Meetings from hell, reductionism and process-products
“People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” Thomas Sowell
Contentious meetings need facilitators
By now, you may have heard of Handforth Parish Council, whose Planning Committee meeting descended into utter chaos, very publicly. I could only watch the first few minutes of this, before I sank into a deep despair, as the infighting, the social incompetence, and the directionlessness of this group of councillors escalated into something both comic and sad.
Now, most of the meetings and workshops I run aren’t statutory processes; they’re generative exercises aiming to find common ground or clarity on complex issues. But, if anything, the stakes are even higher than Handforth’s. My three meeting leadership rules of thumb are as follows:
Challenge assumptions: Give perspective and fresh eyes to well-worn ideas.
Detect patterns: Join the dots between seemingly disparate ideas, to draw out insights, or operating principles.
Reframe: Step away from the actual content, and look for the ‘meta’ themes, so you can offer a variant view or a challenge.
I sympathise with Handforth’s ‘facilitator’, Jackie Weaver — who has become a minor celebrity in Britain this week (!) — but she really was well out of her depth on this occasion.
Question: What leadership guides do you use to handle contentious meetings or planning sessions?
When processes become products
In 2015 Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar became Australia’s first tech billionaires. Their success is the result of a rare pivot that spun their company, Atlassian, into a 180,000-customer, $60b+ valuation business with 5000 staff.
What was the pivot? Well, they started out as a third-party support business for other software companies. As they got busier, they needed simple ways to track issues and to project manage. Being programmers, they built their own app, called Jira and, before long, realised there was a bigger market for their internal product than for their tech support. The rest is history.
The even more famous example of ‘process becoming product’ was American Airlines’ converting the paper rolodexes on which it booked flights in the 1950s to an electronic booking system. Developed by IBM, for the astonishing sum of $40m (in 1960 dollars!), the SABRE system was initially used only by AA internally. But then, travel agents clamoured for it, and it spread rapidly to other airlines too. By the time the businesses were split in 2000, Sabre had outperformed its parent substantially.
Both of these businesses succeeded because they solved an internal problem so profound that every team wanted it, and it ultimately spread virally outside the organisation.
Question: What processes do you use that are potentially invaluable to others?
Reductionist thinking
I led a strategy meeting with a highly adept group of directors this week, and we had a discussion about what I call reductionist thinking. This is asking questions like:
“If we could only do one thing, what would it be?”
“If we were prevented from performing our main role, what would we do instead?”
“If we didn’t have any of what we have, what would we build first?”
Reductionist thinking is useful because it compels us to examine “What if” scenarios from first principles. These are often base assumptions that capture the core of what’s really important to your customers, your identity, or the value you provide.
Question: Can you identify one capability set that accounts for 80% of your success?
Drop me a line in the comments below to give me your thoughts on the questions above. And, I’d love it if you told others about please do tell others about 5MSM by sharing below!
I’ll see you next week,
Andrew