1. Andy Grove on meetings (via Anna Shipman)

  2. Reaching Peak Meeting Efficiency by Steven Sinofsky

  3. https://boz.com/articles/mutual-knowledge

    1. I believe most people are wrong about the primary value of meetings. I posit that if we held a meeting and everything that was said was already known by every individual, the meeting would still be immensely valuable. After such a meeting everyone now knows that everyone else knows the same thing that they do.
    2. We can’t Vulcan Mind Meld. If we could we’d probably be the most effective and high-performing team in history (link to story about Duke of Marlborough, Cadogan, glove, and cannon). But in lieu of that we have to have dedicated time for high-bandwidth communication so that we can work, indeed, as a team. And THAT is what meetings are for. The minute a meeting ceases to work toward that goal, then we adjourn the meeting
    3. Pairwise discussions are costly. Sharing information in successive one on ones can be effective because it allows you to subtly adapt the message to each audience. However, in addition to the tremendous cost in time, it has the much more pernicious cost of denying participants a mental model of others.
    4. Information is much less useful when you don’t know who else has it. When people do finally connect around the information, entropy will cause subtle mismatches in their understanding which will undermine their confidence in the information itself and in the leadership they got it from.

  4. Meeting agendas

  5. Silence means you disagree: we often interpret silence as passive agreement, when it’s actually the opposite. Investigating any silences can often surface contrary opinions that would otherwise remain unheard.

  6. Meetings can be good and important, but are often bad and wastes of time, so let's strive to allow only meetings that are the former into our lives

  7. Saying no to meetings is hard

    1. Most of us are people pleasers, and saying "no" to a meeting is hard. Saying "no" to a meeting request can feel akin to saying, "I'm better than you" or "you're not worth my time", when in reality, meetings are just a very inefficient way to transmit information in almost all circumstances.
    2. You can use this, from Levels

    My synchronous time for meetings is pretty limited the next couple weeks. Mind if we trade some notes by email to start?

    Tactically, I've usually handled people saying no to the above by agreeing to a meeting, several months out and sending them an async loom with what I think they're going to ask me. Pretty much 100% of the time that leads to them responding by email and then we don't have to do the meeting.

  8. [https://amsterdamproductclub.substack.com/p/no-more-bad-meetings?](https://amsterdamproductclub.substack.com/p/no-more-bad-meetings?s=w)

    1. Decline- “Hi Sarah, can we make this meeting optional and only meet when urgent things come up?”
    2. Delegate- “Hi Sarah. Would you like to present at the product review this week? This will give you and your work more visibility.”
    3. Delete- "Hi all, I don’t think we need to have this meeting. I propose to move to a weekly update in Slack.”

    Untitled

  9. https://lethain.com/eng-org-meetings/

    1. Good meetings are the heartbeat for your organization.
    2. At a certain size, you can’t discuss everything with every member of your organization, but you can have each manager talk with their team, and complement that with an org-wide meeting. You can’t include everyone’s input early in every technology decision, but you can ensure that the decisions are well-vetted by sharing them in a tech spec review. While meetings are rarely the best initial solution, they are often the best backup solution to ensure important information is communicated across the organization.
    3. While most leaders view organization meetings as a necessary mechanism to distribute context down the reporting hierarchy, I find that they are also effective at two other important tasks: communicating culture, and surfacing concerns from the organization
    4. Lastly, consider starting a Team-wide Q&A, and start with this: “I’m glad to talk about anything, no questions are off limits. If your question is too awkward or private, I’ll just avoid answering it. Ask whatever you want.” This is partially a joke, but it’s also how I run the sessions. Sometimes folks ask angry questions. Sometimes they ask questions that were already answered by an email. I always try to bring an even, positive energy, even when the questions are messy

  10. Sana meetings stuff

    1. Sorry to miss this, please record! I had meetings literally all of yesterday so I need to do some other necessary non-meeting work (as Noreen continually reminds me, meetings ARE work) to keep things going

  11. My employees at Puppet used to say they hated meetings (I’m sure they still do, they just don’t work for me any more). I would tell them: Replace “meeting” with “collaborating with my team-mates” and say that again, eh?