn't need them every week. You know, and they were saying yes because I'm, you know, it's it's their supervisor sending them a one-to-one invite, decline. I can't imagine saying decline to that, right? So I think what I started doing then was quarterly. I look at my calendars and then I do reset and I let my team know, like if you see things go off, you know, I give them, you know, off the calendar, I get them, you know, the update of why we're doing it. And so that's been helpful. Is there a certain amount of time you should do that cleanse, as you call it? You know, is it quarterly, annually?

Measure Meeting Value

SPEAKER_01 17:01

I recommend at least once a year. Ideally, you're doing it once, once every six months because our business has changed so quickly. We change, you know, we grow into new roles, we adopt new team members, we have different priorities. The business changes so fast, often much faster than our calendar. Now we know those one-to-one meetings in particular are incredibly important. And there's, you know, quite a bit of research to suggest that they are the, if not one of the most important forms of communication between the manager and the direct report. But also the research suggests, you know, they don't need to be 30 minutes, they don't need to be an hour, even 15-minute check-ins every week are enough to maintain that really important communication relationship between the manager and the direct report.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

Yeah. Okay, wonderful. So make sure you put that on your schedule to do, but you know, maybe just put it on your calendar right now for, you know, May, end of May, and then you're gonna begin the next six months. So maybe try that just as a quick tip. So now that we've talked about that first principle, can you walk us through the rest of the principles from the perspective of meeting design? So volume measurement, structure flow, et cetera, and and give a quick example, if you can?

Meeting Minimalism

SPEAKER_01 18:21

Sure. So the second one is around metrics, right? We should be measuring just as we do our products, we should be measuring our meetings. Most people, most teams, most organizations don't. And there are several different ways we can measure our meetings. One of the most, you know, the lightest lift and most effective ways to do this is as the meeting organizer, ask attendees after about 10% of your meetings, was this meeting worth the time you invested? It's sometimes called roadie. I originally learned it from my colleague Elise Keith. And it's similar to ROI in product development applied to meetings. And why it tends to be effective is we have this negative bias towards meetings, as we've spoken about, where because there's this natural negativity associated with them, we can't just ask our employees, you know, how effective are your meetings? Because we trigger this natural negativity. But if we ask them about their time, was this worth the time you invested on a scale of zero to five? Everyone has an intuitive sense of how valuable their time is. And that tends to give you much more valuable information. A follow-up question that I and Elise often recommend is what would it take for me as the organizer to boost that rating by one point? So you're giving some actual feedback. We don't want to overwhelm employees with survey fatigue already, you know, there's too much survey fatigue in organizations, but that one question after about 10% of your meetings, and then pairing it with a lot of analytics that we can already glean from our meeting tools. There's a wealth of information in terms of understanding, you know, was the airtime balanced within the meeting? What was the engagement level? Were people multitasking in the meeting? All of these new AI tools and new meeting tools can give us very important information to help us course correct. And again, it's never the purpose is never surveillance or policing behavior or calling out bad behavior, but putting that information in the hands of attendees and in the hands of the organizer as very valuable information to understand is the meeting I'm designing, is the meeting I'm showing up for, or is my contribution in the meeting effective? How can I improve it so that it's more effective for everyone in the room?

SPEAKER_00 20:53

Yeah. So different ways that you can measure effectiveness there. I think also in the sense of are there nonverbal or non-survey like cues that we can be looking for when we're maybe falling off or people aren't engaged as we had hoped in a meeting?

SPEAKER_01 21:07

Absolutely. Even looking at, you know, where people's eyes are glazing, you know, are they using certain words? Are they starting to use filler words? Are they, you know, going off the agenda, using sentiment analysis? All of this is, you know, it's up and coming. And it wasn't the case that we could measure this two or three years ago in most cases. But now it becomes really exciting if we use this information intentionally and responsibly and for the best interest of the team and organization. It's a massive untapped potential.

SPEAKER_00 21:41

Yeah. So the next one is structure. Like so the structure of your meeting, how how do you become a meeting minimalist?

SPEAKER_01 21:48

It's it's one of my mine as well. And you know, there's such a powerful, I think, sort of contrast and comparison in product development where we consider we know the greatest products are our minimalists. Minimalist. Google Homepage is the classic example where there's one search bar. It's very clear what you're doing. There's no fluff. There's no filler. The same should be true with our meetings. And in particular, becoming a meeting minimalist means looking at the four key dimensions of your meeting. So the length, the cadence, the attendees, and the agenda items, and thinking about across each of those four dimensions, how can we minimize that dimension? So, can we take that 30-minute meeting and make it a 25-minute meeting? Can we make it a 27-minute meeting? I studied an individual in the book who ran 27-minute meetings because that starts to jolt people out of autopilot. They start to take the time much more seriously. They start to take the meeting much more seriously. Standing up in the meeting tends to result in a shorter meeting, often, you know, 25% shorter according to the research. And so all of these different dimensions, there are strategies that we can put in place to help to make our meetings not only more efficient, but also more effective.

Designing Agendas That Do Jobs

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah. Is there a min-max that we should be, you know, just generally paying attention to, like a normal meeting, you know, Gary Vee, what does five-minute meetings, 10-minute meetings? And we all aren't going to be Gary V. Is there a minimum that we should be meeting or is just it just depends? And then, you know, I think anything for me, honestly, over 90 minutes, unless it's, you know, for a meeting. And I'm not talking about workshop or those types of things. I'm just talking about meeting. Anything really over 90 minutes really is a strain. And honestly, over 60.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yes. I as soon as you get above for sure 60 minutes, we have short, short attention spans. And inevitably, given the busyness of you know everyone right now, people start to multitask, people start to tune out very, very quickly. I'm a big fan of 25-minute meetings because I think you get that, and and the the five minutes should be ideally taken off the beginning because we know, so you should be starting at you know 10.05 versus finishing at 1025, if we're talking about, you know, the 1030 meeting. And that's because we know that meetings also suffer from what's called Parkinson's Law, meaning time expands to fill what's allotted. If we give a meeting 30 minutes, it will probably take 30 minutes. And even when we cut the five minutes off the tail end of a meeting, those five minutes are often still available on everyone's calendar and you tend to also fall victim to this Parkinson's law. Whereas if you start five minutes after the half hour or hour, you're not going to lose that time because the meeting hasn't started yet. Everyone's showing up and you're ending at the the 10 30 when it's a natural, you know, place to transition to the next meeting or to the next activity on the calendar.

SPEAKER_00 24:57

Yeah, I like that. So starting a little later, which is actually really good to me as a because sometimes I have the back to back, certainly not as much as I used to. But then, you know, the 1001, the 1002 isn't going to impact the meeting. So the 1005 to 1030 sounds like a nice sweet spot. How do you lot the time, the best use of your time with those 25 minutes?

Engagement And Environment

SPEAKER_01 25:17

That's it, that's a great question. So the agenda is so, so important. And it's actually fascinating to look at the research on agendas. And this is great research from my colleague uh Steven Rogelberg, who I first was introduced to it by. And there's no conclusive evidence to show that having an agenda actually improves our meetings. And that is because it's not about having the agenda, it's really about how we design it. And we know that whatever we put first on the agenda list is going to disproportionately take up most of the time in the meeting. And so the more you can put those essential mission critical items at the top of the agenda list, the more likely you are to get to them because inevitably they're going to take up more time. So that's one strategy in terms of agendas. It's very important to be clear on what is the job of each agenda item. And so I'll often recommend that people frame each agenda item in terms of a combination of a verb and a noun. So it's not just, you know, budget discussion, it's a line on the Q3 budget. You're being very clear on what is the job for each agenda item to do. And then based on that, you're very clear in terms of, okay, the job's been done, we can move on to the next agenda item. And I think in terms of the proportion of time we spend on each agenda item, it is quite specific to the meeting. You know, if we have only one topic, one job to do in the meeting, then that's probably going to warrant uh more time within the meeting than if we have, you know, four equally important topics that that we need to work through and each have a job to be done.

SPEAKER_00 27:03

Yeah. When I think of some of the meetings that I've been in, I think some people get stuck in using the same format or the way that they always run things. I realize some meetings maybe need to have that, but I do feel in the sense of at least general asymmetry with you know how they they've done it before. But I think with regard to getting bored or knowing what's next or not really being engaged as much, those are the types of meetings that I think I can check out of potentially because it's just like, oh, been here, done that. It's like a you know, different day, this same comment, same type of thing. So so changing it up a little isn't a bad thing uh for us to do.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

No, and we see in so many cases, you know, in many cases, 50% of agenda items are recycled meeting after meeting in particular. And then we see, you know, the same meeting room, the same dull wallpaper on the wall. And chapter five of the book is is all around engagement. And an important part of meeting design is ensuring that your participants are engaged in the meeting. And part of that is the content of the meeting, but there's a big part around the environment. We know that color, greenery, lighting, fresh air, all of these things, you know, stimulate us and allow us and enable us and prime us to show up more engaged in the meeting. Even if we're wanting to show up engaged, you know, there are all these environmental cues that shape our level of engagement in the meeting, where often we don't consider them, but I think we ought to, again, in terms of creating this environment that's designed in service of the user of the meeting, which is our attendees, and ensuring that they remain engaged and committed to the meeting.

Apply Systems Thinking

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Are meetings better if you have coffee? You know, like in that sense of like the user-centric design that you're talking about, really what what that chapter is all about, is really like what's the experience of the meeting? So, and that is such an incredible I love that word. I'm really honed in on that myself in the sense of like how we offer, what we do in our membership, you know, how we explore different topics. What's the experience, right? So I don't think anyone's at least I've never heard anyone but you really help us understand like it should be an experience. Like you you shouldn't be in the basement with no windows, and you know, I think this is something I've always thought about because it's something that personally, like if I'm going to be someplace, I do want light. I do want to see, you know, trees or greenery or something like that. I do think coffee and tea helps out when you have a 5 a.m. meeting, you know. So like uh surgeons, they meet early. So it's important to think about those things. Like, this is this a meeting you would be excited or at least want to go to, right? Thinking about the user experience is a really, I think, great way uh to set up a successful meeting as well. Now we skipped over four, which was apply systems thinking. What would be some key things for us to understand about how to apply systems thinking to our meetings?

SPEAKER_01 30:04

And the premise of this one is, you know, often we blame meetings for being the problem, for being, you know, everything that's wrong with work. Usually they're a symptom of a bigger problem, and that is a broken communication system.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 30:18

And there are many aspects of this, but the most important thing that an organization can do in this respect is give employees clarity in terms of what actually deserves to be a meeting in our organization. Because if employees don't have that clarity, they're going to start to put work in email, put work in Slack, they're going to start to operate in an environment where you're not sure where the real work is happening. And by virtue of that, you tend to then need to fall back on meetings to get that alignment, do the information gathering that should be done asynchronous. One of the biggest problems organizations face right now is employees don't know which tool to use for which purpose. And we're seeing this with AI as well. And when they don't have that clarity, they have to default and fall back on face-to-face meeting type culture because that becomes the only reliable way to get people's attention and to ensure that you know you're getting the information you need to move work forward.

Rhythm And Midpoint Magic

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Yeah. Okay. So we're moving into so we have the apply the systems thinking, which we just talked about. We also talked about using user-centric design. And now we're getting our meetings into rhythm. So our timing of these. So principle six.

SPEAKER_01 31:44

This is another of my favorite ones because I think it's it's so underappreciated. As humans, we are hardwired for rhythm. You know, the way we talk, the way we breathe, our brain waves, they all follow a natural rhythm. And we should be designing our meetings as such to align with the rhythms of work. And there are many different rhythms of work. There's, you know, the strategic rhythm, how we structure our goals when we do annual planning. You know, our meetings should align with that cadence. Another very important one is the life cycle of projects. So often, you know, teams will schedule that weekly project check-in when in reality, we know from research that there are certain parts of the project life cycle that matter more than others. One of my favorite ones is the midpoint of a project. We know that exactly at the midpoint, when you're halfway from the start of the project to the deadline, there's this weird psychological power that happens in the sense of abundance turns to scarcity. So you've used up half the time, and that triggers this natural jolt of energy. And so great teams will recognize that and they'll decide we're going to schedule a meeting exactly at the midpoint, even if it's not, you know, on the Tuesday weekly project meeting, to capitalize on that surge of energy and align their team much more effectively than they would be able to do at any other point through the project, other than at the very start. And so thinking through, you know, we probably don't need that weekly project check-in for all of our projects. But if we schedule a project check-in at the very beginning and we design it as such, and there are lots of strategies to do that, including holding a pre-mortem. So, you know, imagining the project has failed and working backward to understand what led to that failure. The midpoint is another really important one that teams often don't take advantage of. And then a third aspect of this rhythm is ensuring we're building in breaks and pauses, breaks between meetings, breaks within the day, and then in some cases, no meeting days entirely to give us space for that that deep thinking.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

What is your opinion about people putting a dollar sign on meetings? I know when I would sit in some of my meetings at Duke or at Dartmouth, that I would be like, wow, this is an expensive meeting, right? So even before like people started doing this, I was, you know, looking at who was around the room. So what's your opinion about that? Or what did what have you found out about, you know, should we or shouldn't we use a some type of metric or you know, looking at, you know, the you were talking about the different cycles of a of a meeting and those types of things.

The Cost Shock Metric

SPEAKER_01 34:31

And there are lots of, you know, I've seen it in many different capacities. Organizations will sometimes bake in these calculators explicitly to the meeting invite. And how I view this is I often call it a shock metric. You know, it's a metric that can shock people to recognize just how bad the problem is. That, you know, a hundred thousand dollar meeting that no one has questioned. And there are examples of, you know, meetings where you start to, there was a great Harvard Business Review piece a while back where it was an incredibly, I think it was in the healthcare space, an incredibly expensive meeting where they realized how expensive it was. They calculated the cost and then they backtracked and no one could understand why the meeting was put on the calendar. You know, some assistant put it on because they were directed to do so, and it was very unclear what the purpose or intent was. So it can be useful in that respect, but it doesn't do much to help us change behavior or to solve the underlying problem.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

It's like one piece of data that we can see.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Exactly. Exactly. There's no information in that cost calculation other than it likely being a waste of time, but also not always, because we know that, you know, the time and the people in the room don't necessarily at all correlate with value. And we also need to understand, you know, how do we start to measure value in addition to some of the more traditional metrics?

SPEAKER_00 35:58

Yeah, love that. All right. So we end out with principle seven, which is technology, and it's all about innovate and iterate.

SPEAKER_01 36:05

And we know that we've seen various forms of technology infiltrate our meetings for for better or worse. PowerPoint was the early one where again, we start to use this technology in a very performative way that can be very dangerous. When you create a slide deck and all the effort is put into designing the slide deck, you start to lose the purpose of the meeting in terms of moving work forward. And so much effort is spent on the design of the slides and not on the actual conversation. And there's also, you know, a real risk of us distilling slides into these sanitized bullet points that, you know, often are a disservice to the meetings that are really supposed to be about debate and discussion and you know, really digging in. We're seeing this again with AI, where there are so many aspects of our meetings that can be improved with AI, scheduling, automating action items, transcription, but there are also so many areas where AI can do more disservice to the meeting than benefit. And one of those areas is people sending their digital twins to meetings and not showing up themselves. And, you know, we're getting to a situation where most people in desk worker capacities have been in a meeting where there's one or more digital twins. Sometimes you'll you'll join the meeting and half the room is is you know is bots.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yeah. So tell us more. Everyone might not know what a digital twin is. So tell us more about what that is and then literally how it impacts a meeting.

SPEAKER_01 37:43

So a digital twin, you know, there there are multiple different definitions, but there are two types of ways you can essentially send an AI bot to a meeting. You can bring along an AI transcription bot. So often you'll show up at the meeting as a human with a friend who is, and then you you also get into the situation where you have five note-taker bots, you end the meeting, and you have five slightly different versions of reality of what actually happened in the meeting. So that's problematic in itself.

SPEAKER_00 38:14

Big time. I usually don't let them in, honestly. Like when those happen, unless someone's asked me in advance, which I totally would, you know, like just ask a couple questions around that. But I usually don't let them in because of that. What you just said, because it gets the minutes don't look the same, the what happened or the action items don't look the same. I have definitely found that.

SPEAKER_01 38:33

And it's distracting, it's it's incredibly distracting. So, you know, I I've been on several calls recently where you know they put a ban on these bots because it becomes the bigger problem is sending a bot instead of showing up yourself. And more and more we see CEOs in particular, and CEOs of you know large established meeting companies boasting about being able to, you know, send your bot to the meeting to even represent you in the meeting, to give you know your opinion on an idea or or perspective. And that becomes really dangerous because you know, we're starting to create an environment where, again, meetings just become the default solution to all of our communication problems. And if we think that we can send bots to meetings instead of showing up ourselves, you know, that meeting probably shouldn't have existed in the first place. It should probably be an email or an update in a project tracker. In the book, I talk about the 4D CEO test, and meaning a meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, debate, discuss, or develop yourself or your team. That's the first part. And, you know, so many of our meetings are not passing that test. You know, their status updates, their boss briefings, they're fundamentally information exchange. And in those cases, yes, I would be inclined to send a bot to those meetings as well because they can represent me. They can, you know, exchange information or transmit information back to me. But if we're designing meetings properly, such that they only pass that test, you know, very few cases can we afford to be sending our bots to meetings instead of showing up ourselves.

SPEAKER_00 40:18

Yeah. Probably going to have to have like a no bots allowed or do not send your bot to the meeting. I mean, I I can see that coming in the future. So I think you said an important thing though. We're not saying all meetings are bad. I think, you know, definitely that's not what you mean, or you know, you're not saying get rid of me. You're really thinking around what is this about, who should be in the room. You talked about two things that I think a lot of meetings do, or like boss briefings or like status updates. Where should those be? Where do those belong?

SPEAKER_01 40:46

Those should be asynchronous.

SPEAKER_00 40:48

Yeah. So like a Loom video or even a you know, a Zoom video, whatever they need to use.

SPEAKER_01 40:54

A project tracker. The key is make sure that you know your employees know what is meant to be sent through email, what is meant to be sent through our project tracker, what is meant to be sent through Slack, and have really clear norms around them. But no, there's a reason why I titled the book Your Best Meeting Ever as a positive promise, because there's nothing better than a good meeting. And you know, the purpose of making our meetings more efficient is to free up the time for the meetings that shouldn't be highly efficient, right? You're taking the time to think about the experience, to think about the wall color, to think about, you know, who's in the room, to ban the bots. And, you know, meetings are so expensive that if we do them right, they should be for that deep, you know, human-to-human interaction that we can't do through Slack or email or video.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Yeah. All right. Well, we're gonna end with this question, and I like it. Um, you talk about injecting delight into meetings. So people actually want to go, they want to show up, you know, like, oh, that's the best meeting ever. And it isn't like, you know, a type of moment where you're like gonna hand out free merch and giveaways and raffles and pizza, but those are pretty good meetings, I'm guessing. But you're like almost Maria Kondoing the agenda. What are some small design choices that we can make that help us really increase engagement and get people, you know, psyched to come to a meeting?

SPEAKER_01 42:19

And delight is is such an important one. And you know, I thought a lot about this word, and delight is this interesting combination between both joy and surprise.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

Okay.

Designing Delight Into Meetings

SPEAKER_01 42:32

And that element of surprise, I believe, is really important. And in your best meeting ever, I make the argument that every meeting that we organize should have at least one moment of delight. It can be a five-second moment, it can be a one-minute moment, something that is both unexpected and joyful. It can be as simple as, you know, shouting someone out for a job well done the previous week that they weren't expecting. It can be bringing the food, you know, the food that has some personal connection to you, and you're, you know, bonding over that personal history associated with the food item, but something that is, again, going to incite people to want to show up for the next meeting because they know it's not going to be, you know, rinse and repeat. It's going to be something that engages their senses and doesn't take away from the efficiency and effectiveness of the meeting. It actually adds to it because we're stimulating the senses in a way that people are going to remember the meeting and want to show up for the next one.

SPEAKER_00 43:34

Yeah, I love that. So delight, joy plus surprise and good surprise in a meeting.

SPEAKER_01 43:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

No, no negative surprises. Well, I'm so stoked for this to be out into the world. Please, everyone, pick up Rebecca's book and learn how to have your best meeting ever. Thank you so much for being on the Bold Lounge.

SPEAKER_01 43:55

Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Thank you for listening to the Bold Lounge Podcast. Through the continuum of bold stories, vulnerability to taking a leap, you will meet more extraordinary people making a positive impact for others through their unique and important story. By highlighting these stories, we hope to inspire others and share the journey of those with a bold mindset. We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and look forward to sharing the next bold journey with you.