Evan LaPointe: belief

Transcript context

…Are there things that you've found people can change in the way they work based on the way the brain operates, whether it's run better meetings, be better influence? What are some things people can try to do this week that will make them more successful at their work or working with colleagues? In the list of what science knows and what business does, everything is in there. Culture is in there, meetings are in there, goals are in there, deadlines are in there, team dynamics, all this stuff is in there. We'll probably just pick a few things out of that very long list. Meetings are a good one. Meetings, I forget what the statistic is, but it's some insane 12-figure amount of, no, not 12, nine-figure, no, 12-figure, hundreds of billions' amount of waste is caught in meetings. We spend gazillions of dollars on waste of time and meetings. For us, like in our programs, the average delta is between 10 and 20%. People save anywhere from a full half of a day to a full day per week of work as a result of just cleaning up the way they're using meetings. Some of that is just the design of meetings, like treat meetings like a product and treat them workflows that should be organized and used intentionally, but a lot of it is inside the meeting, like what's the tactic? Here's something super tactical, which is, meetings, generally speaking, are a combination of priming and decision making, if you look at meetings through the lens of the phases that they are. A lot of meetings skip the priming step altogether. They launched directly into decision making. It would be safe to skip the priming step if we began the meeting under the assumption that everybody here is on the same page, has the same information, and generally speaking, intends for the same outcome. I think that's a ludicrous assumption for most meetings, and yet most people are actually shocked to find out that we're not on the same page even though we literally never have been, and as long as you're on day two plus of working together. It's a crazy thing that we don't do priming, and priming can be simple. It can even be done in the invite. One of the things that's crazy about Outlook and Google is you can put a very terrible useless meeting into Outlook and it will never look at it and be like, this is probably useless. Just like you can go into Trello and put the dumbest project in the company's history into Trello, it will ingest anything you put into it without any discernment as to its value. Now, imagine we're going to have to do this ourselves for now until a better calendar comes out, but imagine if Outlook or Google Calendar or Cron, which now is part of Notion, would just be like, "Uh, uh, uh. What is the point of this meeting?" You could say, "Okay, this is here. This meeting is about the generation of options or creative problem solving or very tactical problem solving or efficiency seeking, or what is the category of conversation we are about to have? What are some of the basic principles that should apply? Are we honoring sacred cows or are we eating sacred cows in this meeting? What is the mode mentality, the priming? How can we all say this is the mindset and the ultimate purpose that applies to the meeting?" You can write that and you can read that in under three minutes. What is the mode mentality, the priming? How can we all say this is the mindset and the ultimate purpose that applies to the meeting?" You can write that and you can read that in under three minutes. It's not some arduous process. Amazon does it in an arduous process, they're known for that. That's wisdom to know, like we need priming. They're wise enough to realize the need for it. They make that a very robust execution. It doesn't have to be that robust. Skipping priming is pretty bad. Other meetings get the priming and the decision-making backwards. We start to open the meeting. You've heard of diamond-shaped thinking, let's open the meeting with expansionary thought and let's end the second half of the meeting with convergence. Well, we start the meeting instead with convergence, realize that we can't reconcile the various party in the room, their needs for convergence. Then you might hear in the middle of a meeting like, "Well, let's start over again and remember why we're all here." We do the priming in the second half of the meeting just in time for the meeting to end. That's a super obvious thing that people can do, but that people very rarely do in priming. I'm happy to generate a list so we don't have to talk through everything, but maybe make some little PDFs or something that people can download that say, "Here's what great priming looks like." Then when you move to the decision making, here's what great decision making looks like, and that way, you can have a little bit of a guide, and again, do your own math, what science knows what we're doing in this meeting. We're skipping a bunch of steps, that's growing the probability of dysfunction or things will going wrong, and let's shrink that probability instead of growing it.…

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