Stop wasting time in meetings with better Communication Standards (Video Podcast) Ep. 76

0:00:00.2 Todd Brown: Hello everyone. And welcome to another change your game with GTD podcast. My name is Todd Brown and I'm here, as always with Robert Peake.

0:00:13.3 Robert Peake: Hey, Todd, good morning.

0:00:14.6 TB: Hey, Robert, good morning. Our goal in this series of podcasts is really to help you by sharing our knowledge and our experience of the Getting Things Done methodology and how you can use it to do the magic trick of, on the one hand, getting more of the right things done, and on the other hand, lowering your stress levels and enhancing your ability to shut off from being productive when that's appropriate. So that's it in a nutshell. Robert as you and I were normally over the last several months, we've been doing sort of guest podcasts where we've had folks on and we've had the chance to let them talk a little bit about their own GTD experience, to do a little bit of live coaching, as it were, in the moment. But what we decided was that it might be nice for you and me to go back and do our traditional format, just the two of us, because we had a theme that we thought lent itself particularly to this format, and that was this topic of communication standards. Effective communication in an environment where people have adopted getting things done or are adopting getting things done. So I'm curious, as you think about that topic, GTD and communication standards, what comes to mind for you? What kinds of things have you seen? What's your experience been?

0:01:38.6 RP: Yeah, it's a big topic and I think it's one that increasingly is becoming at the forefront of people's awareness as more and more hybrid working is happening and people are just more and more challenged by people wanting their attention for a variety of reasons and in a variety of different ways. So the first thing that I think people often realize, there's that old kind of meme that makes the round somewhere. I think it might have even hit the New Yorker at some point. This cartoon or whatever form it takes, where it basically says this meeting could have been an email. I think for a lot of people, that's their first awareness that the medium matters, that considering your audience matters, and that improving our communication standards, even if very rudimentary, by thinking about what should be an email versus an in-person meeting with a lot of people will help us not only get better, but will help our mental health and help us not have these moments of rueful laughter when we realize we got a lot of people, a lot of salaries here in this room, and actually this could have been summarized in text and saved us all a lot of time and sometimes even travel time and interruptions to our day by choosing the correct medium.

0:03:09.4 RP: So I think everyone has some awareness that this is important. But I think a lot of people and a lot of organizations don't really quite know where to go from there other than sort of encouraging people to think about, can you just do this as an email update versus taking up a lot of people's time in real time. But from there we get into all of the wonderful things about getting things done and the things that mentioned by Ed and David in the team book. So lots to unpack here. I'm curious where your mind goes in terms of maybe what's next most important after realizing that sometimes email is actually better than a big meeting.

0:03:52.6 TB: Yeah. And I like how you brought us sort of back to the core, some of the core ideas of getting things done. Because for me this idea that for a lot of us, the mental noise that we're carrying around with us, the mental noise that gets generated in many cases has to do with conversations that we need to have, things that we need to be talking to folks about. Now in my experience, quite often that'll manifest itself in people as worry. In other words, they'll have a particular topic, something in mind which they know that they need to have a conversation with somebody about, or they have that sense. But what they really haven't boiled down is, okay, well, exactly who do I need to talk to about this and what's the topic of the conversation? And I know and so now we're in the area, of course, of next action thinking. And I guess I would just give a shout out to that core idea. Which is, as in all things, getting things done, one of the really important ideas is, hey, what can I do to get this thing off my mind? What can I do to finish the thinking? And then where would I put a reminder about that in order to make sure that when I was in a position to do that next action, I would be able to see it.

0:05:16.0 TB: So again, to sort of round out that idea, let's imagine that what I've decided is, yeah, I need to have a conversation with one of my colleagues. It's a difficult conversation. It's one about performance perhaps. And I refine my thinking down to the point where I say, okay, well, the conversation that I need to have is about a particular project that this person was working on and I want to discuss this person's performance on that project. That's the topic. And then where does that reminder go? Well, again, those of you out there who've been through GTD or have been exposed to GTD, you probably will recognize the idea of an agendas list. And an agendas list would be a list of things where you keep track of the topics of conversation that you need to want to bring up with folks that you interact with regularly. So again, I think there's, and I know this is, as you said earlier, there's an awful lot to unpack here. So I'm slightly scratching the surface, but I don't want to neglect the importance of these core ideas in the methodology because they do... There are reasons that David Allen's first book sold 3 million copies and continues to sell very well, which is these core ideas from the methodology really have a lot of legs, as we say. They're very effective and they are for a reason. So that's what comes to mind. What's on your mind about this?

0:06:41.9 RP: Yeah, that's great. And I think it's great to point out, as you said, that when you have this impulse toward the next action, we're all very much on teams and in groups and in organizations that impulse very often leads to, I need to interface with someone else about this. You mentioned the agenda list for one to one conversations or regular team meetings where you have that open forum to raise those topics. We do that all the time. We do that in our one to ones. We do that in our all team meetings, dynamically building those agendas and all going away consistently going, wow, I got everything I need addressed and I've got next actions and I'm ready to go as a result of this meeting on, into progressing those things. And I think that's a rare and wonderful experience coming out of meetings in a lot of organizations. So it's one of the things I cherish about the way that we do communication standards in relation to our own meetings. And of course then building on that, we do a lot of consulting work with organizations and teams that want to create working standards for themselves.

0:07:55.4 RP: And that is a consulting thing. That is a thing where we want to dig in and see, well, what are the pain points, what's going on what's working and not working for you? Partly, there's a stylistic almost element or an element of different teams sometimes have different sets of values, different ways that they think about communication, different ways that the individuals process information better than others, for example. But there's some common things that kind of come out of that. And meetings, of course, is a big pain point. Some teams have decided as a result of that. Things like, hey, you know what, if you're going to call a meeting, you need to state the outcome that you want. Is this for discussion? Is this to make a decision? Is this for general awareness? In which case maybe consider another form if it's really just an update. And also neat things like really giving everyone conscious permission, for example, if they're put onto a meeting to look at in relation to their roles, GTD parlance, their areas of focus or areas of responsibility in their job and say, hey, I'm not sure I need to be at this meeting because I think you guys can handle it here and I can just get an update or whatever.

0:09:12.0 RP: So one of the big things I think about communication standards is making things explicit and creating some agreements that give people permission to navigate the different approaches to communication and the different communication styles in relation to those standards in a way that is going to make things a lot more efficient. So I love that aspect of it, the aspect that it's all conscious. We've all signed off on it. This is how we play kind of a thing.

0:09:40.7 TB: Yeah. Do you know, it's funny, as you said that I love that point that you brought up around the objective of a meeting. To use the GTD phrase, what's the desired outcome? This meeting will be finished when what is true. And boy, oh boy, you can spend, I mean, just asking and getting consensus on that question, either in advance of the meeting, if that's appropriate, or if it feels like, hey, well, okay, we've got this meeting. It's a meeting which we've been... It's been in the diary for seven years. We meet every Thursday at 2:00 in the afternoon. Same group. But maybe it's feeling like the meeting has kind of lost its way in the sense that, well, it's nice to be in this room and it's nice to catch up with these people. And yeah, we talk about some things which are probably related to business somehow, but boy, you can just laser focus a group on being as productive as they can be. If you ask this question, open the meeting with the question. This meeting will be done when what is true? And then take a few minutes to just generate that. This meeting will be done when we have agreed who's responsible for the various elements of the budget and what are the deadlines in terms of getting those back to the main group, for example.

0:11:01.4 TB: That's just one way to... That's just one example. But I think that that kind of clarity is, I was going to say sadly lacking. And it is sadly lacking. And the word tragically lacking also comes to mind. You know what I mean, I just think about the amount of time that is wasted in a lot of meetings because there isn't clarity about the purpose of the meeting. And as you quite rightly said, different meetings have different purposes. I'm not saying that every meeting is about the kind of agreement that I've just outlined there, but having agreement about what does Done look like when it comes to this meeting. I think that is... If everyone... If the folks listening out there, if you all just come away from this podcast with that as a potential next action. Use that in your next meeting. I'm thinking that'll probably be an upgrade for a fairly significant proportion of the folks who are listening here.

0:11:57.6 RP: Yeah, I think so. Having been in GTD enabled and non GTD enabled organizations, I think it's safe to say that a lot of meetings aren't as purpose driven as they can be. And I think the other hack that immediately not pack the other best practice really that you can infuse into meetings, that's kind of on the other side of that is taking, for example, the last five minutes of the meeting to say so based on this, who will do what by when? A real basic question that is so often overlooked and so often for some reason, organizations get into the habit of just putting meetings back to back and slamming one thing into another as though the meeting were the place that the stuff gets done, when in reality the meeting is often the place where the stuff gets clarified. But if you don't explicitly go back and kind of get really clear about what you've clarified in terms of the practical mechanics of who's been assigned what, who's taking what away, them getting that into some kind of system for them to work through to completion, you're missing a really big trick.

0:13:06.6 RP: And then also if you're just constantly slamming meetings back to back in that way, you're creating almost no space for the stuff to actually get done. So meetings have become a very emotionally charged topic for that reason, because it really can feel like you're a little bit held captive sometimes to those less purpose driven meetings or to those meetings where you're not really taking away very clear next steps that everyone can see and agree on so that there's accountability to completing the thinking, completing the process of clarifying in the meeting by then organizing that and then obviously engaging with that. And I think there's nothing more frustrating than having a meeting that basically rehashes everything you talked about in the previous meeting, because nothing has really gotten done from meeting to meeting. And that just shows that people really want, they want to get stuff done together, they want to move things forward together. That's a lot more satisfying in some ways than a lot of the more casual perks that people infuse into a business. We really want to get stuff done together and feel like we're accomplishing things. So putting that forward as an intention for the communication standards, I think really helps clarify what standards do we need to feel like we're winning together.

0:14:36.7 TB: Yeah. As you talk about it, it occurs to me again our topic today is communication standards. It's something. And meetings, of course which seem to mine for improvements for a lot of folks in a lot of organizations. But something else that occurs to me that I think we could pivot to and that would also be helpful for folks would be communication standards around the less tactical and the more strategic. And so what came to mind for me as you were talking about it was, do the members of your team have conversations about the outcomes of the projects, if we're going to use the GTD term. The more than one step outcomes that you're working toward, the projects that you as a team are working on. And is there agreement about those things? Again, I found in my own work an awful lot of people who are out there and they think just going back to what you just mentioned, they come out of a meeting, they think they've understood from the meeting what it is that they need to do or somebody else needs to do what is that project? What does the finish line look like? And then it turns out days or weeks into the project, there isn't that clarity.

0:16:00.9 TB: And so people have been spinning wheels or they've been focused on the wrong things or they've just... The lack of clarity about the outcome has led to inefficiency. And that's not bad because inefficiency is bad. It's bad because it creates, well, that's not great, but it also creates as you quite rightly said, also creates frustration. It creates it, it means that the return on the energy invested by the team in the work that they do is not as high as it could be. And that's not great. It's not great for the team, it's not great for the individuals in the team. So that did occur to me as well, that this whole idea of using some of the core artifacts of a GTD system, the definition of a project, what does Done look like? Let's draw a very, very clear picture of what Done looks like and let's all sign up to that. And that I think is again, a way that we can foster more effective communication within teams.

0:17:10.7 RP: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely right. And as you know, I do a lot of work with engineering teams and teams that are developing things like software. So naturally one of the tools there is something called the Kanban board. But if you really pull back from the purpose or the intent of something like a Kanban board, but it also could be again, chart, a spreadsheet or anything else, the purpose for a team is very similar to the purpose for an individual of having their GTD project list, which is to externalize something so that you can deal with it. And almost always that externalization is visual. It's a visual this rather than listening back to things, you are looking at a list or a structured set of things. And for teams it needs to go maybe one step slightly further than what you do for an individual project list in that you need to know who owns it, you need to know what the outcome is and you kind of need to know the state of play. And sometimes it's very useful to think about that state of play, as in, look, that's not something we're actively working on right now, or it is something we're actively working on or actually that thing right now is in kind of a waiting for states where we need something to happen outside the team for us to then get it back in progress or that thing's waiting approval or that thing's completed or whatever.

0:18:35.5 RP: So that fundamental idea, and it comes from Agile, and Agile has gotten a bit of a bad reputation, maybe inside bigger organizations due to some, I think just misimplementation. But the fundamental principle of that just works for every team and any team, which is that you got to kind of be able to see what everyone's working on to create the situational awareness for people to then communicate about it between the lines and between the meetings to actually get it done. And it also naturally creates some accountability for everyone to see. Are certain things languishing and are those assigned to certain people or are things moving forward in a way that we all feel good about and can align on this idea that, yes, we're a dynamic team and we all have similar standards about moving things along quickly. So just that thing of getting it out and external and meetings are inherently so verbal where you're talking through stuff, but having some kind of reference point that's out there that we all can see, I think is an essential part of communication.

0:19:40.1 TB: As you're describing that what I just flashed on was my very first experience of mind mapping software. And this was 20-some years ago, and I was in a meeting with a client. There's a group of about maybe six or eight of us in the room. And this was a client that I hadn't worked with before. And one of the people brought up a mind map in whatever the mind mapping software was, and used the mind map during the meeting to document what was going on in the meeting. And that was a bit of a revelation for me. I thought this, going back to your point about meetings are primarily verbal, but sometimes we can use, in this case it was technology. Didn't have to be. Could also be creative use of a flip chart or a whiteboard or whatever. But creating some sort of visual representation of what's going on in the meeting can also be helpful depending on the nature of the meeting and the goal of the meeting. Well, Robert, this has, as usual, flown by. I'm feeling like we need to start to wrap things up here.

0:20:50.6 TB: Let's put ourselves in the shoes of someone who's maybe familiar a little bit with getting things done, the methodology, but just does feel like a communication standards is something that I'd like to work on for myself, for my team. What would you coach them about getting started? How would you encourage them to get out of the gate here?

0:21:12.9 RP: Well, I think the first thing is to look for where are the pain points, where's the rub and what based on best practices for yourself individually about getting things clarified and organized and reviewing things as appropriate to be able to execute on them might help. Some of the usual low hanging fruit is exactly what you said. For example, setting a clear intention or desired outcome for the meeting, debriefing or spending the last few minutes on the back end during the who will do what by when conversation. So it really depends where also you have and to what degree you have influence. Senior leaders can just pretty quickly call that meeting and say, here's the pain points I see. What do we want to do as a team to address them? Here's some ideas I have.

0:22:05.1 RP: Let's do a brainstorm, let's get the mind map out. Let's start to do this. If you're influencing more from the bottom up, then maybe that's a conversation to start to have with someone who has that degree of influence and certainly with colleagues. You can just start to ask the questions of how can we do this a little better? How could we make sure that we're making really best use of everyone's time? Usually that question, that fundamental intention of let's make sure we're making best use of everyone's time and everybody can align on that because again, I think that's where a lot of the emotional content about meetings and missed opportunities with communication standards emerges. How about, what do you think is that?

0:22:48.7 TB: Yeah, I think that's great. That's a great summary. I think the other perspective that comes to mind that I think would be quite helpful is that in some ways good communication practice can be really, really effectively supported by having... Being clear about the communications that you need to have. So going back to this idea of keeping agendas right, who do I need to talk to and about which topics and as well, keeping track of the things that in conversations have been agreed that you're doing for somebody or that they're doing for you. This whole idea of commitments which really is right at the core of getting things done in some ways, a very important function of a getting things done system is to hold on to these commitments that have to do with communication. They're either an intended communication or they're the results of a communication that are... And looking forward to future communications. That's a key part of it. So I guess what I'm saying is focusing on GTD 101, as it were on some of the core ideas from the fundamentals seminar, if you've been on that or some of the early coaching maybe that you've had will absolutely help.

0:24:15.3 TB: But don't lose sight of the fact that GTD does, of course, have implications not just for our own working practices, but for our practices as teams and as organizations and as you suggested keep your eyes open for refinement opportunities there as well. Well, thank you all. Thank you for being with us for this edition of the change your game with GTD podcast. Please do like and subscribe if you have anything that you'd like us to talk about in this podcast series. We will be having more guests back in the future, by the way, so those of you who have given us feedback that you quite enjoy the new format, we're absolutely going to continue to do that as well. But until then, from Robert and from me, best of luck on your GTD journey. And we hope that everything that we've had to say today and in all of these podcasts has provided you with some support and look forward to seeing you next time. Bye for now.

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