Retrospectives. If you were to chart the most valuable but least practiced meetings, the hands-down winner would be something called a retrospective. A retro is simply a chance for any team to stop, notice, and learn. After a big push of work, or ideally on a regular interval, the team will gather for an hour or two and share their perspectives on what happened, what stood out to them, and what they ultimately learned. The goal is simple: to do better next time. Many forms of retrospective exist, ranging from the simple (mapping highs and lows over the time line of the project) to the more complex (four Ls: liked, learned, lacked, longed for).
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.
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.
maturity models stem from our misguided desire to cram all that complexity into a complicated framework. An ever-evolving spectrum of knowledge and skill becomes a fixed number of levels, each with its own qualifications. These models promote conformity to dogma and reductive criteria that can quickly become the focus instead of actual competence. In order to attain this rank you must know these things. A black belt in karate who has never been in a real fight meets a cage fighter with no formal training. Who is more likely to win? Who is mature? Luckily, it’s easy to abandon the exhausting administration of these models for deliberate practice and knowledge transfer between masters and apprentices. It’s harder work, but we can stop chasing colored sashes and start getting good at what we do.
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.
We practice a wide variety of rituals at The Ready, but one of my favorites is how we recognize team members who are leaving the firm for a new chapter in their career. We gather our team to mark the occasion, and anyone who feels compelled can share their gratitude for their departing colleague. A week later, our alumnus receives a globe selected just for them—a token of our appreciation and a reminder that we hope they’ll change the way the world works wherever they go.
At the beginning or end of your next meeting, ask everyone to stop what they’re doing and think for a moment about something or someone they’re grateful for and wish to recognize within the team.
We need to create work environments with high social density where members with different levels of knowledge and competence can work and learn together.
