Life's Too Short for Bad Meetings: Make Meetings Worth Your Time (With Evan Unger)

Evan Unger: 0:00

Because, if you do the math on meetings, most senior people spend at least 50% of their time in meetings. And so the math on this if you're spending 50% of your time in meetings and only working eight hours a day, you will literally spend a year's worth of your life in hours in meetings in under nine years. So if you have a 40-year career, you probably can spend five years of your life literally in meetings. That's very depressing. It's very depressing.

Ben Maynard: 0:26

Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world-class thought leaders and practitioners. Why, I hear you ask. Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep-rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Welcome back to the Product Agility Podcast. I am your host, Ben Maynard, and today I am joined by Evan Unger. Now, Evan is a gentleman who is and I'm trying to think how he's described in another podcast. They're like a master and guru of this. I can't remember how. On that construction podcast, do you remember how I introduced you?

Evan Unger: 1:23

I can't remember what he did, but something like that he was good.

Ben Maynard: 1:26

Professional unlike me. I'll put a link to that episode in the description so you can hear how they introduced it. Evan is here because at some point you're having to get people to work together on something and there's an element of facilitation that comes in with that. That's what we're going to be talking about today is the ins and outs of having a fantastic facilitative experience, and Evan's going to bestow some of his wisdom on us. But before we get into the meat of the episode, Evan, would you care to share a little bit about yourself to our listeners?

Evan Unger: 1:56

Yeah, thank you, ben, for having me here. I suppose I've got to think early on. My dad worked for IBM for 30 years. The thing that I remember from my childhood many things was how drained my dad came home from work. The funny thing is I ended up going to business school and pretty much did the same thing my dad did. He joined a large multinational company Merck big pharmaceutical company. When you're inside a large company, you're in all these meetings and it's rather perplexing. I went through a series of rotational leadership roles. They like what I was doing and I felt like an imposter. The next thing I knew they invented this job for me called the director of change, leadership and development, which honestly was a fancy title, for I had no idea what I was doing. I was a senior years out of business school, a new CEO comes on board and he does an assessment of the organization. There's a big push for collaboration. I got on a big project, a big re-engineering project. What we did was design a program to teach very senior people complex collaborative facilitation skills and went incredibly well and ended up leaving Merck after about six years worked for a small firm now called Schwartz Associates. What we've done for 30 years is run cultural interventions trying to transform the culture. As part of those interventions, of course, we always have to facilitate multi-day workshop type meetings team building, visioning, strategic planning, process redesign type meetings. As part of those interventions, we always train people to do the same thing because we want real skill transfers. We're really focused on high stakes collaborative workshop meetings I would say most companies. One of the efforts they need to take is to figure out how to reduce the number of meetings, because there are so many meetings that are deadly. Patrick Lencioni wrote that book Death by Meeting. We're running bad meetings. It leads to bad decisions. So many meetings are waste of time and people they don't hate meetings, but they hate is wasting their time. So that's what I've done for 30 years and recently we've started teaching people how to run meetings on a screen, like we're in these hybrid virtual meetings. It is a weird thing to be sitting in these tiles and trying to get work done, but the world's changed since the pandemic and that's what people are faced with.

Ben Maynard: 4:26

It was a challenge before. I think now it's a greater challenge, I think for some non-obvious reasons as well, but maybe if we have time, we can explore some of that. Now. There was a few things you said there which I put what I'm looking for hung onto a little bit. You said about the complex collaborative facilitation skills, which sounded awesome. I'd like to learn more about that Mention high stakes collaborative workshops. I think that, again, I think that's a good thing to explore because I think that maybe, if it isn't high stakes, so maybe why are we doing it? And you mentioned a facilitating workshops around visioning and team building. So there's a lot of stuff we can explore there and maybe to get us going, because I think I spent a long time as listeners no, working in large organizations and seeing lots of people turning up to agile events, even product visioning workshops, road mapping workshops and they didn't want to be there. The organization had decided to go on a particular journey, had decided that they were going to have these certain workshops, these certain points in which to get together and make some decisions or come up with a plan or do X or do Y or produce Z, and sadly, not a lot of the people wanted to be there and I think that, for some people, where they struggled is that they've tried all the lovely, beautiful looking, my road templates, and they've tried lots of the tools that zoom will now give you, for example, but yet their meetings still suck and decisions still aren't getting made and people still in it want to turn up. So, evan, when you think about what you said earlier and you think about this situation, we were just having terrible, terrible get together, so not even going to call them workshops or meetings. Please get together, not like it's happening. What do you think are some of the main causes behind this? For lack of joy the people experience?

Evan Unger: 6:14

joy. I always ask participants how many people attend meetings right, and everyone attends meetings how many people lead meetings? Not everyone leads meetings. And then I ask them how many people love meetings? And rarely people say they love meetings. I would say a big problem calls with meetings is we often have meetings and there's no purpose. Right, there's no objectives for things, and the metaphor I often like to use with a meeting or a project is the metaphor of a plane flight. Where are you in London?

Ben Maynard: 6:48

I'm just near Heathrow.

Evan Unger: 6:50

Okay, so perfect, I'm in Denver, you're in Heathrow. If we're running a project or a meeting, it has three parts. I'm here in Denver, I think. Last time I was on plane I timed it. It took about 52 seconds from the time they hit the jets for two wheels up Not a lot of time. But that's where most of the plane crashes and meetings take place. We jump in. No one has any idea why we're doing things, what we're trying to get done. So if the destination is not clear, there's a Heathrow, we're going to end up in Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Now, if we do a good job at the beginning of the meetings, then we set the stage for having a dynamic, powerful meeting and we're going to get to Heathrow airspace. This is a third place, and third part of a meeting is landing. Another place we have really big plane crashes in the meetings is on landing. But I'd say the first root cause of bad meetings is the leader hasn't thought through why we're having the meeting. What are we trying to get done? Which means they can't design the flight plan, they can't think about creatively how do we get there. They can't think about who should be there and what their roles are, and I would say another problem is people over invite. They just invite people who have nothing to do with it. Part of that's political and what people say FOMO, fear of missing out, whatever that is. But we have all these people there have nothing to do with it and we're wasting people's time. But I think most of the causes of poor means start before you ever show up, and that's where the real work is.

Ben Maynard: 8:21

So you said that this work before it begins, that makes a difference, and you said that we don't do a good job at it. In your experience, or even in your opinion, what would you say a good job like really looks like? Because I teach facilitation and we go through various things and we try and give people these tools and we talk about having a clear purpose, but people struggle when it comes to putting pen to paper. What does good really look like?

Evan Unger: 8:49

Good in the meeting itself or good ahead of time?

Ben Maynard: 8:52

right Ahead of time.

Evan Unger: 8:53

Yeah, look, if you're running a large project and let me be clear, I'm not an agile person at all I just end up training tons of people in the agile space because they legitimately have to run workshop type meetings that require true facilitation. There's a ton of meetings that just should never be allowed out of the hangar she killed them. But those types of meetings need to happen, and so what good looks like is there's, I'd say, in a high stakes meeting you probably spend three times as much time before you ever show up, because you have gotten crystal clear with the sponsor of the project why they want to do it, what you want to do. You want them there to kick it off. And then you have to do a lot of design on the dynamics and that's where most meetings go bad or on the group dynamics, and so you show up with a game plan and most of the work is ahead of time and you're running the X's and O's at the meeting once you get in there. But I think one of the most important things, especially in these virtual meetings, is people sit on the screen and we don't hold space for all the voices In some ways. I don't know in the UK if they have a big diversity, equity, inclusion push in the US. Of course it's a huge thing and no middle-aged white guy like me should represent what they're doing as DEI work and it's not, but it really is an inclusion program. How do we hold space so that we hear from all voices? I imagine because you're in the address space, right hippo decision making with the highest paid person's opinion. It can often be that middle-aged white guy, senior vice president, who might scare the poop out of everyone on the call. No one says a word, we don't get the right information in the conversation, we sub-optimize the decision. So what we're trying to teach people is the art of how to hear from all the diversity of the group, because it may well be that junior person might be introverted, speaking English as a second third language Person of color, possibly, who has exactly the expertise to help a group make a great decision, but there's no structure. So we hear from everyone and that's what we're teaching people. It's just the art of making sure we have the right conversation and get the right decisions made and people buying and they go implement.

Ben Maynard: 11:14

So, when we're thinking about these situations which are real for people and we need to hear from we need to hear from people because it says great, the quiet people have those brilliant insights and we're thinking about group dynamics, do you have any little tips, clues you can give to people to help get that Inclusion across?

Evan Unger: 11:31

the board, one of the simplest ones, and they in many ways can only be done in a virtual meeting. People Don't use the chat enough. So what often you can do to hear get voice from men is pose the question you want to hear from everyone, ask them to wait and type what they want to respond in the chat. Give them plenty of time to think right and then generally when we run those meetings, we call them simultaneous chats, where we will put a banner in the chat after people have a time to think. We ask them all to submit it once. And it is it one of the simplest things to just give people space To think. And people don't think about how powerful the chat can be, because if we just leave it open and keep talking into the screen, it's the same people, sometimes the hippo, or, if I'm in a mixed hierarchy, it's the senior people who are talking. But if you just use that simple tool, it makes sure everyone has voice because by making them wait, they know they have to write something. They know they have to. They've had plenty of time to think about it and by doing the simultaneous chat, people aren't waiting to see what the boss says she or he or they, and it's one of the simplest tools for inclusion. And then you can go to the chat and ask questions to get people to expand what they're thinking. It's not just a simple thing that anyone can do in any meeting, but very effective, very effective.

Ben Maynard: 13:02

So we mentioned about getting ready For our flight, what this could look like, and then, in amongst all the great advice you were giving, you mentioned about group dynamics. Now there's a Episode I've done with a lady called Marsha Acker who wrote the book that is the art and science of facilitation, and she has a new book out now around designing a model for leaving change, and she's a big fan of group dynamics, big fan of a guy called David Cantor, and she's got some interesting bits of tips and advice about how to Look at group dynamics and codify them. When you're thinking about group dynamics and when you're getting ready for a session, like, how can you predict, well, how do you get to know what those group dynamics could be?

Evan Unger: 13:40

Look, we're all dysfunctional human beings. Right to get a group of people to make a decision is a minor leadership miracle, because People don't want to make decisions, because then they have to commit. But coming back to the framing and the takeoff of the meeting, you're setting the container of how you're going to make decisions by getting the group crystal clear why we're doing this and what the context is, what's in scope and out of Scope with the group's decision-making. Literally, we always like to reach consensus, or as long as it doesn't mean compromising to accommodate the most dominant Person, it still has to be the best decision. And then good process structure, which is what we're teaching is what deals with the group dynamic. And then you got to get roles aligned. You have to have working agreements. So setting up the container is what gives you the chance to be able to manage. They're going to be the same dynamics. Right, we have egos. We have politics. Right, people are don't want to say something, they don't want to look good, but it's really what the we talked to people about. It's going slow to go fast in the beginning, not just jumping in with things fuzzy, because when we let the group jump in with things fuzzy, we're going to get a lot of weird dynamics happening in the group. So really it's the setup for the meeting that Gets better, if you will, engagement in a more functional way, given again that we're all dysfunctional for human beings and it most of our dysfunction often times shows up in works and there's a. It's interesting right, because if you do the math on meetings, most senior people spend at least 50% of their time in meetings and and so the math on this, if you're spending 50% of your time in meetings and only working eight hours a day, you will literally spend a year's worth of your life in hours in meetings In under nine years. So if you have a 40 year career, you probably spent five years of your life literally in meetings. That's very pressing, it's very depressing. It's very depressing, and I've asked clients for 30 years two questions. The first one is how many meetings take place in your organization, and that's based on scale of the organization, size of the Organization, because I work with very small organizations, 20 person nonprofits to gigantic Multinational, but a company with 200,000 people, they probably have a million meetings in a deck. The second question I asked them is what's the average effectiveness of the meeting to attend? I've had two clients say 80%, maybe five say 70%. What I get almost all the time is 50% or lower. And I say to clients how can you tolerate this? You may run 200,000 meetings today. I'll give you the high bar of 80% still would be mine. But no one ever says that it is toxic and literally drains the life force out of an organization. And so, really, meetings, if you wanna intervene at the cultural level, that's where you should intervene, because first of all, somehow organizations need to figure out how to stop a lot of the meetings Right, just legacy meetings add no value. There are some that we're focusing on that have to happen. And if you transform your leadership and that's what we're really teaching, it's not a course in meetings, but a course in leadership you begin to transform the performance of the organization and to your original question, it starts with making sure that takeoff is set up.

Ben Maynard: 17:10

Removing meetings. They are a scourge, they are incredible life sponges right and they just take up all this time. And I don't know how many situations I've been in over the years where people have said, oh, we've got a big problem, we've got too many meetings, and never have I seen it or mass happen effectively, where people then say, oh, we're gonna have less meetings, so we're gonna do x, y or z. What, in your experience, does then help to turn the tide in that? Because I think it is saying there's too many meetings, saying we put the effort in, I think you only have higher value on. This is great, but what have you experienced as the real things that help turn the tide on that kind of meeting tsunami?

Evan Unger: 17:53

The honest thing, that's not what I focus on Now. I was trained originally by my mentor in the general electric school workout. I go back a ways right. I'm gonna turn 60 in a week from today.

Ben Maynard: 18:07

Happy that.

Evan Unger: 18:08

And so I go back a ways. But Jack Welch started a workout and one of the things he was trying to do was to get rid of unnecessary reports, policies, protocols and, of course, meetings, and it is a major cultural push you have to take. So I think it takes a senior leadership C team who realizes we have all this sclerosis right In the meeting that's built up. We've gotta have some sort of process to blow all those things up Not just meetings, but reports that people have to do, approvals needed and I'm outside of that arena anymore. At this point in my life, 60 years old, quality of life is the most important thing. So I put my consulting business on the side and really what I'm doing is making the assumption that the meetings and the people I'm leading have to happen. How you deal with that is I hope that there's someone who figures it out they're gonna make a ton of money Because, yeah, you can spend years of your life in meetings. They better be worthwhile.

Ben Maynard: 19:12

Yeah, yeah, that is funny. I have seen it help. When you say to people there has to be a clear purpose and you have to put the effort in. You find some people to put the effort in. Actually, they haven't got time to go to many other meetings because they're really making sure that the ones they are gonna have are effective. But it's difficult. It's difficult and I agree with you. I think it does take a much higher level kind of direction and purpose setting to say, look, we're not gonna carry on in this way. This is just not the way that we should run a business. Now we mentioned preparing for takeoff and let's think about them. We're in a workshop. It's high stakes. I might say high stakes, evan, I'd love to. What do you mean by high stakes?

Evan Unger: 19:54

It's a real business issue that has to be solved. It could be redesigning a process. It could be deciding where we allocate capital next year. It could be how do we deal with a customer complaint, but it's something mission critical to the business. It's not. There are status update meetings where we have the team meeting weekly or monthly and there's a lot of reports, presentations. That's not high stakes. This is a meeting where you have a legitimate business outcome that is critical to some sort of business impact. So that's what I mean by high stakes. The meeting should happen, needs to happen, and if we don't get it right, it's gonna have an implication on how we effectively are as a business.

Ben Maynard: 20:38

Okay, so when you're teaching people how to help them be effective, washable in the air and make sure that things are progressing I'll be back in a minute principles, or guiding what's the word I'm looking for here, any like I suppose it is principles that you ask people to stick to, like unifying rules of what makes a successful high stakes meeting.

Evan Unger: 21:06

Yeah, one of the that not only are we taking off at the beginning of the meeting to frame the container for the meeting, but when you're running a workshop meeting and we in this program we need to use some platform to teach people how to facilitate. We use two things we use Google Sheets and that's a proxy for most organizations using Microsoft Teams and Excel, because that's what most companies use. And then we use Mural. Some of our clients, over the pandemic, most of them adopted some sort of whiteboarding platform, whether it's Mural, lucid Spark, we find Mural to be, they're all similar. But you have to have some sort of platform for engagement, and the model we teach is a simple model called the PAPRA model, which just stands for purpose, objectives, process, roles and agreements. But not only is there a PAPRA for the meeting, if you will, but good facilitation is at every moment in a meeting. Why are you doing something, what are you trying to get done? And then you bring good process structure, and so I think the principle would be you better be clear at every moment what you're trying to get done, and then you've got to help a group know how to do it, because a facilitated meeting is a chain of steps and those steps all have their own mini PAPRAs, many reasons why we're doing it, what we're doing and how we're doing it. And I said, one of the simplest things you can do to be a better facilitator is check for clarity more. Make sure the group's aligned and clear before you let them execute a task right, whether it's storyboarding or we've all done sticky dot voting in the when, the face-to-face world and now these murals and murals have their digital equivalents of those. But it's really about keeping groups crystal clear what they're doing, how they're doing it, and then you can trust the group. If you have the right experts and you can bring the right process structure and you have the right purpose and objectives, that's your job. You literally, when you're facilitating, or even as a leader of people who report to you, you don't have to offer your opinion that much. Great leadership is helping a group, getting the best decision, getting maximum buy-in, and sometimes they don't even know what you've done because you've had such elegant process structure where they all get to weigh in.

Ben Maynard: 23:28

What are your thoughts from a facilitator, either being the facilitator and looking after the process, or a facilitator who has the process but also contributes towards the content?

Evan Unger: 23:41

There's so many different ways people think about leadership. Right, and you and I and everyone have read thousands of articles over the career of books on leadership. One of the simplest ways to think about leadership is on a continuum where, on one extreme, you could be focused as the expert You're the expert in what the system needs to look like. That's one approach. The other extreme is you could remain completely neutral on what the, let's say, the user requirements are for the system, even though you have strong opinions. But you are an expert on that side of the continuum in getting the group to collaborate, to facilitate. Now, in the real world, to your question. We're all in the middle of the continuum. We have opinions and expertise to offer a group and if we're leaving the meeting, we need to be the one who brings the good process structure. And the problem is most people go into a meeting thinking about their expertise and haven't done enough thinking on the process for engaging the group. And the principle we always teach people is start neutral, let the group do the work, and only move into the middle and start off sharing your expertise when the group doesn't have that expertise to do it themselves, or if it's your team, there's times you have to provide the guardrails and say, hey, that we'd love to do that, but I can tell you the COO is gonna come on blue and again. Part of that then is in the beginning framing, when you do the purpose and context, what is in and out of the purview of the decision-making of the group. But real world, we're gonna have opinions. We better be the one who thought about the process structure for the meeting and stay neutral, unless the group can't do it for themselves or you have to provide guardrails because they're about to make a decision that is either a bad decision or is not going to be supported a layer or two up in the organization.

Ben Maynard: 25:39

I like that. It reminds me of Chris Hadfield, the astronaut dude who talks about being a zero and just saying in a group environment you shouldn't go in and try and help. And I can over help and try and show that you are the expert and show that you know what you're talking about. Just go in and be a zero. But when there is an opportunity, when there is a gap, then that's your opportunity to come in and add something to it and people will respect you for that. If you go in and you're just trying to show how amazing you are, then you're not gonna get much collaboration. You're probably gonna piss some people off from the way.

Evan Unger: 26:12

Yeah, and if I'm the senior person who's offering all my opinions and what, I think no one's gonna say a word because you have political hierarchy. And so when we work with senior people and try to train them because these are not just skills in workshops, these are change agent skills right, these are people leading continuous improvement, agents doing agile work they're really much broader than meeting skills. But what we try to teach senior people is look, your people are gonna be intimidated just on the basis of hierarchy. You have to start by asking the group and we all one of the mantras we we always say is let the group do the work. Never do for the group what they can already do for themselves. And if you have the right people with the right purpose and objectives, they can do a ton more than you think. And you, if you're really good at guiding the conversation and what is that loud to doubt? A Ching right was the one of those things that we've all heard it the greatest leader is who, when the work is done, the people say, amazing, we did it all ourselves. It really is true. It is amazing what you can get done with good process structure and you don't have to impose yourself nearly as much as you might think. If you trust the purpose and objectives and trust the group and you can bring the process, you can trust it. Never say to the group trust the process, they shouldn't trust the process, they don't know the process. But you, as a leader, can trust the process and so that's what we're trying to teach people. I'm really saying the process.

Ben Maynard: 27:47

So I'm making a few notes here. I'm really saying the process. What are we talking about that specific and not in like chapter and verse, but just to give honest as a bit of an idea like what are we specifically talking about?

Evan Unger: 27:59

yeah, so. So most of us have done things like storyboarding or affinity diagram right when we were in the room. We're working on big index cards or big post-it notes, and process would mean everyone has a chance to reflect silently, as we talked about in the simultaneous chat. But you don't need chat to do that. You frame very clearly what you want the group to write on the sticky notes, how you want them to write. That's process structure, and then you could have a round robin where you go around and hear from everyone calling things and writing them on the stickies, getting them on the wall, and then we would go into some sort of multi voting. Back then it would be sticky dot voting, but the process is how the group engages. So, for example, if we're, if our meeting objective was to design what the new user requirements are for a system, the decision is what are the user requirements? The process is how do I get these 10 people to engage so they're best thinking. So process is just the structure side of the meeting, and in mural it would be all the moving parts and a mural or a mural right. It's also the framing and the takeoff, though, is process structure explaining why we're there, what we're doing explaining the high level agenda of flight planning, getting roles aligned right. Who's the timekeeper? Who's the ultimate decision maker? So what's the scribe's role? What's the participant? What's my role? Being more neutral. And then it's putting in place agreements how we interact, how we're going to be on video, how we're going to handle mute, how we're going to handle the tech. Don't talk over each other. One of the agreements, though they often gets left implicit. And this is all process structure. How are we going to decide? We go into so many meetings. It's completely fuzzy how we're deciding and the meeting just spins and we don't make the decision. And so that's process structure the beginning of the meeting. And then, when I talk about these mini-poppers, these mini-steps, every step has its own process. It's the how side of the meeting. Is what the process is Perfect.

Ben Maynard: 30:08

So you've got all that designed and then I don't know if you're familiar with this phrase the emergent agenda. You've got it all planned out and it gets all going fantastically and all of a sudden this thing pops up and then it's all like it's a concern or it's bright and shiny and everyone gets focused in on it. How do you suggest that people deal with an emergent agenda versus the plan?

Evan Unger: 30:32

I always say unfortunately, people show up at our meetings because we've got to deal with them and things are going to crop up Now. If you've contracted well ahead of time with the sponsor for the meeting and see here they have signed off on the popper why we're doing this, what we're doing, you design the process for how you're going to do it and then you're going to get roles and agreements in place by having that contract. When things crop up, you can come back to the original objectives and say how many of you think this is outside of scope? People, sometimes they go on these tangents and they just lose sight of that and then we can acknowledge yes, that's an important issue, it doesn't fit what we're doing here. Let's take it offline. Let's take it offline Now. Sometimes there's senior people who they're the ones flashing the shiny object and they have very strong opinions and they'll blow up an entire meeting. Even then, they may be the ultimate decision maker. What we still need to do is say look, this is why we've been asked to do this by the CEO, this is what we're doing. Would it be helpful for you to know what's going to happen if we blow up this meeting to pursue that shiny object. And the other thing we're teaching people is the art of handling challenging people. And when you're neutral you can't tell senior people what to do or think they're your boss's boss. And we're trying to train people how to facilitate in high stakes environments with senior people. But there is an art to handling challenging people and that's one of the things we practice over and over. But if I don't have clear purpose and objectives when the shiny object pops up, we can go down this rabbit hole, because people lose sight of what we're doing. And so it really is setting the container, having good process structure, and when we hit turbulence, using that metaphor, we come back to the headwaters and we're crystal clear what the destination is. And so part of it is just knowing how to take things and intervene, taking things offline or downstream. But it's hard because people want things are going to crop up, but you've got to be the one who says no, that's not what we're doing here. And so it really is about discipline. And with senior people, when they're flashing the shiny object, you need to know how to engage the other senior people to take that person on, because you can't take them on if they're your boss's boss, you just don't have the power and authority to do that.

Ben Maynard: 32:59

Yeah, so, yeah, okay. So it emerges, and what we're saying here is particularly about last point is if it is a senior person that's raised this new shiny thing and wants to go from a tangent it's, what can you do to get the other, their peers, in the room helping to keep it on track? So we're taking off and then all of a sudden, the equivalent to the emergency exit door blows off. That was a little scary recently.

Evan Unger: 33:24

Yeah, it was a little scary.

Ben Maynard: 33:26

And those videos of those people. I don't know how I would be a mess. They look quite composed. I would be in tatters.

Evan Unger: 33:33

I'm sure my underwear would have been soiled if I had that aisle seat.

Ben Maynard: 33:37

Yeah, videos of people that don't know. That was a Boeing 737. Matt took off and then the emergency exit came off laughing I shouldn't laugh this serious. The emergency exit door blew off and there were people sat right next to it and they're not you know and they were saying if I hadn't had their seatbelt at that point they would have sucked out. So serious event they had to land. What's the equivalent in a meeting where you have to make an emergency landing and then go back to the drawing board?

Evan Unger: 34:01

It's interesting because, first of all, we're always not realistic about what can get done in a certain time frame, which is why we have to be so good on the front end before we show up designing, and we have to be realistic around. If you want real conversation, you can't jam, pack the meeting with too many objectives. But the real world is everything takes longer and you don't get everything done in a meeting. So what we say to people is look, if you think about time as fuel, if you're running out of fuel. What we don't say to the pilot is fly faster, Just keep flying faster, because you're going to come at some point you're going to run out of fuel. What we say is look, let's say it's a two hour workshop meeting. At least the last 10 minutes are sacred, Even if you didn't get done everything you wanted to get done, which is the real world. At the 10 minute mark it's coming in for a landing Because things are going to have taken downstream. That shiny object may have gotten taken downstream and put in things. We all use parking lots, but we got to now deal with that. It's like okay, we didn't handle the shiny object here. What are we going to do, Given that the shiny object may well be important, it just didn't fit what we're doing today. But we got to close our parking lot. Now. We had objectives. We didn't get everything done Real world. So, based on that, what do we need to do with the things we didn't get done? And then we have to. One of the most important things is making sure the group, when they drop off this hybrid meeting or face to face, they leave the room. It's crystal clear who's doing what by when. So there is a coherent action plan. I have so many clients who say accountability is a core value, and then the meetings end. No one has any clue where we're going from here, and so what's must do in the meeting is to have Crystal Clear next steps who's gonna do what by when? And if you're working with a group over time. The other thing that's so important to do, especially as teams are in the forming, storming, norming model, is to do some sort of process check, just like you would an after action review, right in a larger event. It starts getting the group to look at its own group dynamic. So we're getting better and better from continuous improvement, but that takes time and a lot of times. What the trap we get into is instead of landing the plane, we try to get through the next agenda item that really we were never gonna get done, and people are like gotta go. I got a three o'clock, I'm out of here, eject, and you're sitting there as the meeting leader and everyone snuck out of your meeting. And they're happy, they're like because they have a ton of work. And so they snuck out of the meeting and there were no next steps, which means we have to have another meeting to deal with the fact we didn't do a good job even closing the meeting, and so it's just a discipline of leaving time to close the meeting itself.

Ben Maynard: 36:52

And we get a ton of plane crashes there. There's lots of gonna take away from this conversation and I think we'll begin to draw this to a close because we've covered so much and it's good that the time is used to pun. Time has flown by, I think. If there's one thing I'm really gonna take away, it's just silly. I really enjoyed it when you said the plane's running out of fuel. You don't ask the pilot to fly faster, and I think that is such a common mistake that people make, and myself included even when we all do, yeah, and we just try and speed up when actually we should be taking a moment to take a step back and really look at what we're trying to achieve and figure out maybe what's feasible and focus on things that are valuable and, like you say, make sure that there's people take something away and there's really consequence to what has been agreed, spoken about, rather than just being set up to another meeting, because then it just begins to degrade. People don't see the value in it and we're having a meeting after meeting and meetings to talk about the meeting. It's just a death spiral, surely? Anyway, evan, if people wanna find out more about you, I'm assuming that they can go on to LinkedIn, because everyone tends to do that anyway. Is there any other way that people can find out something about you?

Evan Unger: 38:07

I'd say you could go on to LinkedIn. You can access our website there. We have a simple website and look, what we love people to do is encourage them to just send one person to take the program we run, because we know that person's gonna say this is amazing. All the people should be trained. The program we run is for intense days, which is mostly practice. There's two hours of lecture in the four days. No one's gonna sit through four days of lecture. I'm not that interesting. My colleagues aren't that interesting. It's primarily people practicing, getting coaching and feedback, because we want real skill transfer. Now, senior clients aren't gonna take four days. So they see team level people. They're just not gonna take four days. They should because they're the ones showing people what miserable meetings look like. But senior people I always say come watch for two or three hours. They'll come in and invariably say this is awesome and that's the best way to just find out whether you find this appropriate. Come in and watch for a few hours. So, senior people or even better, send your smartest person, have them take the course and information's on the website. So if this sounds interesting to you, you can reach out through LinkedIn. Grab me there through my website.

Ben Maynard: 39:22

Awesome, but we'll put some details into the show notes as well, because, yeah, I'm tempted I'm always tempted by training and education. We were talking, before we even started recording, about how I might take a career change and go into at least psychedelics.

Evan Unger: 39:37

But that'd be one pivot too far, perhaps, maybe, but I think that intervention might help organizations clean out some of the junk.

Ben Maynard: 39:43

Well, do you know what, Evan? When I launch my psychedelic change, or leading psychedelic change, then I will absolutely be the first person to know. On that note, thank you very much, evan, for coming along. It's been a joy. I've genuinely, fundamentally enjoyed it. There's tons of notes. I know everyone's going to love listening to it as well. Hello everyone, thank you for listening. We'll be back again next week with a new guest on a new topic, so please make sure you tune in. Okay, thank you, evan, and thank you everyone for listening.