Meeting Moratorium. Sometimes the only way to see things clearly is to stop the madness. Instead of trying to fix all the meetings in your current operating rhythm while they’re in flight, see if your team is open to canceling all meetings for two weeks. At first blush, this sounds impossible, irresponsible even. But it can be done. One leadership team coached by The Ready had amassed an average of forty-five hours of meetings per week. Their calendars looked like a game of Tetris they were quickly losing. So we tried pressing pause on all recurring meetings. The questions we wanted them to answer? What do we miss? What do we need that we’re not getting from informal interactions? Based on what we heard, we rebuilt the meeting rhythm one meeting at a time, ensuring that each one had a clear purpose and matching structure. We tweaked these formats iteratively, based on feedback, until we had something that worked.
Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work