Revolutionizing Meetings: From Sabotage to Strategy (with Rebecca Hinds)

0:00So at the highest level, right, technology should amplify what's best about us as humans and the technology. And we should be using technology strategically, not just because we can use technology. I talk a lot about AI. Unfortunately, I'm seeing more examples of AI making our meetings worse than making our meetings better. The number of note taker bots that come to meetings and the number of people who deploy their bots instead of showing up themselves. Those are the epitome of where technology can go wrong.

0:42Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical. The rest of the Radical Canter team is focusing on summer, and I am thrilled to be here today with Rebecca Hines. I'm talking to a bunch of my favorite authors, and Rebecca Hines is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever, and this book is going to help you love your work and the people you work with more than ever. So welcome, Rebecca. Thank you so much for having me, Kim. It's a thrill to be talking to you. And you start this book with an incredible story about how meetings actually were wartime weapons. So can you share that with folks? Sure.

1:31So I start the book with the story of what's called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. And this was a manual written in World War II era. It was written by the Office of Strategic Services, which was essentially the precursor to the CIA. It was only declassified in 2008. So relatively, you know, recently in the grand scheme of things. And it's fascinating. You know, the manual was designed to advise ordinary citizens. So people like all of us who were living in enemy territory, advise them as to different ways to disrupt the enemy, inject inefficiencies into enemy operations. And one of the tactics that was mentioned throughout the manual is meetings, you know, run unproductive meetings, long winded meetings, do everything through channels.

2:25Right. And you read this manual and certainly there are components where you can tell it's World War Two. But when we think about the aspects around meetings, you know, largely the same as, you know, how we might think about, you know, inefficient meetings today. And it's, you know, it's ironic. It's unfortunate. It's a little bit humorous that this, you know, tactic that was once advised as a weapon of sabotage is now very much business as usual in too many organizations. That's like pouring sand into the gas tank. Well, I think that was actually one of the gravel in the... Gravel or sugar, although sugar was rationed, so you probably wouldn't waste your sugar that way.

3:08Well, yes. And, you know, it's metaphorical today. It was less so back then, but still a lot of these tactics ring largely familiar. Yeah. Yeah. It's unbelievable. Well, thank you for starting that way, because I think that's how a lot of people feel about meetings. So there's one other statistic that really struck me. In the 1960s, how many hours a week did most leaders spend in meetings? Less than 10 hours, less than 10 hours per week. And by the turn of the century, you know, we were seeing that double, 23 hours per week spent in meetings. And we continue to see not only does the time in meetings increase, but in particular, since the pandemic, we've seen the time we spend across every level from individual contributors to executives, the time we spend in dysfunctional meetings increase.

4:09And that is, you know, when we think about communication, the communication system, right, that is a function of a broken communication system. There's no reason why we should be spending more time in dysfunctional meetings than we've ever spent before. We have all of this technology. The technology is often not working for us. So you have seven solutions to this problem. The get us back to the glorious years in the 1960s, the economy was growing faster and we were spending less time in meetings. But not no time in meetings. So you have seven things. Volume, measurement, meeting, minimalism, flow, engagement, timing, and technology.

4:50So let's start with number one. You have a radical suggestion for the volume of meetings on calendar. I do. And when we think about these seven ideas, they're very much grounded in product design principles. So the premise of the book is we need to treat meetings like a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. Decisions get made. And so we should be applying the same product design principles that we know make great everyday products work to our meetings. So volume is just as we have technical debt that builds up in our products, well, we have meeting debt that builds up on our calendars.

5:27I think we all feel it. These legacy meetings that perhaps were valuable six months ago, not valuable today. And so I've worked with organizations over the years to think about how do we do a calendar cleanse? I call it a meeting doomsday. It's essentially a 48-hour cleanse where employees will delete recurring meetings from their calendar. After those 48 hours have elapsed, they're invited to rebuild their calendars from scratch. So add back the meetings that have some value, but make sure you're designing them in a way that's going to be most valuable for the current state of work. And any meetings that lack value, don't bring them back at all.

6:08It gives that social permission to clean the slate. Often we feel so much guilt associated with pushing back or deleting meetings. This gives employees the social permission to do so. So we're going to sunset all recurring meetings. Sunset all recurring meetings that have outlived their value. And for the ones that still have value, figure out, okay, how do we design them across every dimension, length, cadence, attendees, agenda items to be most valuable for our current state of work. I love that. One of the people who I really enjoyed working with at one of my startups, then we also worked together at Google, used to come in every morning, look at his calendar, and routinely just cancel one meeting.

6:59And it felt like everybody was like, oh my god, you can't do that. That's so, you know, but it, it, it bought him an hour a day and that was really valuable. What do you think about that approach as, as kind of a version? I don't know if it's a softer or harsher version of the meeting cleanse. So I love, and what I, what I find in the most effective organizations, they, and our, our mutual colleague and friend, Bob Sutton, will talk a lot about subtraction and the importance of subtraction. Leidy Klotz as well has done amazing research. And what I see consistently is the most effective organizations, they have some rhythm where they are incentivizing or building in a subtraction habit to their day-to-day.

7:45And that's what essentially this is. You know, it's building and subtraction, not just our bias to add. So I love that aspect. We also need to recognize that meetings are highly interdependent on other people. You know, they're not something that just affects us as individuals. And that's the problem. You know, if you're, if there's a level of unpredictability, especially if you're in a position of power, you're deleting meetings, you know, there are all of these psychological factors that kick in. Employees overanalyze why was it deleted? You know, what does this mean? What is the hidden meeting?

8:19So that aspect I don't love, but, you know, we need to be diligent about the subtraction just as much as our knee-jerk reaction to add these things to our calendars. How do you know, like, for example, I believe a one-on-one meeting with each of your direct reports, if you are a manager, is, those are your most important. Do I, do I, do those meetings, they're standing meetings, do they also get subjected to the calendar cleanse? They should. Now, one-on-one meetings, I agree. There's no more important type of meeting for the well-being of your employees and your organization. These are meetings that, you know, in most cases should be on the calendar on a recurring basis.

9:06You know, weekly meetings, there's nothing a manager can do that's more impactful for the direct report. But we should be thinking about, okay, are they at the right cadence? Are they the right length? In particular, have we designed the agenda to make these meetings most impactful? I'm a big proponent for the direct report taking ownership in designing the agenda. Certainly, I think it should be a collaborative effort. But, you know, often we see these meetings being held very performatively, very much power driven, where it's, you know, largely the manager designing the agenda. Right. We need to think about, you know, how do we design these meetings, the agendas to ensure that we are setting our employees up for success and we're giving them what they need out of the meeting, not just what we need as the manager.

10:01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never give feedback in a one-on-one, I would say. Because then your employee dreads it. It's your time to listen to them and to learn what they need. Yes, solve problems. Yeah. So next, let's talk about suggestion number two. Now people have done this cleanse. They've figured out which ones they need to keep. They've scraped the barnacles off the ship. Next, you talk about measuring. So how do you measure the effectiveness of a meeting? So this is hard. It's less hard now than it was pre-AI. And I'm working with a lot of different companies to think about, okay, how do we actually use objective behavioral data to measure our meetings?

10:44But one of the simplest things we can all do is what I call, and I learned from my colleague, Elise Keith, return on time investment. After about 10 % of the meetings you run, ask attendees, was this worth the time you invested on a scale of zero to five? And as a bonus, what could I do as the organizer to boost that rating by one point? So you're soliciting feedback about the meeting. Just as you would in any other product or service, right? We would never launch a product to our customers without asking for customer feedback, surveying our customers. Now, it's not a heavy lift. It's two to three minutes after, you know, 10 % of the meetings you lead.

11:26But you get a ton of information. You get a ton of information. Often you find there are split ratings. You know, you have half the meeting attendees rating the meetings five or four, but you have another half rating them zero to one. Right. In that case, it's pretty clear the solution. The solution is half the meeting attendees don't need to be in that meeting. But most of us don't take the time to get feedback, to gather feedback. And what we also know to be true is there are two people, two types of people who tend to leave meetings more satisfied than anyone else. This is great research my colleague Steven Rogelberg has done.

12:06It tends to be the meeting organizer, right? The meeting organizer tends to leave a meeting. because they've designed it. And the person who talked the most is the second type of person because they were able to influence and share their opinions and dominate the airtime. So we need to get in the habit of not designing our meetings for ourselves as the organizer, but designing them for the users of the meeting, which are the attendees. And how do you do that? Do you just send an email out? Can you like bake that into the calendar invite automatically so it so it automagically does and then just delivers this?

12:47Yes, it should be automated. It should be anonymous in most cases. But there are certainly lots of, you know, automations we can do. I've seen automations built into work management platforms where, you know, the meeting concludes, you're given a follow up task to complete this two to three minute activity. certainly build it into calendaring systems as well. And then what I've also seen is organizations start to say, okay, if an organizer is getting low, low, low ratings, we're going to give them nudges to encourage them to design the meeting more effectively. And if they fail to do so, that meeting is going to be flagged as one that should be considered to be deleted permanently.

13:35Maybe a little training for the meeting organizer, a little help for them, and also maybe a little bit of, maybe a prompt for the meeting organizer to share the feedback and to have an actual conversation at the 10 minutes. You know, take 10 minutes once every 10 meetings seems like a good way to make sure it's on track. Yes, certainly. And I'm seeing so many examples of organizations do this really well. And that public sharing of the feedback gives employees a lot of confidence. And it demonstrates your leadership as an organizer in person within the organization. If you can think strategically about how do I take this feedback, share it, and use it to improve the overall design.

14:21Yeah, yeah. Love it. All right. Measure what matters. So what about meeting minimalism? How can we, we have fewer meetings and then we got to make the meetings sort of have a smaller footprint maybe. How does that work? So meeting minimalism really entails four key dimensions of our meetings. The length, the cadence, the attendees, and the agenda items. And for each of these dimensions, there are different strategies we can put in place to ensure not just that our meetings are more efficient, but also they're more effective as well. So thinking about the length, we know that meetings suffer from what's called Parkinson's law, meaning work expands to fill the time allotted.

15:05We all feel it. We give a meeting 30 minutes. Probably it's going to take 30 minutes regardless of whether it needs it or not. So really creative strategies in terms of, okay, how can we become more intentional about setting lengths. I studied an individual for the book who ran 27-minute meetings. And even a small change like that can jolt people out of the status quo because they start to question, okay, why is the meeting now 27 minutes? Did we really need 30 minutes? And a large part of this is just getting people out of the inertia that happens with meetings, getting people out of that rhythm of assuming that the 30-minute weekly meeting is the right cadence and length for the task at hand.

15:48It's only right because that's what our calendar tells us should be a meeting. There are no reason, no logical, rational reason why most of our meetings should be, you know, that default of 30 or 60 minutes weekly or monthly. we should be thinking much more intentionally about how we design those aspects because the next natural step and thing that happens is the attendees start to really question, okay, what is needed for this meeting to be effective? There was one guy I worked with also at Google, one of his OKRs every quarter was to end at least 50 % of his meetings early. And he would announce it at the beginning.

16:31And it was such a relief. It's like, all right, we're done. In fact, I was on a meeting today with a wonderful radical candor salesperson. And the meeting was an hour. And she said, I don't think we're going to need the whole hour. And everybody got 30 minutes back. Like what a gift. It was great. It's a gift. It's a, I, I, I, I share a little bit of research in the book on how powerful that can be. Time confetti, it's often called, you know, giving people back that the gift of time is one of the most powerful things we can do. And certainly we don't want every meeting to end early, but definitely giving people that gift of time back is just that.

17:12It's a gift. Another thing that you said that I say all the time, I wholeheartedly agree with this, is make all your 30-minute meetings 25 minutes and all your hour-long meetings 50 minutes because those five or 10 minutes in between meetings I mean a you have to go to the bathroom that certainly is one of the things but that's when most that that's when the best feedback I've ever gotten in my career has always happened in those yes spaces in between meetings certainly and then the question is and I did quite a bit of research probably a little bit too much research in terms of okay what happens when you start five minutes late versus end five minutes early or same with 10.

17:53And there are lots of reasons why it can be more effective to start the five minutes late or the 10 minutes late as opposed to ending early because one of the key reasons is you're not up against Parkinson's law, right? Those meetings at the end no longer exist. And so you're more likely, so that's, I studied some fascinating individuals who went through the thought process of, you know, where do you put those meetings? Do you put it on the front end or the back end? Yeah. So the other thing that you talked about that was very wise is the number of people in the meeting. One of the things I describe in Radical Cantor is there came a moment when I realized with my staff meeting that everybody who was in it felt like it was a waste of time and took too long, and everybody who was not in it felt sad and bad and left out.

18:42I'm like, this is the worst. How do you decide who needs to be there and who doesn't? I studied an individual. I don't know if it made it. I don't think it made it into the book, but he used to run these meetings and he became upset that no one was showing up to the meetings. So he started to make it a very closed group. It was an exclusive group of five or six people. And then everyone wanted to attend the meeting, right? Because there's this fear of missing out that is at the core of, but absolutely, you know, a lot of this is psychology. And what we know with, you know, a lot of certainty is once a team size, any team size, but this holds for meetings, certainly once a team size gets above seven or eight people, a whole host of negative consequences start to kick in.

19:32Sometimes it's called the Ringelman effect where social loafing kicks in, people start stop feeling accountable for the outcome. We start to veer towards consensus, people start to stop feeling comfortable sharing dissenting opinions. And in particular, when we start to think about decision making meetings, as soon as we get above seven or eight people, you know, the decision quality decreases significantly. We need to think very carefully about who needs to be in the meeting. And, you know, spectators don't need to be in the meeting, people who might need to stay abreast of what happens in the meeting but aren't actively contributing well they can if we can get the notes yeah a hundred percent and that's often a big problem you know if people feel like the information about the meeting what happens in the meeting is transparently shared after the fact well they're significantly less likely to feel like they need to be in the meeting because they can self-serve the information through, through other channels.

20:37There's a whole song about this in the room where it happens, right? So how do we, how do we make it be less important to be in the room where it happens? Transparency is a, is a key way to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's now talk about flow. I love this chapter. I have so many questions. So my first question is this, you made the point about Sandy Pentland, I think that was the name, to predict a team's success by studying their communication patterns. Can you describe in three words what the right communication pattern is? Maybe not three words. I'll give you 30. One of the biggest predictors of team effectiveness is equality, airtime equality.

21:26Yeah. Right. If we start to see, you know, you never want to create situations where everyone is contributing exactly equal. Right. That doesn't make sense. But all else being equal, if you're seeing wildly lopsided contributions in meetings, that is one of the biggest, best signs that the meeting doesn't need to be a meeting. Probably it can be a status update, a boss briefing, or, you know, it hasn't been designed in a way that is going to make the meeting more, most effective if you're having, you know, wildly different airtime distributions across participants. The bloviating bullshitter does a lot of harm.

22:06Yes. I think. Yes, I agree. Okay. So what about tools? What, talk to me about tools. Like I have, I have so many questions here. So talk to me about tools. Oh, there's so much here. You know, we could talk for hours and hours just about this piece. It's, you know, every organization is under, you know, under pressure from an ineffective, unproductive communication system. It looks different in every organization. But this is why we saw dysfunctional meetings increase through the pandemic. Organizations started to stockpile all of these communication tools, Slack, Zoom, Asana, Figma, Canva. None of them spoke well together.

23:00Work started to live in four, five, six different places. Employees started to confuse urgency with importance. The Slack ping that comes in that immediately gets to the top of the priority list. When work starts to live in five different places, when workers are no longer sure where to go to find the real work, well, meetings start to become that default solution because they start to feel and sometimes are the most reliable way to get information or share information. it becomes this really toxic spiral where if we don't take a step back and understand, okay, what is the specific purpose of each tool and how should I be using each tool?

23:42What are the SLAs? You know, what happens when a Slack ping comes in? Do I need to respond to it immediately? Well, if you don't create the expectation that that's not the case, employees will default to that, you know, rapid ping, ding, response. It becomes very, very detrimental. And we're seeing it now with AI on another level. You know, there's a whole new subset of tooling that employees feel pressured to respond to and with. Often, you know, there's not a concerted effort into what is the bigger communication system and how do I use each specific tool in a strategic way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

24:23And I think also there's like, I mean, I've managed to make my phone never, ever make a noise and my computer never, ever makes a noise except a phone call that will make a noise. So that's great. But why do we have all these things digging it? You can't really hear yourself think. This is why notification pausing is so important. Being able to shut off the, the pings and dings because their dopamine hits and we have natural human reactions. I've done a lot of research over the years on collaboration tools. We call it the toggle tax that happens within organizations where you can look at, and there's been research to suggest that if we are talking about an enterprise organization, a Fortune 500 organization, workers pre-AI were switching between tabs and apps 1200 times per day you know it's enormous and that's not you know often not a direct impact of pings and dings it's a direct impact of work living in so many different places and you know technology not communicating we know that it can take more than 23 minutes to return back to your original task once you are distracted and go to another tab or app it's a massive cost that we don't often appreciate because we live in this, you know, technology enabled world where if we take a step back and really look at the cost, we recognize that, you know, the cost often offsets and overwhelms the benefit of potentially, you know, the one or two use cases you might use another tab or app or tool for.

26:09Yeah. Yeah. Protecting that builder time is important. That sort of hour and a half long chunks of time to where you can really think. All right. Another thing that I love that you said is the four D's. In a meeting, you should either decide, discuss, debate, or develop either a person or an idea. But what is the difference between discuss and debate? In my mind, I've lumped those two things as the same kind of meeting. they can certainly both happen in the same meeting debate is you are very clear on the options at play and you're weighing the trade-offs of each one discuss is more in the brainstorm camp right it's pre pre outlining the specific courses of action in terms of what are we even trying to optimize for.

27:05Now, I talk a lot about brainstorming and how those very early brainstorming, ideally, there should be some independent brainstorming before collective brainstorming. But discussion, I'd say, is much earlier in the coordination life cycle, where we might not even be sure of the specific courses of action we might want to debate and choose between. Yeah. Okay. That's really helpful. And I think in all of these kinds of meetings, we need to learn how to disagree. Yes. Like, we need to learn how to disagree with each other in public. It's really interesting. I have twins who are 17, and I did an AI class with my son last weekend.

27:49It was really fun. And I disagreed with something that the person who was facilitating the class said, and I said what I thought. And I thought my son was going to jump under the table or punch me in the nose. He was like, he just couldn't believe that I disagreed publicly. So why are we so reluctant to do this? Like, has maybe life has just become so psychologically unsafe that kids these days feel like they can't. Like, I disagreed in public. I can remember telling my art history teacher in high school, like, this modern art's a bunch of BS. And she's like, you do have strong opinions. Uninformed opinions, but strong.

28:34Yeah, it's so important. And when we look at the great, you know, organizations and the great leaders, you know, in history, they've created environments where it does feel safe to disagree. and you know we hear disagree and commit Amazon was was famous for for sort of uh championing that but in the best organizations there's a culture of we are going to debate openly and share dissenting opinions once we've committed to the idea or the course of action right we're going to live and breathe it ideally so there's not this you know untangling of the decision after the meeting. But I think as humans, you know, we avoid conflict, you know, all else being equal, and we veer towards harmony and consensus.

29:21And that is a big problem because you don't get the diversity of opinions, you don't get the real raw conversations, the creativity, the innovation, and so much of it does have to do with psychological safety and the environments we've we've created within our organizations. Yeah. And I think if we can't disagree in any of those other 4D meetings, then we have the meeting after the meeting, which, yes, and the meeting before the meeting, and that is a meeting proliferation disaster. Yes. And the politics, I mean, if there's not an openly transparent culture around disagreeing, well, if you disagree, you're going to try to move forward with that disagreement through back channel communications, which is almost always worse than the live conversation.

30:12Yeah. And the other really great point you made in this chapter is about strong asynchronous cultures. BS doesn't survive. Like you don't, you're not allowed to have the meeting after the meeting. So talk a little bit about why that is, because I think it was a really important point. And one of the biggest misconceptions, and we certainly saw this through the pandemic, I continue to see it in organizations, we often assume that technology is inherently synchronous or asynchronous. That is not the case, right? There's no technology that we can use every technology synchronously, and Slack is the classic example, where in theory it can be an asynchronous, rarely is it.

30:53And so building an asynchronous communication culture involves several different components where technology is often, you know, not as important as some of these other dimensions. Strong documentation cultures, strong written communication cultures. I work with an organization that has a norm around no lazy asks, right? If we're going to ask someone to do something, we need to provide the why, the context, you know, where it is in the scheme of priorities. Because if we don't, we're going to have to have those synchronous interactions to make sense of the complexity and ambiguity that we could have communicated in advance.

31:31My colleague, Jen Reimer, who's at University College of London, she's done a lot of research to show it's not just enough to document the end products and have, you know, the documents in their final state available for, you know, asynchronous consumption. We also need to be documenting the why behind decisions because we know organizations suffer from amnesia. You know, we relitigate decisions. We make the same decisions over and over again, bring up the same debates, right? If you're also documenting the why behind why certain decisions or courses of action have occurred within the organization, you also create strong asynchronous norms because people can also self-serve the why behind the decision.

32:14I love that and what about having scheduling time to read the doc like I want you to read this Rebecca I want you to read this by noon on Thursday am I then allowed to like try to put some time in your calendar or ask you to put time in your calendar or I think this is part of the genius of the of the Jeff Bezos with the first 10 minutes of the meeting we're actually going to sit together and read the document because otherwise half the people will have read it and half the people won't. And then we're starting off the meeting with everybody annoyed at everybody else. Yes. And there's the ideal state and then there's the realistic state.

32:57The ideal state is that everyone does their homework. You say there's a pre-read for a meeting and everyone is expected to do that. I will never do the pre-read, so I'm not even going to say that's ideal. It's not ideal for me. It's not, I mean, there's certainly organizations where that is the expectation and people show up prepared. The vast majority, that is not the case. It's ideal because everyone consumes information at different paces. They all are coming in with slightly different levels of context as to the meeting. And so it is ideal in the sense of everyone will need to spend different amounts of time.

33:45And so to structure the study hall as Amazon does brilliantly isn't ideal in the sense that people are going to finish the reading in 10 minutes versus 15 minutes. But the reality is that doesn't happen in most organizations. And so I am in those cases a proponent of having these study halls, blocking time on the calendar, because often we do need to carve out time and take control of our calendars to be able to bake in that necessary time for prep work. I think whether it's done by the individual or the organizer, it depends, again, on the culture and context. But it's often what is warranted in our overwhelmed, overburdened work life.

34:28Here is my ideal world. You can tell me if it would be your ideal world too. If you send me something and you want me to read it before Thursday at noon, there's a button in there and it says find time in my calendar to do this during working hours. And if I don't have any time to do it, I say I'm so sorry I don't have time. Part of the problem is when I get stuff like that, I'm like, I'm going to have to do that tonight at 1030 when I really need to be winding down and getting ready for bed. So that that is half a step to my ideal. My ideal is and I've seen this. I do this with with AI right now.

35:09If AI knows enough about you, the organizational context, it can help you make that determination. And, you know, you can imagine a world and I see it day to day where you've attended a meeting or you're prepping for a meeting and AI will auto schedule those focus blocks or those pre read times on your calendar and go the extra step. and, you know, figuring out, okay, given your specific working style and what's on your calendar and the level of cognitive taxing that is going to happen in preparation for this meeting and your chronotype, you know, where should I be scheduling this block in your calendar?

35:53And if you don't have the time, you know, auto-generating that note back to the organizer, not just saying you don't have time to attend to the pre-read, but also XYZ reason why here Here are my priorities. Here are where I think the meeting fits in. You can start to do this really exciting calculus that we've never been able to do before. Those are the things that I get really excited about in terms of the positive use cases of AI. AI for the win. And maybe AI will say, actually, Kim, you should skip this other thing because reading Rebecca's document is more important than anything else on your calendar.

36:30It's blocked, but you should skip something else. Totally. The more we shift from reactive, which is, you know, very dangerous with the pings and dings and dopamine hits, to proactive. You know, I wake up, I work for Glean, the AI platform. I wake up every day and my priorities are prioritized for me, given, you know, what the AI tool knows about me and my organization. it starts to become a much more efficient but also empowering way to work because your human capabilities are directed at the things that you are uniquely suited to handle and everything around it can start to be offloaded and delegated to AI or to other humans or deprioritized because of where they sit in the grand scheme of things.

37:21All right, I'm sold. I'm ready to be gleaned. All right. So engagement. Talk about engagement in a meeting. And we've talked about several dimensions of this already. So meetings should be designed for the attendees. They shouldn't be designed first and foremost for ourselves as the organizer. And so this has a couple different components. One is the agenda, making sure the agenda is relevant, useful for the people in the room. Sometimes this involves asking the people, you know, to weigh in or co-create the agenda. There's another big component about the physical environment in the book that we don't often think about.

38:05Whenever it's feasible, we shouldn't be having meetings in the same bland conference room. We should think about how can we inject energy, walking meetings. There are lots of reasons why walking meetings or standing meetings can be more effective plants, greenery, you know, the colors of the wall, the shape of the table, all of these aspects, air quality, natural light, all of these aspects fundamentally change how we collaborate. And, you know, they're underappreciated in how we design better meetings. Yeah. And also just the equipment needs to work. No, it's the technology makes a big difference.

38:44And there's also, you know, research I unpack in the book and, you know, audio quality, uh, our brains have very clear reactions to poor audio quality. And, you know, the harder it is for us to consume information, the more we start to trust that information less. And it's very fascinating. You know, we, um, you know, quality of sound of video is a key way that we process information and the key a key way through which we trust other people as well and information as well yeah yeah so important all right timing how do you decide when to have the meetings this is this is one of my favorite chapters of the book because we don't think about it enough.

39:38And there are various rhythms, you know, as humans, we are hardwired for rhythm, you know, the way we talk, the way we breathe, our steps when we walk, and great products, the same thing, you know, Netflix is giving us exactly the right recommendation at the right time, seemingly. And so we should be thinking about, okay, what are those rhythms within our organizations that we live and breathe every day and how do we align our meetings to those natural rhythms and so the obvious one is you know the fiscal calendar how do we think about aligning our meetings to take advantage of that fiscal calendar but also within you know project life cycles and team life cycles there are specific moments within a project or life cycle of a team that matter more than others one of my favorite examples is the midpoint you know there's fascinating research sometimes it's called punctuated equilibrium, where right in the smack middle of a team formation and the deadline, the end of the team life, whether that team lasts six hours, six days, six months, six years, the midpoint has this weird psychological power because we've officially used up half the time and abundance turns to scarcity, right?

40:57So there's this natural burst of energy. Most teams don't take advantage of that, right? Very few project leaders are saying, okay, we've reached the midpoint. I'm going to capitalize on this natural burst of energy. But it's one of the most effective things we can do to catapult our team to the finish line. It is much more effective in most cases to schedule that meeting in the midpoint than to default to this weekly project meeting cadence that is just by default. And so they're, you know, thinking about rhythms, thinking about what we know, which is actually a lot about what happens at certain points within the project.

41:35I talk about premortems and the psychology behind why that works at the start of the project. You know, imagining the project has failed and coming up with all the reasons why increases our ability to forecast risks. And it's most important at the start of the project because that's when optimism tends to be highest. researchers call it the planning fallacy, all of these moments in a project where we should be designing meetings around these moments and not defaulting to the weekly, monthly cadence that has very little to do with the work itself. That is so smart. I love that. All right. All right.

42:14Last but not least, technology, which is different from tools. So explain the use of technology in meetings? So at the highest level, right, technology should amplify what's best about us as humans and the technology. And we should be using technology strategically, not just because we can use technology. I talk a lot about AI. Unfortunately, I'm seeing more examples of AI making our meetings worse than making our meetings better. You know, the number of note taker bots that come to meetings and you know the number of people who deploy their bots instead of showing up themselves right those are the epitome of you know where technology can go wrong what are you all uh about the bot about the note taker bots in meetings because i have this very strong visceral reaction i started my career in what was then the soviet union and and everything I did was surveilled.

43:17But every room I was in had a listening device. And I didn't think I was afraid of it. I mean, I didn't think I was going to get arrested by the KGB or anything like that. So I thought, oh, who cares? It's listening. I'm still me. And then one time I left Moscow and I flew to New York and I called my parents every Sunday. And I found I was talking much more openly to my parents from New York than I was from Moscow. I was like, oh, it does have it. Like this, the surveillance, it has a dampening effect on candor, which is something I care a lot about. Yes. And that's why, and we've done some research on this because I was, you know, I think very clearly most people are frustrated by the proliferation of these note taker bots when you have you know more note taker bots in the meeting than attend human attendees are sending their bots instead and that is there are very few use cases where that makes sense as soon as you start to have more than one note taker bot in a meeting it's probably a sign you haven't designed the meeting effectively because you should only have one note taker bot you should figure out a way to disseminate that information but transcriptions are a bit different and that's where i've you know, long been on the fence because we talked about the importance of a documentation culture, a transparent culture, right?

44:43Transcriptions are a key lever to do that at scale. But at the same time, for exactly the reasons you've articulated so well, you know, there can be a negative impact. What's fascinating is we've done a little bit of research, and this isn't published yet, but it's it's coming in terms of depending on how you are approaching AI fundamentally, whether you see it as a threat or whether you're enthusiastic about it, well, you have very different reactions to AI transcription happening in meetings. If you are in an environment where the mental model around the technology is that of a teammate, where we really see the technology as amplifying our human capability.

45:26But if you're in an environment where, you know, AI is being cited as the driver of layoffs, there are these top-down mandates to use AI or else, as we see in so many organizations, and the technology is perceived as a threat, well, you have a very different reaction to transcriptions, and you start to filter more and more. So that, you know, the culture matters a lot. And certainly I'm a proponent of certain meetings. There should never be another AI bot in the meeting. But I think all us being equal, we should leverage the technology for transcriptions, but we should create environments where this technology is positioned as augmenting and amplifying human potential, not as a replacement or substitute.

46:16Yeah. Yeah. I think maybe if the transcription had a if we sunset the transcription then I would feel less surveilled by it or something like I really want the power of AI but I still feel I mean and so I've sort of have come around to accepting the note takers as inevitable and I view AI as a partner and all you know but I do worry that it has a dampening effect. Yeah. And again, this is where, you know, if we understand enough about the purpose of the meeting and what the end objective is, if it is for relationship building or honest, candid conversations, well, we're going to think about transcription a little bit differently as opposed to whether this is, you know, debating, discussing.

47:09you know there's a lot of overlap but the more we can be clear about what we're trying to achieve in the meeting and the level of emotional intensity involved and the psychological safety well we can start to also make the determination in terms of okay is a transcription um or a note taker bought really going to help the outcome of that um aim as opposed to be in tension with it I love it. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much. Writing a book is a labor of love. And I feel like your book is going to help so many different teams communicate better. Because really, in the end, the meetings that we have with each other, it's about the way that we collaborate as human beings.

47:53So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me, Kim. This has been fun. Really fun. Where can people find you and what should they do next? One, I would say they should buy your book. But what else do you want to tell people to do next? My website is RebeccaHines.com. So some of my research on meetings, but also other topics there. I lead our WorkAI Institute at Glean. So WorkAI.institute is where you can find all the research on AI that we've done. And I'm on LinkedIn as well. Amazing. All right, folks, you heard it here. Get your best meeting ever. Thank you so much. Take care.