Monday Morning Meeting #157
Welcome to another edition of the Monday Morning Meeting! Filament’s weekly newsletter filled with creative, innovative, useful, and interesting ideas and insights to help you get the most of your week ahead.
HERE WE GO AGAIN!
As St. Louis imposes another mask mandate (because COVID cases are spiking here among the non-vaccinated), we’re figuring out just how much of a pivot will be necessary to deliver on our commitments to the in-person meetings on our calendar.
We’ve not seen the official policy yet from the City, but expect we’ll be able to comply with some minor changes to our processes and procedures — and of course, we’ve become adept at delivering amazing virtual meetings for those customers who’d prefer to meet mask-free.
Stay tuned — and go get vaccinated!!
AN “UNREASONABLE” REQUEST
Every week we make an “Unreasonable Request” asking for help to move the needle for Filament in 2021. We don’t expect many of you to say “yes,” but know that we’ll never get an answer to a question we don’t ask. Here’s this week’s request:
Please send the Thinksgiving link (and/or this resource guide) to one person in your St. Louis network who works for a for-profit, innovation-focused organization who might be interested in entering a team.
IDEAS + LINKS
Doodle’s report on the State of Meetings in 2021 (.pdf) has some interesting nuggets, but it sent me looking for previous editions and I found these astounding research results in their 2019 survey (though I think the hours spent in meetings is super-low):
Professionals spend 2 hours a week in meetings they find pointless, a waste of more than $541 billion in employee time in 2019.
The average professional spends three hours a week in meetings – making two-thirds of all meetings unnecessary or a waste of time.
Cumulatively, 24 billion hours will be lost to pointless meetings in the next year.
More than a third (37%) of professionals consider unnecessary meetings to be the biggest cost to their organisation.
Hybrid policies aren't get-out-of-jail-free cards.
“I’m worried about organizations attempting to split the issue by playing the hybrid card and saying, 'Oh, you can apply to go remote.' Or 'It’s your choice.' Or 'We’re going to maintain these offices.' Or 'We’re going to do this-or-that dance.' And my fear is that without more structure around that, without more thinking and theory behind it, what could happen is a very haphazard location game within specific teams and units—where, say, half of the HR team is in-office and half isn’t. When it then comes time to make a decision, have a meeting, or build a new team, I see opportunities for frustration and chaos.”
Some employees view their organization's unclear remote work policies as a breach of trust. "That takes years to develop and minutes to destroy," Ryan told Protocol. "So I think there's just a little bit of chaos right now in the minds of business leaders because they haven't had to sit down and have a good think about the entire employee experience, and if they have broken trust with people, if they haven't given people a reason to be loyal to them, they're gonna have a harder time of it."
There are dozens of activities and frameworks to steal in this online toolbox from Hyper Island. For example, the Lightning Decision Jam is super easy and impactful.
I really like The Ready’s framework for building team “agreements” for how work gets done, and think it would work well for nearly any decision-making meeting:
Propose. Invite a team member to describe a tension they’re trying to solve, followed by a written proposal of a solution or experiment. Here is a template that we often use, which helps you sharpen your thinking around the relevant background, facts, assumptions, constraints, and potential risks. In this round, everyone listens without interjection while the proposer speaks.
Clarify. Going around the table, give each participant the chance to ask the proposer questions so that they can fully understand the proposal. As participants ask, the proposer answers. Help participants save suggestions (even ones phrased as questions) for the reaction round.
React. Going around the table, give each participant the chance to react and/or make suggestions that might improve the proposal. This is their chance to share their point of view. The proposer listens to the feedback but does not reply until the next round.
Adjust. Based on the questions and reactions, the proposer may edit the proposal (or not) and clarify anything that was unclear. The proposer may also remove the proposal at this time if they no longer wish to pursue it based on what they’ve learned.
Consent. Going around the table, give each participant the chance to voice an objection if they have one. An objection is defined as a reason this would be unsafe to try or would cause irreversible harm to the team or organization. This is a high bar by design, as the goal here is progress — a safe step toward resolving the original tension. If there are on objections, this is the final step.
Integrate. If there are any objections, ask objector(s) to work with the proposer to edit the proposal, making it smaller, faster, better, cheaper, or whatever is required to achieve consent from both parties. Once all objections have been addressed, the proposal is accepted.
A process (that includes using game cards) to help prioritize all your project ideas.
This interview of “thinking” researcher and writer Annie Murphy Paul by Ezra Klein is totally worth a listen (or read), but what stood out was this bit on fidgeting:
Being still is not necessarily our natural state, certainly not for long periods of time. And so when we have to be still in an office or in a classroom, we have to inhibit our natural urge to move. And that uses up some of the mental bandwidth that could otherwise be applied to our learning or our work.
And then, in the case of kids who have attention deficit disorder, it’s actually the case that they use physical activity as a kind of stimulant just the way an adult would drink a cup of coffee before they needed to focus. Kids with ADHD use movement to kind of get them into the right mental state where they can concentrate. So meanwhile, parents and teachers are trying to get them to sit still so they can think, when really these kids, and many of us, need to move in order to think.
And one strand of research that I just love that I included in this section is about fidgeting. Again, because of our brain-bound attitudes, we see fidgeting as sort of gauche or maybe almost shady, like why is this person — why can’t they be still? When actually fidgeting is this brilliant kind of very subtle way of adjusting on a moment-by-moment basis our arousal, our physiological state of alertness.
And so if we were more intentional about fidgeting, we could even develop, and psychologists are exploring this, different kinds of fidget objects that induce different kinds of mental states in us that really precisely calibrate our mental state through this “embodied self-regulation,” which is the phrase that one of these gesture researchers used. So all these different kinds of movements from the macro to the micro we could be using in a much more thoughtful and intelligent way, intentional way, to modulate the way our brains work.
Crows aren’t fooled by the magic the way humans are.
A joy generator. Go ahead, give it a click!
Decisions are easier to make when you realize they’re not always one way:
One-way door. These decisions are almost impossible to reverse, so the door only swings one way. Like firing an employee. Selling your business. Ending a vendor or supplier relationship. Generally speaking, once you make a one-way-door decision, there's no going back. (Bezos also calls these Type 1 decisions.)
Two-way door. These decisions are reversible, so the door swings two ways. Like hiring a new employee. Starting a side hustle. Providing a new service. Creating new pricing models. While two-way-door decisions can seem life-and-death, especially before you make them, with a little time and effort, they can be tweaked or modified or even reversed. (Bezos also calls these Type 2 decisions.)
The “Lizardman’s Constant” explains so many things:
Lizardman’s Constant is an idea proposed by Scott Alexander that each poll always has about 4% weird answers. In one poll, 4% of Americans said that reptilian people do control our world and, in another 4% answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever been decapitated?’
So many great nuggets in this list of 25 Microhabits of Great Managers, including this one:
“A startup doesn’t just move fast — it moves too fast. Our jobs change too quickly, requiring a constant adjustment to how we operate to stay effective. A monthly reflection is the single most valuable tool I’ve found for scaling yourself in a fast-paced environment with continually increasing responsibilities. This is also where we establish a lot of trust and I show care for each team member, which in turn allows me to push the team harder on a daily basis without erosion,” says Jaleh Rezaei, co-founder and CEO of Mutiny.
She advises setting up specific 1:1 monthly meetings with each team member, where the report reflects on the three things that went well the past month, and three things they’d like to go differently in the next month. Rezaei then shares her own 3x3. The conversation ends on a buoyant note: What are you most hopeful about as you think about the next month? To get started, you can borrow from her template.
Maybe “Keep It Simple, Stupid” isn’t always good advice:
The work of simplification is an exercise in making information accessible. Those receiving it should be helped in making informed decisions. Simplification beyond that likely only serves the interests of the person delivering it. This is how people weaponize simplicity.
How to draw yourself as a Peanuts character.
The Foo Fighters do The Bee Gees!
Finally, listen to these soccer supporters chanting and I bet the captions change what you hear.
WONDERFUL WORDS
“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.” — Laurie Halse Anderson
"It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time. Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one." — Julia Cameron
"Every opportunity is attached to a person. Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people.” — Ben Casnocha
“I am not inclined to ruin myself for the sake of hurting my enemies.” — Hermocrates
“When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost – and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.” — TS Eliot