Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 125: How do we fit it all in?

October 04, 2022 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 125: How do we fit it all in?
Show Notes Transcript

"If what you want is buy-in, or if you're trying to get consensus on a thing, shortening the amount of time does not magically make it fit in that time box. "

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Paul:

Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen:

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen:

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "How do we fit it all in?"

Paul:

There are lots of things that we might be trying to fit into our lives, into our daily routines, into our to do lists, or really into our done lists. But the thing that Karen and I want to focus on here today is how do we fit all these things that we need a group to have a conversation about into our meetings. Karen and I do a lot of work as facilitators, in helping groups come together and make decisions and forward the thinking and a lot of different stuff. And we often get these requests for an agenda, for things that are going to get talked about, that are going to get discussed in a particular meeting. We often look at that list and go, "Well, there's no way that's all going to fit." And we want to talk today about where that comes from. Why is it that we try to put more things into a meeting or into a conversation than really fit there? What the consequences of doing that sometimes is? And what are some things we can do about it? How can we start to right-size our agendas? How can we really start to think about what does it really take to address some of these things? So that we're not trying to fit everything in, that we're trying to fit the right amount of stuff in.

Karen:

So I think that first question of how do we get in this situation? Where does this come from? That we've got this long list of things that want to happen in a meeting, and then some question about whether it all fits in? I think one of the beginning places is looking at,"How does an agenda get formed?" Because very often, the way that agenda gets formed is that a message gets sent out or there's a practice of at a certain time,"If you want anything on the meeting agenda, let me know." And it can even include an expectation that a representative from each team is going to make a report. There can be a lot of things that promote putting things on a meeting agenda without any filter around, "What's the objective of our meeting? What kinds of things, what what do we hope will happen as a result of having those conversations?" So I actually think it's really useful to have a process for agenda creation in two parts. One is where you get the the leaders of the various departments or teams together and talk about what are the things we need to get done at this meeting. What's urgent? What's coming? What's a good use of our time? What do we need relationally going on in the group that might be supported at this meeting? Whatever those objectives are, what are we wanting to get done? And then part two, which is really the facilitators, not all the group leaders, but the facilitator sitting down and then saying,"So how do we do that? And how much time will it take?" And perhaps some interplay back and forth, where you go back and then say, "Yeah, all those things you wanted? I can't do them well in the amount of time that we have." So I think just that getting intentional and thoughtful about why are these things being put on a meeting agenda? And do they actually

Paul:

One of the things that I come back to a lot is this idea belong there? of the meeting's purpose. Because there may be 17 different purposes that you might create a meeting for or you might hold a meeting for. Trying to do all of them in any one meeting is generally a recipe for failure. Because what we really need is something some way of deciding, "What's in and out of scope for this meeting?" So those 17 things that that people want to have happen, that they want to have on the agenda, those might be legitimate things to get done. Those are coming from somewhere. But the question is whether or not they're legitimate things for this particular meeting. I think it's very interesting, because in my mind, when I've worked with groups, there's kind of two different kinds of meetings. Oftentimes, in organizations, the meetings that I'm helping with the meetings that I've been part of are about a particular thing. They kind of have a built-in focus. "This is about this project." "This is this team getting together to reflect on a thing." Those often just have a purpose, and when they don't, one of the things I really do is get people to try to articulate what those purposes are. Because when the purpose is clear, it prevents people from just kind of tacking stuff on. It naturally repels that sort of scope. But then you also have things like, I mean, I grew up in way too many youth activities that were structured like large community organizations. And so you just had a monthly meeting where you're supposed to get together. Similarly, I see this when I've worked with boards of directors, where the purpose of the meeting is to have the quarterly meeting, because they need to have one. And so it can be really hard in those because those kind of are designed as grab-bag meetings. That can be really hard, because you don't have that natural sense of the purpose of this meeting to repel scope. And so it makes sense that people start to just kind of toss stuff in.

Karen:

One of the things that I think we forget to ask is,"Okay, so there's this thing that wants to happen at the meeting. Is a meeting even the right place for the thing?" And I particularly asked this about reporting functions. "Well, we need to report it so everybody knows." I'm not convinced that saying it out loud in a room full of people results in everybody knowing. Also, it's often the case that what you really want is that everybody could know if they cared but not necessarily that they do know. And so having information be available by email, or by shared files, or by other means, possibly even links from an agenda document that you're not going to take time in the meeting, there's a lot of ways for reporting and transparency to occur that are more effective and way more efficient than meeting time at any meeting. Even if it theoretically would be within scope, a meeting may not even be the right fit for the thing you're trying to do. So that's kind of my first cut, if we're trying to clear space out, is looking at what are the things that could be done in a more efficient way. Because from my take, meetings are one of the most expensive things we do. The number of people and the number of hours and you add all of that up, it's really, really valuable time, especially if it's a large community wide or company wide meeting. It's a really valuable time. So let's only use it if we need to.

Paul:

One of the things that that points me is another thing that I tend to think about. When somebody wants to do something in a meeting – and we've kind of talked about the purpose of the meeting – I will often focus on, for any particular section or any particular activity that you want to do, what's the outcome you want to have from that? Because we don't want to just do the thing. We don't want to just read the report. We're doing it– in theory – because there's some outcome we want from it. We want to forward the thinking, we want to answer questions, we want to clarify what's going on. And so I find one way – even if the meeting doesn't have a clearly defined purpose that repels scope – one of the questions that I'll sometimes ask, when somebody says, "I want to add this thing to the agenda" is "What's the outcome you would like from that?" We've talked a little bit about that on the show before. And sometimes that will point to an outcome that's actually better achieved by something that isn't a meeting. And so that can be another useful litmus test. But it also points to why we tend to throw so much stuff in. We don't think about the fact that there's an outcome we're trying to get, and that outcome might come from an activity that's better suited not to this meeting, or not to a meeting at all. But if we just don't think about it, if we just assume the only way we can do this thing is in a meeting, then of course, we're just going to keep throwing stuff in.

Karen:

Yeah, so I think that thins right away. And that same outcome question will feed timing assessments. So and I often will say to people, "Is that a thing you just want to say? Is the outcome that I will have had a chance to stand at the front of the room and say it?" Okay, that might be totally appropriate, and we'll give you five minutes for that. And that's all it takes. And I think we've talked about this before. Another outcome might be, "I want to be heard." Well, for that, you're going to want some kind of interaction. You're not likely to feel heard if you just stand up and say it. In fact, you're not likely to be heard if you just stand up and say it. So that's gonna take a little longer. Or I might want to get buy in or change behavior or one of those more higher order goals, higher order thinking skills. And if we're wanting to engage in that way, we're going to need a much bigger chunk of a meeting around that thing. And so I love that outcome focus, because it guides both "Does it need to be in the meeting at all?" And also then, "How much time do we need to think about?" and what sort of facilitation method. Because not only do we need enough time for everything to fit in, we also need enough emotional energy. So are we trying to fit in three major topics and we have time or people are willing to stay longer to cover the time, but their energy is going to be tapped by one and now we're trying to do do two more and we've just set ourselves up. So it doesn't fit in the energy envelope, even if it fits in the time envelope.

Paul:

Yeah. Thinking about outcomes really helps you to think about the shape of the engagement you need. And that I think is the other reason why we fall into this trap of thinking we can fit everything in. People don't think through, "What would it actually take?" As facilitator when I'm working with folks, they'll have given me the list of things, I will have asked them what the outcomes they want from each of those sections are, and then I'll come back and just say, "I don't think we can fit this all in, and here's why." And we'll walk through. "Okay, so you said you needed to address this issue. This seems like it's largely an informative thing. We could do that in this way. It'd be some pre-read. Does anybody in your organization do pre-reads?" But then it's like,"Well, you said you needed to have this conversation about this contentious topic, and you need to come to a decision. So we don't know how long that's gonna take." And people go, "Oh, that's right." Rhey'd like to believe that will take less time than it does. So part of it is just getting realistic. I mean, it's funny, the easiest tool I have used to convince people that not everything will fit in their meeting is a spreadsheet. Because when I plan stuff out, as I'm listing out the activities and I'm giving times, people can see it doesn't add up. And then sometimes they want to argue about it. But if they go, "Well, this thing that's got like 20 minutes on it, couldn't we do that in like, 10?" And I'm like, "Well, what do you think it would look like? " In some ways, just showing, this is what we've got and then pushing back on it I think sometimes helps people to see what's really likely to happen. Going back to something that you talk about a lot is this whole,"Well, in my experience, when groups tried to do this, here's what's likely to occur." I think it's really having that dialogue about it and having a realistic assessment of it that helps us to kind of avoid trying to stuff too much stuff in. And so we focus instead on the stuff that we absolutely have to do as a group that a meeting is the best venue for doing it in.

Karen:

Yeah, and I think some of what we look at there is if we're used to really hierarchical spaces, where what we need to do is for the boss to say, "This is what's happening." And everybody goes, "Okay, now I know what's happening," and maybe there's some input or a little bit of exchange, you can limit the time on that. But if what you want is buy in, or if you're trying to get consensus on a thing – because that's your process – shortening the amount of time does not magically make it fit in that time box. So what you're pointing to all makes really good sense to me. And then I think the next step that we're looking toward is when it just doesn't all fit, and being able to be realistic about that. Optimism is great, but it's not perfect. That's not what you actually want here. What you really want here is realistic. Let's make sure we have enough time. I don't have any problem with putting a "if we get to it" item on an agenda if we're not sure. But being clear, this is what we're contracting, that we're pretty confident we can get done. And people know that and then there's a maybe thing, I'm good with that. But really what we want to be looking at is how do we prioritize for this amount of meeting time? What can we fit in? And you'll have group norms about if it doesn't fit, does it go to another? Does it wait till the next pre scheduled quarterly meeting? Or do we schedule a different meeting for that? There's lots of ways. I think it'd be interesting to talk for just a bit about how do we decide what does go into this meeting and what gets bumped, knowing that bumped means different things in different situations.

Paul:

One of my least favorite meetings is the meeting to talk about the things we didn't fit into the last meeting. Because we got halfway through. Part of it is priority. I often go down the list and just go, "What would happen if we didn't resolve this today, if we didn't get through this thing today? How would we deal with it?" Thinking about what good options are there? It's like, "Oh, well actually, if we didn't get to this, that would be okay, because there's really only four people who care about that. So we could just actually have them meet and come back." "Oh, okay. Great." Ideally, we'd like to do this as a whole group, but we can live with some other alternative. And so that's often the question there. And then, when I'm working with a group, usually I do not have the final say about what is and is not in the meeting. There's somebody who does, and I need to know who that is. And I need to let them know that if we said we're going to spend 25 minutes on this, and we've already spent half an hour and we're behind time, they need to know I'm going to come to them and ask them to make a call. That can't just be on me. I can offer observations about what's going on, and I can make some suggestions, but ultimately, whoever owns the meeting – who owns the purpose and outcomes that we're actually dealing with here – there needs to be some light to make a decision about that. In hierarchical organizations, that's usually pretty clear. But even in consensus-based groups, there should be some method that the group's already figured out about, "How do we decide whether or not we're going to spend more time on this? Or whether or not we're going to move on? And if we're going to move on, how do we make a decision about what the next steps on it are?"

Karen:

Early on with consensus groups, my experience is that sometimes you do have to burn a bunch of meeting time on that. There is an assumption that the facilitator makes that decision. And the problem is if the facilitator just makes that decision, and people don't feel like it was the right decision – quite possibly because it wasn't the way they wanted it to go – you can really break down trust. So I advise facilitators, particularly facilitators who are members of the group in early stage consensus groups, that what you really want to do in that time is say, "Okay, so this is what it seems to me. This is what I would suggest. How's the group with that?" You want to have a suggestion that honors what's in the room. So in some groups that's suggesting adding time, in some groups and suggesting delegating it out in some groups, it's punting it to the next meeting. There are various ways. But to really get buy in of the whole room, recognizing that that can burn meeting time, which is in itself a learning experience. Because getting that transition going in consensus spaces requires a good bit of learning and practice. Taking the time then will help the group the next time be able to get to it more quickly."Okay, we see what happens if we fight for turf here. And that we're better off to – unless there's a major objection – go along with the facilitator." And maybe the facilitator isn't seeing something. I'm suggesting punting it to the next meeting, and I don't know that if we don't make the decision today, something happens that's bad.

Paul:

There's also a degree there to which you can, in your planning, figure out your contingencies. When the time pressure isn't on you, you can go, "Okay, so if this takes longer than we expect, or this issue comes up, what do we think we're going to want to do about it?" To already have some of those contingencies in your back pocket. I've certainly done that when I've worked with boards. So there's a chair of the board and I'm generally working with them. I tee them up to, "If we get to this point, you're going to need to make a call about this." And so for each thing on the agenda, we might already have pre-selected the, "If we can't fit this in, here's what the first option is going to be. Here's what we think our best option is going to be. This is probably just going to get tabled. We're just going to skip it until next quarter, that's fine. This we really do need to get through, and so if we can't get there, we will steal time from this other agenda item that we'll kick out." You can actually plan some of those contingencies in advance, so you aren't having to completely improvise. And obviously, you need to be ready to improvise based on what actually happens in the room. But I think part of this – this comes around to this whole idea of when we get asked how do we fit it all in – people are surprised when it doesn't. And these things predictably happen, so why don't we take advantage of our past experiences, and make some plans that don't assume everything will be perfect, everything will be smooth, Let's some flexibility, have contingencies, have scenarios in them, because then we're better equipped when we're in the meeting together to actually get our way through the stuff that's most critical.

Karen:

Yeah. And I think that"most critical" thing is interesting to define, too. I love that terminology, but I want to add a little more to it, which is there's "critically important" and there's "time critical." And those are very often not the same things. So the tendency in meeting planning– particularly if you're in some kind of cadence of meetings, where you're meeting weekly or monthly or quarterly – the tendency is to fit in the things that are urgent. And there is a danger that then you don't do the things that are important. And so I just would caution us to think about, "Is it urgent? Is it important?" And if it's important, maybe we bump it once. But has it already been bumped? And I think the reality is very often the importance piece especially is not everybody thinks the same. It's very important to some people and not very important to others. But if those for whom it's really important have the experience of it keeps getting bumped for something more urgent, they begin to lose trust in the process and trust in the meeting. And that's where people start just going and doing things without the process or without the conversation and just do things anyway. Which might be okay, but it's probably not great. And then the other caveat to this is groups will have an agenda bin or a list of upcoming topics that they draw from. And the other thing that I like to be careful about is just make sure as you're planning your meeting, that the thing that got in the agenda bin six months ago because it was important and it wasn't urgent, and a bunch of other urgent stuff has happened, is it important now? Is that still live topic? Because it's actually really okay to have things that people were interested in that we said we were going to talk about and then we decide we don't need to, as long as the people who did want to talk about them have been consulted, and can say,"Yeah, that just doesn't seem so important anymore." So there's this sort of balance of honoring the commitment that we've made – we said we weren't gonna talk about it last week, but we promised we would next week, and we honor that and maintain the trust – and also checking in,"Does it still make sense?" Because the environment changes, the memberships change, the goals change, the needs change, and that will change what needs to happen. So having a strict hierarchy doesn't make sense. But having something that keeps us from prioritizing always the urgent over the important is also really significant.

Paul:

And it's about making informed trade offs, right, and educated trade offs and realizing hey, yeah, we could, in theory, keep bumping this, but then at some point, the wheels are gonna fall off, if we don't address it. And and yeah, the tyranny of the urgent is is, is difficult to to deal with. The other thing that I would add about that is this idea of making trade offs in terms of how much time or depth we want to spend on something, I often get into the situation where, you know, a group says, well, we want to do this thing, and then I go, Oh, yeah. Okay. And based on my experience, that's about two hours, and they got what we were thinking 20 minutes, right, and, and I kind of have to step back and go, Well, if that's the budget that they've got, what could we do that isn't going to be as good and as thorough as spending two hours on it. But that might still be helpful. And not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good if we can move something like that. And often, these things that are important to not urgent are actually really good candidates for this kind of thing as being able to say, if we could do a little bit of this work, where hey, we instead of making a decision about, you know, exploring this whole thing about the strategic plan and making a decision about it today, what if we just start to introduce these topics, so that people know what we're thinking about what's and and we don't have to get, we don't have to get through the decision today? Like it's a several month process? What if we just do a little bit, there's a lot of a lot of the relationship work, you know, shows up that way as well. And it's like, sometimes it's better as a drip over time than it is to try to do in a giant chunk. And so I think having some, for me, there's often a degree of as a facilitator, sometimes kind of not exactly meeting the group in the middle, but understanding how much time energy they're willing to spend on something, maybe we'll wait less than I think they ought to. But that's what they're willing to spend. That's what they're willing to do. How can I help them move towards that? Is there a way and so it kind of becomes a challenge for me, one of the things often like in a large group, right, is people want to hear from everybody. And that just takes a lot of time. And so one of my favorite things that I'll do to start to, to move along that direction is break people into small groups, have the groups have conversation, and then we'll do some report outs. Does everybody hear from everybody? No, but oftentimes that does a good enough job of of helping people be heard, and also surfacing some of the most important things. And it happens in a much smaller timeframe. And so for certain things, that's good enough. And so I'll go with something like that. And so I think there's again, that trade off and that discernment around what's the outcome we're trying to get to? How much time can we really spend on it? How do we hit the right balance for the for the the situation we're actually in?

Karen:

I think we could probably talk for days about strategies for that shorter thing because every situation has its own. I like the group thing. Even the idea that people discuss in-depth in small groups and then report out their "one sentence" most important thing, so you hear from everybody, but you help people condense their priorities. I've also, at times, said, "Okay, the whole group needs to know this is going on and have an opportunity to participate, but maybe they don't have to participate." So at the meeting that we're planning, we give a presentation of what it is, and invite people to the next meeting, that's what I would call a single topic meeting. Those kinds of things, I think, are hugely useful. And that's that creativity in facilitation that we've talked about in many of these episodes. Get out of the box of a meeting as "you call on people in order" and into "What are different modes of facilitation that we can use?" A lot of them on the face of it look like they'll take longer, but then they end up often not actually taking longer.

Paul:

Well, as is unsurprising in a podcast about facilitation and fitting stuff in, we've tried to cram all kinds of tips and tricks and advice into this one. So to summarize what we've covered here today, we've talked about the challenge of when when people come with 12 million things that they want to fit into a half hour meeting. How do we fit it all? And the short answer is you don't. The question is, how do you make informed choices about what's in and what's not? We've talked a little bit about purposes, and when you're meeting does have a clear purpose, that's one of the things that helps repel some of that scope. The idea of single purpose meetings is actually one of my favorite tools for doing that, because then it's very clear what is and isn't out of scope. But also focusing on outcomes. When there are things that sort of go more on to these general agenda sorts of things, what is it the people actually trying to accomplish with it? Because getting them to think about that can help them understand whether or not a meeting is the right place to do it or not. But also, it can help the group figure out how would we actually go about doing that? Which will start to give us a sense of what's the time actually involved in doing that. We know that we need to make some plans for how we're going to try to get through all of these things, but we also need to have our contingencies ready. We can make what we think is the perfect plan, but it's unlikely to actually execute that way. So we need to know ahead of time, when we're not actually sticking to that plan – when things come up – how are we going to make decisions about what we're going to do? Who's going to make those decisions? What contingencies might we already have pre-planned so that when things don't fit into the space we hope that they would, that we can move along? And then really thinking in depth about what's the right depth to go into with any particular thing? Where do we want to go with it? How do we make those trade offs around what would be ideal and what's actually pragmatic? What we can actually accomplish in this particular time together. And not letting the urgent drive out all of the important things. Making informed decisions about what are actually the most important things for us to handle. Some of those will also be urgent, but some of them will not. And how do we make sure that we're making informed decisions so that the things that we do fit in are the things that are most useful and most valuable to the group?

Karen:

Think that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul:

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.