Sherpa Alliance

Like it or not, the portfolio of meetings you run is the gearbox of your business.  Meetings are the collective mecahnism via which everything else meshes together, with the frequency and quality of communication, collaboration and coordination you need as a team for organizational agility. 

Unfortunately, unless you have some kind of workflow management software system in your business (and good luck trying to implement one of those) meetings are all you have - they are like the operating system software of your business.  In his book, Death by Meeting, Patrick Lencioni puts it this way:

“For those of us who lead and manage organizations, meetings are pretty much what we do. Whether we like it or not, meetings are the closest thing to an operating room, a playing field, or a stage that we have. How pathetic is it that we have come to accept that the activity most central to the running of our organizations in inherently painful and unproductive. There is simply no substitute for a good meeting – a dynamic, passionate, and focused engagement – when it comes to extracting the collective wisdom of a team. When properly utilized, meetings are time savers”

Yes, he sets about breaking the myths we have about meetings - good meetings are not time consumers, they are time savers.  He goes on to say:

“The myth of too many meetings: Our problem is not that we are having too many meetings. Our problem is that we’re having too few of them. I’m not saying we need to be spending more time in meetings, necessarily. But we definitely need to be having more than one type of meeting. By taking a contrarian, nontraditional view of meetings … we can transform what is now painful and tedious into something productive, compelling and even energizing. In the process, we can also differentiate ourselves from our competitors who continue to waste time, energy, and enthusiasm lamenting the drudgery of meetings”.

However, developing our porrtfolio of meetings as the gearbox of our business and our organizational agility (as a competitive differentiator), doesn’t happen by accident.  Instead, it happens by design (Agility by Design).  How much design effort have you invested and how is your gearbox of meetings?  If they are a little haphazard, are not meshing well with eachother and are not well oiled, I urge you to invest more design effort in them.  Here is a tool to help you (Meetings Matrix & Annual Calendar) which also includes a design template for a morning meeting/daily huddle for Fast-Cycle Teamwork (donwloadable article).