Karen: [00:00:06] Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Paul: [00:00:13] I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:00:14] And I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:00:16] Each episode we start with a question and we see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Can we drop this?"

Karen: [00:00:25] So this is a question that I find myself asking a lot in agenda planning. Whether I am planning an agenda by myself, or planning an agenda as part of a group of people who are planning an agenda for some other group or larger group meeting. Very often when we're trying to put a meeting together, we need more time than is allotted. And that's especially true if you're trying to fit in time for richer, deeper discussions. Or relationship building kinds of activities which tend to take more time.

Karen: [00:00:57] And so you end up looking at everything else and going, can we drop these things? And so what we wanted to look at this episode is what are the things that you can probably do without, and make up some time in your meetings. And actually, aside from fitting more stuff in, also just having more efficient meetings, these are things that we probably would suggest dropping even if you had extra time in your meeting.

Paul: [00:01:25] Very true. One of the things that I sort of ask myself whenever I'm thinking about, you know, 'can we drop this?' is, is this the right venue even for this? Because oftentimes there are things- and I think here we're really talking about organizations that have institutionalized some way of doing meetings. And so that may be for example, I work with a couple of boards of directors. They have a structure, they have sort of a set. These are things that have to happen at their board meetings or in volunteer organization that I'm in.

Paul: [00:01:58] Same thing we always have to start with, and then we always have to include these. And when I'm working with those groups or I'm part of those groups, I often ask myself like, "Is meeting even the right venue for this thing?"

Paul: [00:02:10] If the thing that's on there is we need to get reports from all these various officers or subgroups or things like that, is the right thing to do, to have them to speak aloud in the meeting. Or could that report simply go out ahead of time?

Paul: [00:02:25] Because if what we're doing is really creating a space for people to ask questions about those things, then that might be a good use of time. But I often start with the question of is a meeting is live the group of us together, the right space, the right venue for this particular thing to happen? And if not, we can drop it. We can do it some other way.

Karen: [00:02:50] Yeah. And one of the frames I like to put with that is for most organizations meeting time, particularly a meeting of the whole group is the most expensive resource you have. Mm hmm. And we don't always think of it that way. It's like, "Oh, it's the monthly meeting" or "It's the weekly meeting" or whatever meeting it is.

Karen: [00:03:07] But if you really pay attention to where your resources are, a meeting is a very, very valuable resource. Time with everybody together or a group of people together is actually potentially really, really valuable.

Karen: [00:03:20] And so one of the things that I want to think about is this the right venue? Is this the thing that's worth the resource we're putting into having everybody in a room together, even if it's a Zoom room?

Paul: [00:03:31] Mm hmm. And I think that the in some ways, the worst offenders of these things that I've dealt with have been volunteer organizations that don't tend to pay a lot of attention to the cost of doing a thing when there's not actually money involved. It's like, well, this just costs people's time.

Paul: [00:03:49] Well, turns out it costs their energy, it costs their dedication. There's only so many bad meetings for a group that I'm willing to sit through before I go "I'm just not willing to participate or to be able to be involved in this anymore!" 

Paul: [00:04:02] So I think there can be a cost to these things beyond just the financial. There's an energy cost and there's an attention cost that we need to pay attention to. And absolutely synchronous meetings of the whole group are incredibly expensive in that way as well.

Karen: [00:04:19] Yeah, totally agree. Another question that I ask myself is 'What's the objective of doing this thing?' 'What is the thing that we hope this item will accomplish and is it accomplishing that?' 'And is that thing again worth the resource that we have?'. But if you aren't clear about why you're doing it.

Karen: [00:04:41] So an example on this is I know of groups who have a set script that they read at the beginning of their meetings, every meeting, the mission statement, the meeting behavior guidelines, the values of the group, something that they just routinely read. And I tend to suspect that while they think that that's going to, you know, cause people to follow the guidelines or keep people thinking about the mission.

Karen: [00:05:10] I think probably the amount of energy they put into it is about the amount of focus and energy I put into reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when I was in third grade. I did it every day. The syllables rolled out. I didn't actually have to pay attention to anything. And yeah, maybe some patriotism got beat into me, but probably not.

Karen: [00:05:28] So I really look at if we're spending time reading a list of things like that or a statement like that, is it actually causing people to think about it? And likely not. Likely, if what we want is to engage people with that topic, there's a better way that would actually do it. You know, people say, "Oh, it just takes a minute" and maybe it just takes a minute. 

Karen: [00:05:50] But it's focus. And a shift of focus and a, you know, transition between things. So, and it trains people to ignore what's being said. To some extent. I mean, if it is a thing that's just it's being said and I never pay attention. So that's another both category and example of things that I often will drop from meetings.

Paul: [00:06:11] I think there is another thing that can be really valuable to do in sort of looking at, you know, 'Can we drop this' is a question I'll often ask is, is "What if we don't?" Like, if we don't do this? Like, what would happen? And I think that can be a useful guide. 

Paul: [00:06:27] Because if it's like, "Well, if we don't do this, like, well, there's no real impact of that", or "If we don't do this, oh well, well, we would just deal with it in this other way." Is that a cheaper way of dealing with that? Is that an easier way of dealing with it? Oh yeah, actually, maybe it would be.

Paul: [00:06:40] I think it's often useful as a thought exercise to go through the question of like, "What would it look like without this if we didn't do this." Now, obviously there are some things like for example, you may have an organization where the bylaws state that you have to approve the minutes of the previous meeting. Like, that may just be part of how you operate as a group. And so you can't not do it and stay in compliance with your operating agreement.

Paul: [00:07:07] And that's okay! In which case I would go, "How do we do this as cheaply, as quickly, as subversively as possible?" I think that's often the thing that I get into. It's like, 'How can we follow the process that we need to?' But if we discover that it's not really adding anything, it's not really helping us to do it as minimally as we can. Or to do it in a way that it does actually help us.

Paul: [00:07:32] So to go back to your example of reciting, of going through the mission, the values, the thing. It's like maybe people aren't getting a whole lot out of that, but maybe we want them to. So how might we re-envision that? Like, what if we don't drop it entirely? But we take a piece of that and we reinvent it in some way? So that people do get value out of it! 

Paul: [00:07:53] So instead of just saying, "We're just going to read these", it's like, "We're going to read this and then we're going to ask in groups of three, Which one of these values do you think is most important for you to inhabit during this meeting tonight?" Because it's going to help you to show up in the way that's useful, right. And take 2 or 3 minutes to do that.

Paul: [00:08:10] If the thing that we're doing now is not providing the value we need it to, we might drop it. But we might also go, how do we remix it in such a way that it doesn't necessarily add all that much time, but we get substantially more value out of it?

Karen: [00:08:25] Yeah, I think that's really part of this is that we say, "Well, we have to do this thing that somebody wants on the agenda. And assume then that we need to do it the way that everyone's expecting or the way that that person's expecting."

Karen: [00:08:39] And very often, if we're in a facilitator chair, or a meeting planning kind of chair, we can come up with strategies for accomplishing the thing they wish to accomplish.

Karen: [00:08:50] And I think we probably talked about this back in episode 125, where we did some related topics of "Let's find out what's wanted to be accomplished" rather than "They wanted 30 minutes. So we give them 30 minutes."

Paul: [00:09:03] Mm hmm.

Karen: [00:09:03] "What is it that they were going to do with that 30 minutes, and will it accomplish it?" A thing I've seen in some groups is real debate actually, about whether or not to read proposals aloud. Because there are people who like to hear them. It's probably most often an issue if proposals are lengthy and detailed, with lots of justification. And so I've seen examples where people are reading two pages of text aloud. 

Karen: [00:09:30] And then there may be a few people who really like that, but there are a lot of people who just tune out. "I'd rather read it myself", that kind of thing.

Karen: [00:09:37] So what happens if instead of reading the full detailed text aloud, you do a 5 or 10 sentence summary. Or for that matter, perhaps consider thinning the text of the proposal altogether. Might be that might be another episode.

Karen: [00:09:53] But so both 'Can we drop it?' But also 'Can we focus it?' 'Can we thin it down', maybe? Or just get more focused, more intentional, more direct about it so that we do it in a more efficient way?

Paul: [00:10:05] Mm hmm. The other thing that I'll add around things that we would like to drop, but we can't, is that oftentimes, particularly if I'm working with a group that's doing a large meeting along multi-meeting day sort of thing. There is a tendency to go well, there are these- Inevitably, it's the ritualistic pieces that have long since ceased to have value always end up at the beginning of the meeting.

Paul: [00:10:28] And so what I, you know, things like officer reports or approving minutes or things like that. And so what I will have a tendency to do, when we notice that there are these things that need to happen, but it's not actually important that they happen at the beginning. I'll hold those as "These are floating items that when we discover, 'Hey, we've got 15 minutes here on the second day that we finished up this other part early. Let's just jump to that now so that we'll make sure that we get to them by the end and we'll reserve time at the end for dealing with anything.'. 

Paul: [00:11:00] But we don't have to start with the things that drain everybody's energy, that drop them all out. We can sprinkle them in as we discover opportunities to do them over the course of the event.

Karen: [00:11:11] So I think what we're saying is that as we're agenda planning, it's really good to ask the question, "Can we drop this?" And the things we want to think about are is there a different place, a different venue, a different way that would be more efficient for handling this thing?

Karen: [00:11:28] What's the objective? What are we trying to accomplish with this thing? And is what we're doing actually accomplishing that objective?

Karen: [00:11:36] And is it worth the cost of meeting time to do that here? And I think we're pointing especially to the things that we do routinely by ritual over and over again, without thinking about them. That this might be a time to think about them. 

Karen: [00:11:52] And think about how to do them and how to do them either differently so that they accomplish their goal or differently, so that they're more focussed and efficient. And we get through them in less meeting time depending on what we need to do.

Paul: [00:12:08] Well, that's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:12:11] And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.