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Fun Yet Effective Meetings

blog.pwkf.org

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Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#31

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

Maybe it depends on the email habits at your office. In mine, the signal-to-noise of email is so low that it's nearly worthless. (If this were an email, it'd probably go to the whole department)

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#32

Post by grayclhn »

elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

You're combining "email" and "mailing lists." I totally agree about the value of mailing lists, but well archived mailing lists don't seem to be an option in many companies. Email w/out mailing lists can be a poor experience.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#34

Post by daralthus »

Async Google Docs > async Slack > meetings

You can setup a template with all they main points and checklists already in place, then get people to fill it out and collaborate on it.

Here's an example with the headlines, each would become it's own section:

    - Problem summary
    - Impact
    - Measure of success
    - “Why does this happen?”
    - Current solutions
    - Ideal scenario
    - Constraints and needs
    - Unknowns
    - Proposed change
    - Alternatives
And checklists for the writers:

    - On what level, and how detailed I want to describe things?
    - Did I write details into unrelated sections?
    - Who is this document for? Do they really know all that stuff I assume?
    - What impact would this change have on the business?
    - Can we quantify it?
    - How do we measure that the change solved the problem? How does winning look like? (ROI, proof of impact)
    - What is the root cause? (“Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”) Are we solving the right problem?
    - Can we break up the solution into smaller chunks to reach the goal faster?
    - Are we trying to solve a general problem before something specific?
    - How do people solve this already?
    - Did we talk to them yet?
    etc.
Then you offloaded all the questions you would have asked anyway to a document.

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#35

Post by cpeterso »

I spend a lot of time in meetings, as both host/facilitator and guest, and work remotely 99% of the time. We spend so much time in meetings without giving them much thought to designing them.

I highly recommend the book "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" [1] ("One of the top business books everybody will be reading in 2019" — Business Insider) or, for a quick summary, the author's webinar "The Surprising Science of Meetings: Evidence-Based Insights Leaders Need to Gain a Competitive Advantage" [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218

[2] https://youtu.be/8rDuumUtfAM

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#36

Post by gregmac »

chrisweekly wrote: post #18
elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible." You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the m…

You can "tag" people with email. Lots of people use this highly effective pattern:

FW: Re: FW: Fw: Re: RE: Update on project

hey chrisweekly, what do you think of this?

Regards,

John Doe, MSc, CPA, CMA, TLA,

CISAOO

Big Corp

123 Fake St

Someplace, OT 90210

Phone 2025551234 x364375

Fax 2025553536

Cell 2025553788

Pager 20255522226

Check out our FacedIn page!

[Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image]

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

This message (including any attachments) is confidential and may be privileged. It may be read, copied and used only by the intended recipient. If you have received it in error please contact the sender (by return E-Mail) immediately and delete this message. Any unauthorized use or dissemination of this message in whole or in part is strictly prohibited. Please note that, for organisational reasons, the personal E-Mail address of the sender is not available for matters subject to a deadline.

[Broken image] [Broken image]

---------

[Chain of 92 emails; the important ones are #36 and #73 but you won't figure that out until at least an hour of scrolling]

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#37

Post by wcarss »

daralthus wrote: post #34

Async Google Docs > async Slack > meetings You can setup a template with all they main points and checklists already in place, then get people to fill it out and collaborate on it. Here's an example with the headlines, each would become it's own section: - Problem summary - Impact - Measure of success - “Why does this happen?” - Current solutions - Ideal scenario - Constraints and needs - Unknowns - Proposed change -…

This is a great template! I have a personal theory about extending what you wrote above:

Async verbal meetings > Async Google Docs > async Slack > meetings

...and I'm writing an MVP for a tool to do it[1]! I hope that a lot of people will run async verbal meetings and do team-wide chats via asynchronous audio in the near future, because it's much more convenient and comfortable than long, synchronous video chats or laboriously editing text messages for technical content and tone.

In most ways, my MVP is just like IRC or slack, but it lets you also send audio, and it auto-transcribes the audio as a chat message, with a play button beside it.

I think meetings are one of the biggest use cases for a tool like this, so building some default structures like the above and publishing them out as artifacts is certainly in the milieu of ideas I'm trying out.

1 - https://heysync.chat

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#38

Post by CleaveIt2Beaver »

gregmac wrote: post #36
chrisweekly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible." You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the m…

You can "tag" people with email. Lots of people use this highly effective pattern: FW: Re: FW: Fw: Re: RE: Update on project hey chrisweekly, what do you think of this? Regards, John Doe, MSc, CPA, CMA, TLA, CISAOO Big Corp 123 Fake St Someplace, OT 90210 Phone 2025551234 x364375 Fax 2025553536 Cell 2025553788 Pager 20255522226 Check out our FacedIn page! [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [B…

Don't forget that at least three threads have forked from this because some nimrod clicked Reply instead of Reply All

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#39

Post by wcarss »

chrisweekly wrote: post #18
elric wrote: post #2

I agree with the author's crusade against pointless meetings, but their attack on email doesn't sit well with me. > Avoid email loops. Those have too much overhead, and will divide your audience pretty quickly. The author recommends "async slack" in a cartoon, but then advises against using email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible. Mailing lists are severely under valued in corporate…

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible." You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the m…

+1, I agree strongly that the "channel" is a powerful UX metaphor and enables better high-throughput communications, and that other modern ideas are expressed in chat applications in a way that's more comfortable to us than they are within email.

I also believe that there's a big gap between traditional text chat and an audio/video meeting, where casual discussion and emotion trade off against calendar space and long periods of captured focus -- so I hope we have progress to make here!

(I posted in a different thread in this submission that I believe in this so strongly that I'm making a product to try to bridge that gap, but I won't muddy things by re-linking it repeatedly.)

Re: Fun Yet Effective Meetings

#40

Post by dsr_ »

gregmac wrote: post #36
chrisweekly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "email -- which is IMO far superior to "async slack" in every way possible." You're entitled to your preferences, but "far superior... in every way" is a bit hyperbolic. In practice, with email, usage patterns vary wildly (forward, reply, reply-all, cc, bcc). IME Slack channels are cleaner and provide several benefits. Not just the option for ~realtime / synchronous chat (where email doesn't work at all), but the m…

You can "tag" people with email. Lots of people use this highly effective pattern: FW: Re: FW: Fw: Re: RE: Update on project hey chrisweekly, what do you think of this? Regards, John Doe, MSc, CPA, CMA, TLA, CISAOO Big Corp 123 Fake St Someplace, OT 90210 Phone 2025551234 x364375 Fax 2025553536 Cell 2025553788 Pager 20255522226 Check out our FacedIn page! [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [Broken image] [B…

Hi John --

Please remember that our corporate standard of email etiquette, as referenced in the employee handbook wiki [link], is to inline our responses while removing unrelated content. We've found that method to be very effective for the last thirty years.

Also note that the standard for internal signatures [link] is 2 lines:

NAME OR NICKNAME DEPARTMENT

and that the standard for external signatures is a maximum of four lines [link] with the following recommendation: NAME DEPARTMENT / COMPANY DEPARTMENT CONTACT URL

Finally, I don't know who told you to put all those images and disclaimers in, but Legal advises that you can't discuss confidential info in external emails, so you don't need disclaimers. You don't get privilege unless you work in Legal, either.

Yours,

dsr_ Security

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