7 hours of meetings and no time for work

This is a reality, stuck in meetings each day, trying to do the work, but being locked in back-to-back meetings giving you no time to actually do the work.

Is this your world too?

While we need meetings to collaborate, communicate, co-design and co-create, most organisations still haven’t worked out how to support their leaders to run meetings in ways that are more productive, creative, effective and collaborative.

These are the four outcomes good sensemaking + facilitation delivers in meetings:

🌕 productive

🌕 creative

🌕 effective

🌕 collaborative.

At your next meeting, ask or enquire: What sensemaking techniques are we using today, to help us understand each other and help us make these important decisions?

If you get blank faces as a response, or ’the PowerPoint deck’, or ‘Karen is taking minutes’ … these all get the ’no/wrong’ buzzer from me. Bzzzzt!

With 7 hours of meetings, the meetings aren’t working. They’re not making sense; likely going around in circles; and lacking focus, leadership and outcomes.

You need just one sensemaker in the room to completely change how a meeting works.

Are you the one? 

Don’t let the minimisers drag you down

You’ve information to share, a cool idea or suggestion for something. So you launch it out there into the meeting, the workshop, the room or the conversation. And it floats down softly over everyone, flip ... zip... zop ... like a leaf falling from a tree. 

Someone catches it, backing you up or validating you, reinforcing what you said. Good. Your contribution has been acknowledged.

But then it comes, the grey cloud (no it's snappier), the fly swatter (no it’s more powerful) ... the big boulder.

It’s a Slap. Down.

This is the minimiser, reducing what you said, deflating, downplaying, trivializing. Using criticism, dismissal, or patronizing techniques they be-little. So they can be-big.

When you’re leading a meeting you MUST tune in to this behaviour and moderate or mediate it. They may not realise they're doing it, the killjoys and party poopers.

Minimizing can be a habitual way of thinking, a way of seeing the world, pointing out problems, cautioning and keeping things as they are, under control. Don’t let it drag you down.

Gather the validators and supporters you heard from earlier and continue to advance your idea.

Illegitimi non carborundum

Your overwhelm is your business

We're faced with daily situations of overwhelm, yet expected to keep up, work it out and carry on.

It happens when we learn something new, start a new role, join a new team or get new responsibilities.

Heck, it happens if we move to a new town, read the menu at a new cafe or have a conversation with someone new! These all have the potential to cause overwhelm.

Nature's metaphors of floods, mudslides, sand storms and sink holes overwhelm cars, buildings and villages in the same way that we get overwhelmed.

But what we're drowning in is information, data, details.

It doesn't feel good.

So do we wait until everyone is a better presenter, leader and communicator, who'll make it all better by delivering information in ways we easily digest? Oh yeah... we’ll be waiting awhile!

This is why our overwhelm - when it happens - is our business. It’s ours to get out of. We don’t have to do it alone, but we do need to take responsibility for it.

Next time you experience overwhelm, notice your response to it. Is your strategy to escape overwhelm or to conquer it? Sensemaking is a deliberate practice to use in the space of overwhelm.

Ask

- what's going on

- what's this about

- what do I need to do.

The problem with a project roadmap

Many project teams sweat over the project roadmap, the “what’s going to happen and when” of the project. It’s important. It keeps focus and shares intentions and expectations.

And this is all good.

But there could be a problem ... a disconnect of sorts. It’s right there in the name of it, roadmap.

Too often roadmaps are presented as boxes, tables full of words, cells from spreadsheets or complicated-looking calendars.

Tables, cells and columns may be great for actually working on the project, but for many people who don’t work in this way, they’re not so great for engaging and updating on the project story.

When you're dealing with future states or concepts, you've got to go for something that's as realistic as possible. People are in pain from information overload, bandwidth and capacity they don’t have, plus the fear and uncertainty of the unknown stuff that's ahead.

They may not even understand your table.

While you may love your spreadsheet, it may be saying so little to so many.

Road. Map. Keep tables for the work to be done and get better at sensemaking via map making.

Could you do it in reverse

I collected the mail from my mailbox yesterday at 11am and saw the postal delivery worker, the ‘postie’, finishing delivering mail to other letterboxes.

Usually she delivers the mail to our area at about 3pm.

‘Hi!’ I said. ‘Hey you seem a bit earlier, a different time today?’

‘Yes', she said, 'I thought I’d do my round in reverse today; you know, keep it fresh.

She went on...'It’s easy to become a machine, doing the same thing, same way, same route, riding up streets the same direction, the same order and same views. But wow, this has really snapped me out of things today; I’ve had to think and not just go by habit.'

She delivered the mail and a great insight.

What’s the current way you do something? And how could you reverse it? Even a small part of it? Go try.

Creativity and novel thinking data suggests this helps us see new things, make new connections, make sense in other ways.

Most of all, it changes our locked-in perspective.