How to Have Better Meetings, and Save Millions

Most companies wasted a combined half a billion dollars on pointless meetings in 2019. Others changed. I’m going to tell you how.

“Half a billion dollars!?” you ask. Yes. Over 500 million.

This was according to Doodle’s State of Meetings Report. In the report, they point out that people spend an average 2 hours a week in pointless meetings. That adds up fast, and not just in direct time waste. Consider the damage to your sense of authenticity, mission and morale. Forget about focus and forward momentum. When you think about what we’re working toward as Designers, Product Managers, Architects, and leaders, this is bigger than a bad meeting.

At work I am surrounded by people who amaze me. The office is chock full of brilliant minds, talent, and diverse perspectives. When we are able to leverage that, we make amazing progress. But this is easier said than done!

So, how can we make better use of our time, talents, and energy?

For starters, we can find ways to be more intentional about how we design our time together.

One thing we do as part of our experience design practice at Pearson is to plan and run purpose-built workshops. When planning/designing these gatherings, we always start with desired outcomes and objectives, ask questions to contextualize our opportunities, and create a custom-tailored plan with specific, timed ‘plays’, that only get added to our agenda if they will help fulfill our purpose.

The plays are strung together in a way that strives to make a winning game-plan.

Over time, as we plan, run and reflect on these sessions, we begin to view time as a canvas that we can use to draw out our purpose and connect it to plans for action, continuously experimenting and improving our use of time with each iteration. I like to think of each workshop like a product experiment that we continue to rapidly prototype, iterate on and improve over time.

In order to effectively design for time and collaboration, we make heavy use of a new breed of collaborative tools. Here’s a few of the tools we use.

Facilitation and collaborative session design are blowing up right now, both in practice and in tools. I absolutely must take a moment here to point out that tools like Mural, Miro, and Figma are great visual collaboration tools that not only enable live real time remote (and in-person digital-first) collaboration, but also serve as excellent time-design tools, enabling us to visually design, facilitate, and reflect on our sessions.

I should also mention the softer tools, principles, philosophies and methods like Design Sprints, Design Thinking, Liberating Structures, Gamestorming, Co-Design, Agile, Lean Startup, etc.

There are so many great tools and practices at our disposal that sometimes it feels like we’re in the middle of a revolution in ways of working.

So many options to choose from!

If you’re also into things like the art of gathering, the power of facilitation, the fun of Design Sprints, or our untapped ability to enable rapid experimentation, extreme alignment, and visually-accelerated conversations, let’s get this conversation going!