Digital Works Podcast

Episode 039 - Dr Carrie Goucher on meeting culture, the role of psychological safety, advice on how to improve the effectiveness of your meetings, and building trust in teams

• Digital Works / Carrie Goucher • Season 1 • Episode 39

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A conversation with Dr Carrie Goucher. Carrie helps people transform meetings and meeting culture. She has redesigned how we meet for the collaborative era, crafting meetings that are honest, focused, supportive and energising. Carrie’s PhD created an evidence-based framework for what underpins meeting success (spoiler alert: it’s not having an agenda) and her research was described as 'game changing for meeting science’.

Links:

Recommended reading:

  • Kim Scott, Radical Candour
  • Nancy Klein, Time to Think
  • Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless, The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures
Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, the podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode episode number 39, we talk to Dr Carrie Gucha. Carrie is the founder of Fuea, faster Boulder, and has a PhD in systems thinking and meeting culture from the University of Cambridge. We discuss the history and purpose of meetings, whether or not we are all spending more time in meetings and what to do about it, and some practical tips for having better, more engaging, more effective meetings. I wanted to speak to Carrie because collaborative working and meetings is such a common part of digital projects. Carrie has a really insightful perspective, grounded in rigorous research and her experience working with hundreds of organisations. Enjoy Thanks for joining us today, carrie, really looking forward to our conversation.

Speaker 2:

Hi Ash, thank you so much for having me A long awaited conversation.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. We've both been struck down with various versions of the illnesses that are doing the rounds at the moment. So I want to start, as I do with almost every one of these conversations, with your career. You have a PhD, you focus on the effectiveness of meetings and institutional culture, but how have you ended up doing what you do?

Speaker 2:

Well, I only recently have a PhD, so I started life on a graduate trainee scheme Fast forward to 2005 and I set up a business called One Fish, two Fish and it had two objectives and one of them was to transform organisational culture. So how can organisations become faster, more agile, psychologically safe places to work, high trust, high performance, high support so that constellation of things? A lot of people in those days used to say to me we want to become more googly, and that was a standard phrase and I would work with organisations almost we would do that with comms and engagement Over time. What happened was I bumped into meeting culture over and over again and that came to a head in about 2013 where the HR director then at Abel and Cole said Carrie, we love your work, we love everything you want to do here. If you are going to impact our culture, you have to start with meetings, our meetings. They do not align with our cultural aspirations, put it that way. And she said come back and tell me when you have something you can do about our meetings. And I took that pretty literally.

Speaker 2:

I went away and I did tons of exploration on meetings. I had worked quite heavily in the agile space with unboxed consulting, from whom I had learned a huge amount in practice, and I blended that together and I created some meeting canvases. I created some meeting philosophies and I did that for four or five years. Quite a lot of training, and I made everything open source. That got picked up by Cambridge University Engineering Design Centre. They invited me in for a meeting to talk about to the PhD.

Speaker 2:

Now I was about 40 minutes late for that hour meeting and at the time I thought, not great clearly, but it's fine, I'm not going to do a PhD. This is ridiculous. The last person who should be doing a PhD is me. I start everything, can't finish anything, and anyway, one year later I sat down at my desk in the Engineering Design Centre and I googled what is engineering and there started a three and a bit year journey, which was the most. I would say it's probably the most joyful and fantastic time of my work. You are very difficult. I was running the business at the same time. I'm not sure my supervisor was entirely aware of that, but at the end of it I had a PhD in systems thinking and meeting culture COVID, a baby and it was time for a reset. So I focused my business entirely on meetings. I felt it was this really big, wide space. No one was addressing this big problem and I felt I could make a contribution there. Here we are.

Speaker 1:

Amazing and one of the reasons I reached out to you and wanted to have a conversation is because I hear from lots of people working in the cultural sector, and I see it through my work at Substract that meetings are such a big part of almost everything that seems to happen in the cultural sector, certainly on the more administrative side of the sector. But before we start to look at that, I'm fascinated to hear a bit about the history of meetings. You know, where do they originate? Have they always been a part of in the Middle Ages, where people sitting down and having meetings? What was the sort of origin and, I suppose, original purpose of meetings?

Speaker 2:

So this is my favorite question and honestly, ash, what could be more exciting than the history of meetings? And the truth is it is completely fascinating. So here's my short and ridiculously over simplified version. In the Middle Ages, a meeting was a euphemism for a physical dual, so reaching decisions through violence. But over time, the idea of restraining from violence and I'm going to quote this battling instinct with words the meetings became a sign of power and of social status, and it was part of the civilising of society. But instead of reaching agreement through a duel, instead we cultivated conversation and discussion. And of course, another heavy influence were the therapy circles of the 60s, so the idea that we sit in a circle to discuss something that everybody has an equal voice. Whether that's true or not, we can talk about that later, but therapy circles are also thought to have had a heavy influence on particularly board meetings.

Speaker 2:

So then we get to the industrial era. So the economy is booming, driven by production of tangible products, so sourced, sold locally, compared with today's global markets, and the process might be complicated. So loads of steps in the mechanisation, but they would be known in advance and, provided you did all those steps correctly, the end product would be correct. And so that kind of product, that kind of processes, optimised through specialisation, hierarchy, control, rules, compliance processes, but that concept of lots and lots of steps, but completely known and understood in advance, did them in the right order and you've done your job this year. Like, does that sound like your job or my job or anybody's job? Our jobs just aren't like that anymore.

Speaker 2:

So what's changed now is our economy is based on the production of knowledge, data, pixels. We sell it globally and the rate of innovation is so much higher. We need to make a new thing or improve something every month or every week, not every decade. This kind of product is optimised not through specialisation and hierarchy and control, but through collaboration, and that's why meetings have taken on a completely different role, and I think we might talk about this later. I don't think we're in any more meetings than we were previously. Certainly not at kind of manager, senior manager level, but people who are individual contributors are certainly going to more meetings than they ever would have done before, and we need meetings to achieve this collaborative work. But the meeting format has broadly stayed unchanged since the industrial era. So the world has changed, but meetings haven't, and that's how we get to this conversation.

Speaker 1:

I mean that is fascinating and genuinely, and I think also you can maybe feel the residual sort of echoes of some of the origins of where meetings have come from and how they exist in many organisations. But I want to pick up on something that you said there and because I think, anecdotally, I've heard from lots and lots of people friends, family, colleagues that people feel, I think, particularly in the last few years, that meetings are taking up much more of their time. There are more meetings, they go on for longer, there's more people in them. But it sounds like from what you've just said that may not necessarily be the case for everyone, and so is that a genuine, factual observation or do we just feel that we're all spending more time in meetings?

Speaker 2:

The short answer is I don't think we know for sure. I think we're still emerging from the pandemic and establishing the data points before and after. The data from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, right the way through, is broadly similar in terms of how much time managers and senior managers will spend in meetings, and it was Henry Minnsburg who first did a real benchmark study that we still go back to in the 50s, establishing just how much time people are spending in meetings. I think a couple of things have changed. So, firstly, if you were in a senior role, you'd go to a lot of meetings, but if you weren't, you probably wouldn't. That's changed. So individual contributors are far more likely to be working on things that require them to go in and out of meetings to align, coordinate, ideate, et cetera, with other people. So that has certainly changed. So my data show that the normal distribution of meeting volume is broadly similar. Interested in pre and post pandemic, some people will go to a lot of meetings, some people will go to very few meetings and most people will be somewhere in the middle, and that mean median point hasn't massively shifted according to my data.

Speaker 2:

However, anecdotally, exactly as you say, everybody reports that they're in more meetings. So what they complete in the quantitative part of my meeting culture indicator survey will tell one story. What they say in the verbatim comments and their perception of meeting load will be quite different. I think broadly that is the proliferation of video and teams meetings. I think they're more likely to run back to back, to run over, I think, the sensation of being on the screen no break, shifting from one to the other, back to back. I think that feels completely different from doing the same in the office and there is also less friction to creating a meeting. So whereas in the office the key thing in the office was the meeting room Can't get a meeting room. Well, now we've got an infinite paradise of meeting rooms on teams or whatever platform people are using. I also think there are a higher number of shorter meetings. So you're more likely to go to a higher frequency of meetings even if you've got the same overall meeting load and that will feel like a higher load.

Speaker 1:

Certainly from my perspective, which is not an academic or research-based one, but it's my experience of working in a company that had some element of remote working pre-pandemic but now remote working is the norm and the primary mode is that in a remote context you have to be proactive and intentional about everything in a way that you don't when you're physically co-locating in an office with someone. You can just wander over to their desk and have a quick chat, whereas that quick chat is less easily instigated in a remote context and you do have to look at their diary and book something in and everything. As you said, what wouldn't have felt like a meeting in the office suddenly becomes a thing in your calendar that you've got to join and you've got to stare at a screen and all of those things. So I do think that I suppose sort of psychological load is an interesting strand to all of this.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

And regardless of whether or not meetings are taking up more of our lives, for many people meetings are something that they spend a significant amount of time in, even if it's a minority of their time, and across the board. What are your sort of general observations about the problems that come with meetings and meeting culture?

Speaker 2:

First key issue I see is we're in too many meetings. We were before the pandemic. We're still in too many meetings now. Too long, too many, too many people in them. There's no check and balance. So I can put something in your diary and your culturally required to come to it unless you can find a reason not to, and I can read your diary in the way I can't read your budget. What's happening is that deep work time is getting squeezed out. So, yes, we need to collaborate Absolutely we do. We also need time to think and do and make on our own, and that time isn't protected in any way, and what happens is it will get fragmented and atomized across the day, and that's why we end up working in the evening to get enough headspace to do something throughout the weekends.

Speaker 2:

The second issue that I see is that meetings have too little structure. So often they are either overly formal we're working our way down an agenda, we're just going to go through all the list of topics and make sure that we've covered everything. That's not structure, that's a list or they're completely informal. Let's just get together and talk about dot, dot, dot. You'll say something and I'll say something, and somebody else will say something and somebody else will try and say something and then I'll say something again, and the whole thing is very analogue, takes a long time to make progress. What we need to do is create some really helpful light structures that allow us to hear multiple voices at once. Say, for example, brain writing, where, instead of that analogue conversation that goes on for part of the meeting, you might allow people to have two or three minutes to think on their own and make some notes or into a document, for example, and then to read other people's. Or we need to find ways of structuring meetings to equalise voices. So the reality is it's not I speak and then someone else and speaks and someone else speaks. It's probably that someone else speaks quite a lot and then they speak again, and then they speak again and someone else tries to chime in, and so on. Structure can help to level that out and to hear from everybody, and we want to do that. The whole point of a meeting is to bring together diverse perspectives and we need to use structure to encourage cognitive diversity of that kind.

Speaker 2:

The third problem I see is that we don't have enough candor in meetings. So what we want is to have an environment within the meeting, but also within the organisation. You know it's based on the foundation of trust and safety in the organisation as a whole. That allows people to say what they really think and what really matters at 10 plus 12, not at 5 to 1 when the meeting's about to close and to be able to disagree in really helpful ways around a task without that feeling aggressive, combative, personal. The skills of that are still emergent and those three things. So we need more space for deep work, we need more structure and we need more candor. Those three things are kind of held in healthy tension together and that's really the basis for all the work I do with organisations.

Speaker 1:

And I would like to dig into each of those three areas because I think they all require unpacking a bit, and I would like to start with structure. Actually, I think you know, as you said, perhaps there are too many meetings. However, structured group discussions, ie meetings, are necessary to some degree. So if we acknowledge that is the case for most projects, initiatives, are there sort of universally true principles, approaches, ideas that you might be able to share that relate to the structure of these moments? Should meetings, you know, never be longer than X? Should there never be more than Y number of people? Or is it, as is probably the case, not that simple?

Speaker 2:

So there are lots of research papers that will tell you things like the optimum number of people in a meeting is seven and meetings should be less than two hours. Well, that kind of goes without saying, doesn't it? And I find those interesting but fairly impractical, because that's a bit like saying what's the optimum length for a conversation or how many people should be in a movie. There are completely different types of meetings that are there to achieve different things. So I see it as a design thinking challenge and what we need is a toolkit of different ways, of different structures, or I would call them scaffolds different ways of scaffolding different parts of the conversation to allow the grown-ups in the room to do their job in that meeting, to make it easy for them to do their job.

Speaker 2:

The fundamental principle of all of them is that they are explicit. It's like a little mini set of rules, isn't it for all or part of a meeting, and everybody knows what they are. That's helpful, because meetings have traditionally been a place where there have been a lot of rules, but none of them were written down, and if you're new or junior or neurodivergent or female or a person of colour or any other of a range of people who have often sat in the margins of meetings, it is not always easy to know what those rules are. So what scaffolding does is it makes those rules clear so we can moderate ourselves and we know how to contribute.

Speaker 1:

And what might some examples of that scaffolding or those rules look like?

Speaker 2:

So let's look at a couple of different examples. If we're in an idea generation meeting there aren't that many of those really. We do a lot of work on idea generation meetings, but how often do you go to a kind of a pure innovation creation generative meeting? Not that often, but it's something we all know what that is. In an ideation meeting, we might first of all, be really, really clear on the purpose of the thing we're trying to get to, so set a North Star so that everybody is ideating based on the same direction and the same criteria, and then we might ask people to do brain writing.

Speaker 2:

So brainstorming has been the kind of informal way of it, which involves shouting ideas out. Brain writing invites people to think of as many ideas as they can on their own, together in the room, and then to share them or place them on a shared board. There are lots of reasons why that's better. I won't go into all of them, but things like you find that you get a lot of creative fixation when you shout ideas out. So the first idea will determine many of the following ideas that will become fixated around a similar solution. Clearly, there are people who feel more or less comfortable shouting things out. So brain writing will be one format and then the next scaffold you might use in that session is that all the ideas go up onto a wall. They're then clustered together in affinity mapping I'm sure lots of people will be familiar with that where we group together ideas which have affinity with each other and then we can dot vote on them. We can add other data like heart voting or $100,000 voting or there are lots of things we can do on that shared canvas.

Speaker 2:

But we've got a structure process and we can add a few rules to that as we go. So, for example, in that first stage of brain writing we're looking for volume of ideas, not quality of ideas. We're not going to critique any idea at this stage. That will come in the next meeting. So I use that example because I think a lot of people will be familiar with that kind of session and with some of those principles.

Speaker 2:

And we can do a similar thing in Other meetings. If I give you another example, completely opposite end of the spectrum, for example, in a short update meeting we might start with a structure or a scaffold called a round and in the round everybody answers the same question in turn. Concisely, the rule is no interrupting, no commenting, no side conversations, and that means everyone speaks once before anyone speaks twice, and that you then got a shared pool of data from which you can start to compose the rest of the meeting based on their answers. So these are just a few different ways to feed up contribution, to equalise voices, and we want a better quality of contribution. They're really the three things that scuffolds can do for us.

Speaker 1:

That's really useful, I think, and I think particularly your point about people being invited to join a meeting, being very clear on what the purpose of that meeting is. And I think that relates to another point which you mentioned. And it does feel as though lots of meetings and maybe this is an unfair generalisation, but I'm going to say it anyway a lot of meetings are scheduled and are quite performative. They give the illusion that your input is sought or required, whereas actually the person organising the meeting or the people organising the meeting probably have a pretty good idea of where things are going to end up, but they acknowledge they need to give the illusion of people having been given a chance to feed in and having been given a chance to influence the direction of a decision, but in reality that's not the case. Is that a fair observation or am I being horribly cynical?

Speaker 2:

I think that's a very fair observation, for certain people and certain organisations for sure. In fact, there's a module in my e-course called Decisions Art Dynamite, because the way in which we make decisions as a group is so powerful in telling people where they stand in the pecking order and whether they're valued or not, and whether this meeting, and therefore this organisation, is performative or not. So my counsel for anybody who has a decision to make and is trying to figure out how to Because it's often with good intention, isn't it? I want people to feel involved it's to be 100% clear about what role you actually want people to play in it and to be 100% honest with them about that, because people are grown-ups. They don't expect to have an equal say in every decision around them. They get that. They just want you to be upfront with them. So it's completely okay to say I've made this decision. This is now off the table. I'm not seeking any advice on it. That's okay to say that. It's okay to say I've made the decision. This is the direction I'm going in. Can I check? I'd like your feedback and I may or may not use it. It may or may not affect my decision and clearly it's okay to say I would like us to discuss this. I will take this data away and then I will go and make this decision, and it may or may not be in line with what the majority of people in this room think, the key thing being to have an explicit process.

Speaker 2:

Now, there's a nice scaffold around this as well, called agreement levels, where you might have five levels. I have a set, and many organisations would use that and adapt it for their own purpose. For example, one could be total veto. I disagree and I won't support it. Two could be I don't agree, but I will back it. Three could be I think we need more information. Four could be I agree, but with these caveats. And five could be I wholeheartedly agree, and it allows people to take a position and make that clear very quickly. And you can see how that was short circuit, you know three hours worth of conversation where you never really got to what people really thought anyway, because they were trying to shape and frame what they said and because it's about power, isn't it? How do I have power without diminishing the person who's got more power than me? Everything in meetings is about power and status, I would argue, and scaffolds and structure provide ways to safely engage more explicitly and put the power struggle aside for a moment.

Speaker 1:

And I think that scaffold that you just talked about there is, I mean, genius actually, because I can think of so many meetings I've been in in hugely diverse range of different contexts, where you are trying to understand people's perspective on the decision you're trying to make, but because you don't have that shared criteria around how people are giving you their feedback, you're having to interpret and infer and you know, unpack what they are saying with their words but maybe saying something different with their body language. But you know some other piece of context that actually and actually, if there's this sort of one to five, clearly understood way of people feeding back on their opinion on the decision you're trying to make, that and, as you say, it shortcuts a whole load of ambiguity and potential upset and really helps with clarity. And clarity feels like a really important thing. And you mentioned a few things which I'd like to discuss now around clarity of purpose and when I say purpose I mean the purpose of the meeting and the purpose of the discussion and also the purpose of the other people in the meeting. You know you have been invited because of this reason and clarity around input and decision making. You know the scaffold. You mentioned the one to five. For people to be able to be very clear about how much they agree or disagree with the thing that you're presenting to them feels really important. And you also mentioned trust and candor, and that feels very important as well for the quality of the meeting and the quality of the discussion and the quality of the thoughts that people feel able to express. And I sent this to you prior to this conversation.

Speaker 1:

But there was a comment on LinkedIn that I saw you'd replied to and the comment was from Angela Cox and I'll read it out and I'll read your response and then maybe we can talk a bit about trust and candor and psychological safety.

Speaker 1:

Angela said imagine all the energy people could be using to do their jobs if they weren't being forced to use exorbitant amounts of energy masking and trying to stay safe. You want people to give 100%, create safe, inclusive, kind environments first. When people feel safe, they can divert energy from protecting themselves to doing the work that needs to be done. And you said in response to that trust is fast, safe is speed. Low trust, low safety, is treacle speed, and I think that's a really important idea, I think, for us to talk about and for organizations and leaders and people with power to consider, actually, if you feel you need to have meetings and you want to invite people in, actually there needs to be this psychologically safe context where people feel trusted and people feel that they are able to contribute. How do we get to that sort of environment?

Speaker 2:

So you're absolutely right. The cost of low trust is your go to a lot of meetings, so it's not just what happens in the meeting. If trust and safety is low, meetings will spring up all over the place and people will feel they need to go because they don't trust that the other person is going to act in their interest or kind of hold their interests in mind. Let's look at the term psychological safety. It's everywhere. It's somewhat misunderstood, it's nowhere near as simple as a kind of do these five things for psychological safety. For example, if you make one person feel hugely psychologically safe to share exactly what they think can feel, what they think can feel can make somebody else feel unsafe. So there is a maturing process by which we provide a consistently safe environment so that people trust it will be safe in the future, and we also upskill people to express themselves. And then you found safety in a way that doesn't diminish anybody else's safety. The word psychological safety I'm not sure if you're getting tired of hearing yourself say it, but I definitely am, and I know it pushes some buttons around oh, safe this and oh, everybody, you know snowflakes and everybody's got to feel completely, you know, fluffy and wonderful. And then I disagree with that. I can see why that is a pushback. So the phrase I use is to create a strong space, because we're not trying to take a meeting or an interaction down to the level of nothing can offend you. You know, trading on eggshells, everything's fine and nice. We're trying to take it up to the strength at which we can say a whole range of things in such a way that our relationship is such the way we say it and the relationship in which we're sharing it is such that it's heard in service of the task it can be heard. So we're not trying to narrow down the vista of the path of what can and can't be said in meetings. We're trying to open it up because inevitably we will all say things that could trigger each other all the time, and there are a variety of ways of doing that, the most fundamental of which is to be a consistently strong space creator all the time.

Speaker 2:

If you create a strong space most of the time and then somebody says something and you dismiss it or you commit some kind of microaggression, that will create a micro threat, and you don't need many of those for people to feel like it's a safe space when everything's fine, but when they don't feel like it or they don't agree with me, then it's not so, unfortunately, it takes a long time to build it up and it can be very quick to unpick it, but we're trying to get to the stage where you can make a mistake, but the strength of the space is sufficient that people will still trust you because the relationship is there. There are some ways, specifically in the meeting, that you can start to establish that. So I often talk about using a safety statement or a strong statement at the start of a meeting, and you can either make it really deliberate, a bit like the Prime Directive in Agile, where you put something on the screen that says the whole principle of this session today is, no matter what we see or hear, we trust that everybody did the best they could with the resources they had and the knowledge they had, and they picked the best option they thought was available at the time. That's on the screen and that's how we do this meeting. You can also do it much more informally. So I've got a range of statements and I can give you a link to my article on this if people want to have a have a rummage for some things that might work.

Speaker 2:

I often say today is as much about disagreeing as agreeing. So we are actively welcoming different perspectives today, even if, whether we agree with them or not, and whether that's the route we ultimately choose or not, we want all those differences of opinions and disagreements that are already there. We want to hear them in the room today, and that means that people will self-moderate a bit and say a bit more, and they'll also moderate themselves to not immediately critique somebody else's. And if they hear somebody critiquing somebody else's, they might step in and say well, we did say that today. We were about hearing all of them and as the meeting leader, you can go back to that at any point during the session and say I'm really glad you said that, or I do want to hear that point of all, because we did say we wanted to hear all these even if we didn't agree with them and even if we weren't going to use them. So what you say at the beginning of the session can be really, really powerful and give you a springboard to moderate from later.

Speaker 1:

It feels like so many of the things we're talking about in terms of adjustments you might want to make in order to make your meetings more effective. They're interrelated. You can't just turn any one dial and expect things to immediately improve, because in order to create psychological safety, you have to have clarity around why the meeting is happening and why people are there. Then you need to have structure so that people can input in a way that they feel comfortable doing so, and you have to. People have to feel comfortable disagreeing. I think that's the big thing. People have to feel comfortable being candid and also expect that other people's candle may be in opposition with what they've got to say and that that's okay, because it's not a you'd hope it's not a personal attack.

Speaker 1:

Actually it's, as you said, everyone in the session giving their input to try and achieve the best outcome, whatever the outcome is desired to be. I wonder and maybe this is me making a sort of a spurious connection, but it feels like lots of the things that you've just said relate to many of the things that Kim Scott talks about in her book Radical Candour around particularly focused on leaders leaders being prepared and actually inviting people to disagree with them as the first step to creating spaces and environments in which everyone feels that they can be authentic and candid with each other. I would say that that is true, or am I grasping at strews here?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the link is absolutely right. Kim Scott's work is excellent. I have a slight build on her Radical Candour model and I think there are three levels at which we could look at how we create safety. So leaders modelling it that is the platinum option and hugely powerful, a really cheap and inexpensive and fast way to improve psychological safety in your organisation. Dare, I say it, forget going on a course. Get your leaders model it much cheaper, much more effective.

Speaker 2:

Next level down is if that safety is not being actively created at the pace you want it, then you can create it in your own team, in your own meetings, your own team, like in my space on my watch.

Speaker 2:

This is how we do things here and I will make a safe space and that's what we do with our children essentially, don't we? We create a safe space and a safe set of boundaries for them to operate in, priming them for the world. We parent them in the home for the time they are going to be out of the home and in a world that doesn't necessarily operate that way and some of us, that's not possible. So I've also worked with plenty of people where they've been going into a leadership team meeting. You know they perhaps on the leadership team themselves, where that has been an unsafe place. They don't run that meeting, they don't run that team and I coach them on how to create a safe space for themselves in that meeting and how to set up that safety statement for the contribution they're about to make. So you do it at whatever level you can but, yes, premium is leaders modelling it.

Speaker 1:

And the last thing I want to talk about is you know, the cultural sector is a place where a lot of decisions and discussions, the status quo is that they involve a lot of people. You know a lot of meetings lead to more meetings because the purpose isn't clear, because they're just recurring things and people feel obliged to attend. You know, a lot of structures exist because they have always existed in that way, and if someone listening to this is working in a cultural organization, how do we, how do people start to effectively challenge entrenched and perhaps less effective ways of working and start to introduce new ideas?

Speaker 1:

you know, around structure, around clarity, around trust, around culture. These are all big but intangible things that are needing to be changed, and most of the people listening to this are not the person sitting at the top of the organization. And so what sort of agency and approach do people sitting elsewhere in this sort of hierarchy of an organization have in order to start to make positive change?

Speaker 2:

And this is one of the best ways that change can happen. So with somebody saying I'm going to try to do something differently. And the nice thing about meetings is if you do something differently, a mean of seven people will see it and those people might go to other meetings. So things that change in meetings can catch light quite quickly and make changes quite quickly. How I would do that? I would think about some things that you want to make a change to, either in the meeting or perhaps around the meeting. So an example of around the meeting would be either I go to this meeting or I have to invite all these different people to these meetings, and I don't think we need them all there. So what I'm going to do is some social contracting to say to them, either at the start of the piece of work or, more realistically, somewhere in the middle let's have a look at how we're dividing up the work and who needs to do what. And I'm going to have a go at streamlining some of this how can we delineate your role and your contribution from my role and my contribution? Or how can you contribute without coming to that meeting, or how can I contribute without coming to that meeting. So those are the examples of things you can do, kind of social contracting around some of those issues outside of the meeting. The things you do inside of the meeting, whether that is adding in some scaffolds, reducing the length of the meeting and compressing the format a bit to allow you to do that, using agreement levels, using something that changes how people contribute. I would badge that as an experiment. So, first of all, I get a bit of feedback and say so.

Speaker 2:

The simplest, simplest way to change any meeting is to make an observation and ask a question, just wondering. I see this in this meeting. It's taking a long time. It feels like we're not hearing from everybody. Whatever it is, what do you see? Do you agree and do we want to do anything about that? You've then got a mandate to make a change and you can say next time okay, we're going to try doing this, we'll try it for four weeks, four meetings, one meeting, whatever it is, and then we'll come back and talk about whether that worked or not and decide if we want to ditch it as an idea or improve it or keep it. And so, rather than adding something by stealth or saying I'm changing it, you're involving everybody, because in every meeting this is the interesting it wasn't quite an interesting part of my research really was talking to multiple people who've been in the same meeting and how differently they saw it.

Speaker 2:

So your experience might be different from other people's and if you can create an experiment that's been driven by other people as much as by you, you've got a really good chance of that succeeding. And as soon as you do this social contracting and then the experimentation, you'll probably need to do a little bit more communicating. So you might need to say to somebody senior who's dropping into that meeting what you'll see is slightly different today. See what you think, tell me afterwards. Or you might need to say to somebody you'll notice that in this project we're doing it slightly differently because we're trying to go to fewer meetings overall. See what you think and tell me afterwards. If people are primed to understand why you're doing something and that it's an experiment and that they get to feedback afterwards, you have, I would say, 10 times Scientific fact, 10 times more chance of that change being accepted and working.

Speaker 1:

Brilliant and I think there's some really practical and low cost ideas that people in almost any type of role in any type of organization could give a go with there. So thanks for that. Lastly, I mentioned Kim Scott's book a minute ago. Are there any other books you would recommend people read if they're interested in this? Ted Talks, people Should Seek Out Courses. People Should Go On what's if further reading what would carry a recommend?

Speaker 2:

An obvious first starting point would be Liberating Structures, which is a book about the open source movement of 33, what they call structures and what I would call scaffolds that you can implement. Now it has a fantastic introduction to the principles of how you use simple rules. To what they call, I would say, unleash, a culture of innovation, like how rules can actually free people. And then there's a ton of ideas for rules. Now they may not work in your meetings. I use virtually none of them, exactly as they're specified in the book, but I use many of the questions and the principles and the ideas and so on. It's a really good place to start.

Speaker 2:

And my other pick would be the absolute classic, nancy Klein Time to Think. It is not a book about thinking and how to do it and how to find more time to think. It is a book about how we can create a thinking environment in which people can do their best, work in a group and working on the principles that we often end up as thinking competitors in meetings. And actually how can we create a setting that allows us to do great disagreeing around a task, bring the best stuff out of our brains and build trust and relationship. And it is an absolute classic.

Speaker 1:

And I would add one. I will add the friction free newsletter from Dr Carrie Hutcher, as well as a really good weekly digestive, new ideas and I think you know once you've shared recently about different ways to open meetings, different approaches to naming meetings in people's diaries, again to prime them, to come to the meeting with the right mindset. As we said earlier, it's a range of small changes that are going to have the biggest impact rather than any one sort of silver bullet.

Speaker 2:

They're all interlinked, exactly as you say, and that's why all the podcasts I do are so long, because you cannot just pluck and it takes some thinking about. We haven't been conditioned to think about designing meetings. We see it as like running effective meetings. It's not its leadership, its delivery, it's the whole range of behaviors embodied in a group event worthy of our time and focus.

Speaker 1:

And that feels like the perfect place to end. Thank you so much for your time today, Carrie.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, ash, so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

And that is everything for today. Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast, sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, thedigital Works. You can also find us on LinkedIn. Now that Twitter is a total garbage fire, our theme tune is Vienna, beat by Blue Dot Sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to Mark Cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.

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Ash Mann

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