The Golden Half Hour

How do you have better and/or fewer meetings? 

You have a really decisive meeting first.

As a Transformation Programme Lead, I worked out years ago that the biggest drag on progress is talking too long without taking a decision. This is an activity commonly known as “a meeting”.

Poor-quality meetings circle the subject; peer at it from all angles; and then run out of time before agreeing anything that moves stuff along. In Programme Leadership, the very worst place for this to happen is the day-planning stand-up meeting: the Golden Half Hour. Because if you don’t have everything decided within the 30 minutes, it means you’re going to need more meetings today. Joy unconfined….

Consequently, all those years ago, I realised the best option was to take all the day’s decisions there and then. Just choose. Then everyone can leave the room with the ability to move things along, immediately.

In the subsequent years. I’ve noticed three very interesting by-products of this approach:

• If many Programme decisions are made with the full team present, everyone gets a better picture of the direction of travel. And there’s little need to spend time on just-to-fill-you-in communications.

• Seeing decisions being scoped and taken gives everyone a better understanding of the Programme rationale and ethos. As a result, people go on to take their own decisions consistently, within these parameters.

• Team members absorb the importance of decisiveness. They see that no blame is attached to a decision that later needs to be reversed. Therefore, people become more confident in daring to take their own decisions.

In the last year, this approach has become even more important, because so much time is being stolen from people by the ever-present demand to “jump on a Zoom”. The drive to create phoney face-to-face contact means that many people feel they are perpetually in formal meetings, with no time to do some actual work. Therefore, saving them just one additional decision-making meeting equates to giving them back time to make progress.

So for me, the very best way to improve a meeting is to make a decision. If it’s wrong, you can always take another one tomorrow….

Mark Aikman is the author of Uncommon Sense: Alternative Thinking on Digital Transformation

Amazon location: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Uncommon-Sense-Alternative-Thinking-Transformation-ebook/dp/B08KSG513Q  

Apple location: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/uncommon-sense/id1536877985