Do your employees complain about meetings? Have you tried introducing policies or technology to make meetings more effective, only to see bad habits and overloaded calendars quickly return? If so, your colleagues may be trapped by three common limiting beliefs – mental barriers that keep them from realizing the true potential of well-coordinated gatherings. They may believe that: Meetings suck. All efforts at improvement are doomed. Not my place. Only "leaders" have the authority (and responsibility) to improve meetings. I don't want to rock the boat. It can't be done. It's not possible for m ..read more

Two people sit mostly naked in the snow, breathing deeply. They remain quiet and still for a long time. At least it feels like a long time to one of them. The other – a more advanced student – rests in comfortable contemplation, focusing deeply on sending healing energy throughout his body. The first one wants to send healing to his body, too. If only it wasn't so damn cold! As the minutes pass, he begins to fear that bits of him must surely be freezing off. His anxiety escalates until he feels compelled to flee for the warm cabin. An outside observer would say that these two men shared the sa ..read more

Now, I'm curious: have you noticed that a growing number of companies are trying to solve their crushing meeting load by canceling them? All of them.     For some, this intervention provides a much-needed break and the time they needed to redesign a more thoughtful approach. See the HBR article Meeting Overload is a Fixable Problem by Rebecca Hinds and Bob Sutton for an example. (You can find several more examples in this Meeting Innovation Community discussion thread.) For others, their calendars quickly fill back up, just like a trash heap in the belly of a st ..read more

It looks to me like we've broken work. Not for everyone, and not everywhere, but for a lot of teams the WE part of work isn't working. I know. This isn't new. Work has been kinda broken for a lot of people for a long time. But take it from a lady who deploys lots of duct tape and safety pins: there's a big difference between kinda broken and all-the-way broken. The lockdowns broke office work. They forced many people out of jobs, and many more into isolation in an attempt to protect our communities. Even though we went through this experience together, we experienced it alone. We were for ..read more

This is a popular search. For those of you building infographics and reports and term papers, here's the bottom line up front. Our 2022 best-guess estimates for the number of meetings per day in the US: 1976: 11 million 2015: 55 million 2020 lockdown: 80+ million 2022: 62 to 80 million For everyone else, read on to understand where these numbers come from, why they're irrelevant for most people, and when (or if) you should care about the number of meetings in your organization. Article Contents Part 1: How many meetings are there per day in 2022? The Data We Used Converging on New Estimat ..read more

Did you know that the first stop sign was installed in 1915? Before that, there wasn't much need. Horses rarely ran into each other, and most people traveled by foot. There were no speed limits, no lane markings, no directional signage, and few street name signs. Traffic control was not a thing. The first stop sign was an intervention. More cars led to more accidents, and something had to be done. Since then, our understanding of how to manage traffic has evolved. Today, the stop sign is one of many internationally recognized signals. We enjoy sophisticated, continually evolving systems for ro ..read more

Earlier this year, we were contacted by the team at Railsware about a meeting method they'd developed that they call BRIDGeS. We invited them to share their method here  because we think that: This is a great example of the kind of practices teams can develop when they purposefully design their meetings, and It's a useful method that more people should try! Read more and download their helpful guide below. ~Lucid Meetings Team Who is Railsware? Railsware is a product design studio with offices in Krakow and Kyiv. Together, they build software products for themselves and other companie ..read more

Many teams endure too much time wasted in unproductive meetings. I am increasingly convinced that this is not due to a lack of knowledge. Want to help me test this hypothesis? Take our short survey and share it with your peers! We are awash in information about How to plan and run productive meetings. We have centuries of useful tips and multiple professions full of people who know how to structure and lead a productive meeting to draw upon. I believe instead that those ineffective meetings are a systemic issue. If leaders really wanted to address their meeting problems, they could - but the ..read more

Want to quickly make an enormous impact on the meetings in your organization? Roll out an effective strategy for your Team Cadence and Progress Check meetings. Too much time wasted in unproductive meetings. Meeting overload. Zoom fatigue. Article after article decries the plague of too many meetings gobbling up our time. Looking for data about how awful this problem is and some recycled quick tips? No problem! These are just a few of the articles published on this topic in the past few months. If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? (Jan 10, McKinsey) "When do you pee?" Managin ..read more

Several years ago I wrote an article for Inc. about 3 Powerful Ways to Help Your Team Cope With Tragedy. At the time, the tragedy was the burning of Notre Dame. Last week's invasion of Ukraine resurfaced this conversation. Looking back, the Notre Dame fire seems merely unfortunate in comparison to the events of the past several years. We've been bombarded by tragedies, and many teams have developed better ways of processing these events together. Even still - when new events unfold, we need to decide: What should we do in our upcoming meetings? Should we begin by acknowledging what's happeni ..read more