Build an agenda on the fly. Rather than predict what will matter most tomorrow or next week, we’ll choose and prioritize our topics once we get in the room. If we don’t get to it, we don’t save it. Someone will bring it up next time if it’s still important.
Speak and participate in rounds. When we want to prioritize speed and inclusion, we’ll go around the table and give everyone one chance to provide updates, ask questions, offer feedback, or give consent, depending on the type of meeting we’re holding. Everyone else is invited to listen respectfully and wait for their turn to speak.
If you’re hungry for more, liberatingstructures.com is a fantastic resource for anyone ready to move beyond conventional meetings to something more inclusive and generative. The website, app, and the book that inspired them provide a menu of thirty-three methods for activities such as brainstorming, problem solving, and sensemaking, complete with instructions for how to facilitate them.
Percolate, a content-marketing platform used by some of the biggest brands in the world, it built a tool called Barista that allowed anyone in the company to ask a question and route it to people who might know the answer. Completed questions were tagged, saved, and searchable by everyone else. Instead of trying to drown a new employee in pushed information, Percolate let them find what they needed when they needed it.
The idea that we should all share everything all the time seems crazy. But that’s only because we misunderstand how to share information—the difference between push and pull. Legacy information sharing is “push,” meaning that the information is delivered to us without our consent. When information is pushed, we have to wade through it and separate the signal (what we need) from the noise (what we don’t). But when information is abundant, a “pull”-based system where information is tagged, stored, and ready to search is far superior.
in a complex system, the interactions matter more than the parts. A bench full of star players does not automatically produce a winning team. Relationships define our collective potential. And our approach to membership creates the foundation for relationships to flourish or flounder. Everything we do, from the moment we meet prospective candidates to the moment they depart as alumni, shapes their membership experience, and with it the very fabric of our network.
Legacy Organizations think about membership as binary—as a legal status or something that’s conferred upon you. But membership isn’t binary. Not every employee feels the same level of loyalty, or inclusion, or participation. No, membership is really a social status. It’s an identity. It’s a living agreement.
