Monday Morning Meeting #158
Welcome to another edition of the Monday Morning Meeting from your friends at Filament.
WE WERE WRONG ABOUT MASKS
I’m not a mask skeptic — at least the way you might be thinking — but was concerned that donning masks during Filament-style, collaborative meetings would put such a damper on the face-to-face engagement and small-group discussions that it might make sense to go back to virtual events again.
I was wrong.
On Thursday, we hosted our friends at Schnucks (my favorite local grocery chain) for a 30-person, full-day innovation retreat and it was amazing. Everyone was masked and yet the engagement and collaboration were off the charts. We even got two of our favorite evaluations ever:
This wasn’t a normal meeting … it was like a field trip: interesting, engaging, and fun.
This was an amazing experience. LOVE IT!!! (the emphasis was in the original, along with some smiley faces under the exclamation marks I couldn’t reproduce)
We’ll keep masking until the Delta variant runs its course, but are confident that even with masks, the Filament “magic” won’t disappear — and we hope to see you and your team here soon!
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:
We’ve got at least ten amazing Thinksgiving t-shirts left and we’ll give one away to every person who introduces us to a potential for-profit innovation (here’s the guide) partner this week. Please use this email link to CC the Thinksgiving team when you send it. Thanks!
IDEAS + LINKS
As the great work reset continues, I love the idea of conducting “stay interviews” with all team members:
Another tactic is to conduct “stay interviews.” Employers traditionally hold “exit interviews” when people leave companies, to better understand what went wrong. But managers would be better off if they proactively met with staff individually to better understand any problems they’re having before they get to the point of quitting. Good questions to ask include What do you wish you could spend less time on?
I’ll admit, I’ve been feeling a bit of decision fatigue lately:
Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price.”
Speaking of decisions, bad ones don’t just come from fatigue, they’re also the product of bad meetings (via Patrick Lencioni):
If you’re having bad meetings, you’re making bad decisions. There is no getting around that. And you’re almost certainly not talking about all the right things.
And speaking of meetings, here’s a great insight from Sam Spurlin about what good meetings have in common (hint, they’re for the team, not the leader):
If a meeting exists solely because a leader finds it useful then you should be incredibly circumspect about whether that meeting should continue in its current form. Leaders don’t own meetings, teams do, and Action Meetings embody this ethos. That means the meeting always starts on time, regardless of whether the leader is there. It means that the meeting can happen even when there isn’t full attendance (including if the leader is not present). It means the leader of the team isn’t necessarily the facilitator and no one person owns the agenda. Ultimately, whether or not the meeting is useful and successful falls to the entire team and not just the highest-paid person in the room.
Next time you want to connect with someone, Caroline Webb suggests you “anchor” your preferences when you ask:
[I]f we want to propose a lunch meeting with a colleague or client, the usual approach is to say, “Would you like to have lunch?” But with default bias and anchoring in mind, you could make a more specific suggestion, such as, “Would you like to have lunch, perhaps on Wednesday next week? There’s a great new pizza place across the street we could try.” Your prospective lunch companion might not want to do precisely what you suggest, but you’ve anchored him on a date in the near future and a convenient nearby venue...
Why it is hard to innovate in construction:
Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are costly to undo (it’s a lot easier to pour concrete than to unpour it), and are highly sequential (and thus time-sensitive). A building, for the most part, can’t be beta-tested to work the bugs out. Combined with the riskiness inherent of building large, heavy things that will be occupied by people (any failure becomes a potential life safety issue) and are heavily regulated, this means that any given process failure has the potential to completely derail your project.
From the “who knew?” department: there are only 25 blimps in the entire world.:
12 of those 25 are used for advertising.
Only 128 people in the US are qualified to fly a blimp.
It takes pilots 10-15 hours of training to learn to fly a single-engine plane, and 250-400 hours (!) of training to learn to fly a blimp.
Don’t despair if you feel ignorant about something you care about, so long as you’re curious:
I have been burned so many times over the years imagining the worst that could happen at a specific step in a project, not saying it out loud, and then that thing, in fact, does happen. Don’t think, “Oh, I’m just a worrywart, it’ll be fine.” Trust the voice in your head! Especially when you are working with “experts,” like, electricians or builders or designers or tech teams or whatever — ask them the stupid, obvious questions. The expert constantly misses things the outside observer catches, exactly because they’re not an expert.
I quite like this updated version of Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by moderately rational individuals following incentives in a complex system of interactions.
Want to see just how sneaky web-design “dark practices” can get? In this web-based game, Evil Corp attempts to trick you into accepting its terms and conditions (e.g., “Would you like to not receive our newsletter? Yes or No”).
Here are hundreds of vintage What’s My Line episodes with most of the famous people from our parents’ (and grandparents’) lives (like this one featuring Eleanor Roosevelt).
Piccles is a cool icebreaker drawing game for your next team Zoom.
Find the furthest city from any on earth.
Finally, here’s a reminder from Tim Kreider that we all need:
I don't know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives.
WONDERFUL WORDS
"I have never been modest enough to demand less of myself." — Friedrich Nietzsche
"Being optimistic is like a muscle that gets stronger with use.” — Robin Roberts
“The greatest obstacle to spreading organizational innovations is often not credibility or legitimacy; it’s coordination.” — Damon Centola
"People respond well to those that are sure of what they want." — Anna Wintour
“There is no economic law that says new technologies offer the same profit potential as old technologies.” — Gary Pisano
“Always pay it forward. And don’t keep count.” — Naval Ravikant
“Never underestimate’s man ability to take miracles for granted.” — Drew Magary
"Technology is the set of things that don’t quite work yet. Once something works, it’s no longer technology.” — Danny Hillis