I Just Showed 950 People How to Fix Broken Collaboration

Hey, Jonathan here from AJ and Smart. And if it's looking a bit chaotic around here, it's not our usual like film set. It's because I just got back from doing a talk in Oslo. And actually, the talk itself might be interesting to you because it is essentially me going on stage and trying to pitch to 950 people, pitch facilitation to them, pitch workshopping to them. And I know a lot of you guys in the comments ask all the time like, "How do you explain the value of facilitation? How do you explain the value of a workshop? How do you sell this stuff to clients? It's so broad. It's so general. Well, you what you'll see in the couple of clips coming up from me speaking in this uh conference in Oslo is there's a very specific way that we do it at AJSmart and it's that we focus on the concept of just improving meetings. So, we keep it super simple. We don't try to like flood people with too much information about workshops or facilitation. In fact, I rarely even talk about facilitation when I'm doing this sort of thing. And so, if you're wondering how do the guys at AJ and Smart talk about facilitation to people who are maybe not super aware or even necessarily interested in facilitation. Well, this video is exactly that. I hope you enjoy it. Let's go to Jonathan from two days ago. >> Hey everybody. >> How's it going? They told me you weren't going to respond. I've never come to a country where I've gotten so many warnings about the people not being like, Jonathan, they're not going to do anything. They're not going to smile. They're not going to say anything. This is great. Okay, maybe they were just lowering my expectations. So, I've got a question for you guys. I've got a task for you guys. First thing I want you to do, just think for yourself, just in your own head. If you got a piece of paper, you can write something down. Think of the first thing that comes to your head when I say the worst meeting experience you've ever had. Just a random bad meeting experience that you've had in your life. Could even be some sort of messy collaboration system that happened with you and your friends, maybe trying to organize something in a WhatsApp group. Um, I'm going to give you a minute to think about it while I try to figure out how to make music work on my laptop here. So, think about that by yourself. I'm just going to give you a minute of awkward silence. Oh, nice. Now, I'm going to get you to do something that they warn me Norwegians don't want to do. I'm going to ask you to look at the people next to you. I'm sorry. And pair up into little groups of three. So, just can be the people behind you. It doesn't matter. Two or three, that's fine. And all I want you to do is tell the people in your mini group about the experience, about your terrible meeting experience. I'm going to give you about 3 minutes to do that in total. Let's go. Let's go. Thank you. So, what did you guys notice? What are some of the things you noticed when talking about meetings? What are some of the bad meetings? What are some of the things that came up? Shout it. >> Frustration. >> Frustration. agenda. >> Lack of agenda. >> Waste of time. >> Too much talking. Waste of time. >> Why am I here? >> Why am I here? That's what I'm asking. >> Just about life in general. >> Say that again. >> Bad connections. >> Bad connections. All right. >> People not being present. >> Too many hippo. >> What did you say? >> Hippo. >> Oh, there's a hippo. Was it the highest >> paid person's opinion? >> What was it? Highest paid person's opinion. Uh-huh. Or a real hippo, which actually makes meetings fun. Anything else? >> Could have been an email. >> No decision makers. >> Uh-huh. >> Say that one more time. >> Passive aggressiveness. >> Passive aggressiveness. I heard that in your voice as well, actually. So, and and we all know we get through all of that pain, right? We get through all of that frustration, but at least at the end of a meeting, we've got a decision, right? Like everything's solved, right? What's the most common thing that happens at the end of a meeting? >> More meetings, right? Okay. So today over the next while I have uh what I want to do what I want you to leave here with today is an understanding of why this happens like why meetings are so incredibly frustrating. How a couple of ways to make them a lot less frustrating. But before I get into that I think the most important thing to understand is that a question for you guys. How do the biggest decisions actually get made in companies? Like strategic decisions, how do they get made? People coming together, talking to each other chaotically, and eventually something out the bottom of it. And now that's the strategy. It is chaos. And with a lot of the stuff that's happening with all of these amazing AI tools that we're, you know, using at the moment that are making the execution of our work easier and easier, I think hating meetings and, you know, the meme of meeting suck could have been an email is actually going to hurt us because the people who are able to have good meetings, the people who are making decisions, all of the big strategic decisions are still going to happen when a bunch of people come together, talk to each No matter how chaotic it is, that's still where the big decisions are getting made. It's not in my Figma file. It's not, you know, in whatever software we're using. That's the real work. I know that I also say that I wish this meeting. How many of you have said how how many of you have thought I wish this meeting would end so I can go back to my real work. Unfortunately, what if meetings end up being the real work? Guys, it actually might happen that so much of the real work we do is going to get automated. I think a lot of us know that. And even though there will still of course be plenty to do, I do think that like just fully deciding that we're not going to to be part of meetings and we're just going to like, you know, it's just the tax that I have to pay to get my real work done probably at least won't make your life enjoyable in the long run because you're still going to be in a lot of meetings. So, let me show you with my incredible high technology device here. Going to turn this on for you guys. Check that out. Let me show you in let let me start things off by showing you why meetings are incredibly broken in the first place. And it's not what you might think. So let's think about let's think about your average meeting. So we have kind of a goal at the start kind of, right? Usually the goal is like whatever the meeting invite is called like let's say it's design the team retreat. I can't spell by the way. So at least you got you know not native English. It's fine. Whatever it's all correct guys. Okay. Um so you can see it. Can you guys see that? Okay. >> I really am not a big fan of making slides cuz I'm way too lazy. And so I really appreciate that they gave me this thing. Okay. So, it's like being back in school. So, you have your goal at the start. You've got like a bunch of people. That's us in a meeting, whatever. There's like, you know, maybe four people in the room, some people on Zoom, whatever. And then we've got our, this could be like, you know, this is the thing we want to actually do or the challenge, whatever. It's the starting point. And at the end we ideally want to have our outcome, our kind of tasks, our answer, our decisions. Oops. And here's where the problem comes in. When we go to a meeting, we think that this is how meetings are supposed to work. We think it's a linear journey from meetings start with that there's a thing we're going to talk about and then meetings end with the answers and the things that we're going to do. Is this what happens in real life? >> Everyone's like, "Yes, goodbye." So, let's play it out a little bit. Okay. So, we start the meeting. Hey, we want to have this retreat. So, it's going to be happening in a couple of months. Um, what we're looking for here today is to figure out the location of the retreat, how many people are coming, and the budget. So, we're talking about that. So, what where, you know, where could we go? Where could we go on the retreat? And we're just asking the group of people. Okay. Maybe a pizza, whatever. Okay. Maybe Oslo. All right. Well, whatever. We'll see about we'll think about that. Maybe we'll go to um Spain. Maybe we'll go here. We'll go here. Okay. So, people are starting to talk about it, right? There's something something is happening in a generally kind of productive direction. It's not structured, but that's fine. It doesn't have to be super structured. Right. Now Dave comes in 10 minutes late into the Zoom call. He's like, "When are we getting our new laptops?" Okay. All right. New thread. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Look, Dave, we're talking about the retreat thing. Yeah, but like if we don't have our new laptops at the retreat and then another person jumps in. Yeah. You said we were going to have the laptops by next week. All right. Let's, you know, Okay. Here's what we'll do. I'll open up Slack right now and I'll message uh James and then we'll figure out the laptop thing. Okay, cool. Laptop thing, whatever. Okay, so I think we should have the retreat in in like summer instead of the winter. Oh, yeah. Okay. So, well, we can we can talk about that. So, we're opening up a new thread now. We're talking about when the wear thing is over here. And, you know, we've kind of like got maybe maybe like Spain, maybe like warm a warm place is the thing that people have decided that they want to do. And then it's like, yeah, it. You know what? We'll let's say Spain for now. Okay, so that one has jumped right to the end of the meeting. That one's just got checked off. We still don't know when we're going, how many people are going, what the budget is, and we're on this little laptop journey over here. Now, two employees are on Slack talking about the laptop situation while three of them are over here trying to decide when. But then they and and they're talking to each other and they've decided we're going to do it in July. And you know, 20 minutes goes on looking for the time. And then these guys join back in. Oh, I'm on paternity leave at that time. So, oh yeah, whatever. That's fine. And also, I don't have a visa to go to Spain. So, we can whatever. We can we'll bring this back here. So, now the the whole thing is playing out and the meeting is coming. We're 15 minutes before the end of the meeting. We've got a lot of different threads open. We've got another thread open about like the cafeteria. We've got another thread open about like onboarding new employees and the meeting is going to end not because we have an answer but because >> time's up. >> Time's up. And this is one of the many reasons that the only way to solve this problem is to have >> lots more meetings. One meeting has essentially spawned loads more meetings. So the problem is I mean the the the thing is we work in a company and this frustrates us every single time as if it's the first time and after a while what happens is we start to es like I'm you know I started my career as a designer first 10 years of my career was a UX designer and at a certain point of going through these meetings over and over and over again I just sort of lost interest in participating and so what I would do is try to wait them out the pro How many of you try to wait out meetings? Exactly. So, the problem with it or the the thing that I realized because I also thought someone else was going to come fix it. Well, you know what? I thought two things. I thought number one, this company is just really stupid and they never get anything done. That was the first thing I would think because it was like my, you know, first or second job. I was like, this company just cannot get anything done. It's a super chaotic place to work and if I go somewhere else it will be much better. And I went to a lot of different companies, ended up working at the tech companies, all of the companies that apparently have everything working fine. The exact same thing was happening everywhere except maybe in a nicer looking meter meeting meeting room uh and people were getting paid a lot more. So for me, the thing that I started, my decision in my mind was I'm just going to check out and I'm just going to like let other people deal with that stupid stuff and then I'm going to do my I'm going to wait. I'm going to show up to the meeting just to show that I'm still part of the company just to show that I care and also because maybe I need a bit of information and then I'm going to go and back, you know, do my own work. The thing I figured out though was that a lot of the really important decisions that I ended up having to work on were getting made in these shitow rooms of people talking over each other. And I had a weird mixture of really not wanting to be part of these things but also really wanting to be part of making the decisions so that I just wasn't executing work for people. I wanted to be part of the creating creation of the concept. And for me, these meetings, they were these things that were just constantly stopping me doing my work. And the the thing that I said I said there was two things. One is the companies I thought the companies would improve as I moved to a different company. They're all the same. The second thing is I thought someone else was going to get hired to solve this problem. I was like, they're bringing in a scrum master. This is going to solve it. Didn't solve it. You know, okay, now we're doing a big design thinking thing. This is going to solve it. Didn't solve it. And I kept waiting on someone else to solve this problem. And eventually I came to the conclusion that probably if I am the one who's the most annoyed about it and I'm the one who's getting the most irritated, I should probably think about trying to solve this myself. And that's how I ended up figuring out the term and I probably will spell it wrong even though it's my company name. That's how I ended up uh figuring out the term facilitator. Uh the most boring thing of all time. It ended up being like the most boring research of my life. Uh but I actually ended up getting very excited about it. There is a job of a person who actually goes into meetings and helps the meetings run. Well, that part's not exciting. The exciting part is that if this person is doing their job well then everyone else can just focus on what they actually want to do because teams if they have to focus on how the meeting is going to work like you're paying you know some companies are paying designers like extremely high salaries and then that designer is stuck just trying to figure out when is my turn to talk in this meeting like who's taking the notes like is this going to be remembered in the next session and the idea of the fact that someone could come into the room and I and they could like take the burden of the meeting off of the team so we could actually do the work we're being paid to do was like it just like blew my mind. The idea that this even could exist. And the cool thing about it is there's not a whole lot to it. being a facilitator besides just realizing that having one of those people in a room when you have to make decisions when you have to solve big problems just makes meetings work better which for me was a really cool idea. So myself and my team set out on trying to figure out how to do this. Also really big part of that was discovering the sprint book from Jake over here. Come on Jake everybody. Yay. So, in Jake's book, I was reading Jake's book because we were looking for a way for my company to like what I was trying to figure out was how do we still do the design work and get paid for it, but not have to just do the execution? How do we get more into strategy and further away from just pure execution? And the design sprint was one of those things where we were able to have a facilitated step-by-step process for the clients to start projects. And that led me to realizing, oh, like facilitation just as a base skill is something I want my team to have so that we can decide what we want to work on. If I fall off this chair, it'll be so embarrassing. So, let me show you you some of you might have seen this model for a meeting just to just to give you a feeling. Let's add some uh let's add some like structure to this. And some of you might have seen how many of you you've seen the like double diamond something like that from design thinking. Great. How many of you have know how many of you how many of you know like Sam Kainer's model? Okay, that's nice. Nice. It's actually good for me that not everyone knows it because then it's like everyone will be like, "Oh my god, Jonathan's so smart." I'm just Yeah. So, okay. So, I'm going to show you um when people look into meeting theory and solving meetings, I want to show you and if you start like for some reason weirdly getting into this later, um I'll show you what a lot of people talk about when it comes to well here's how you solve it. I don't think this is how you solve it, but it's good to understand this step just to kind of get the feeling for it. So an ideal session like an ideal like collaboration session um when you look at these theories ideally starts with this idea of divergence like divergent thinking. Oh no d is that right? yeah it's probably right. So the idea here is that you're creating loads of ideas as a team. You're the ideas are diverging. There's lots of different ideas being thrown into the into the pool and we're not like stopping any ideas necessarily and we're just creating like a volume of ideas at the end of a meeting or at the end of a collaborative session. What we generally want is >> I'm trying to make this as weirdly like a classroom as possible. Convergence. Exactly. Oh, it's shining into my eye. Here we go. Convergence. So this is where now we're taking, you know, we have all of these ideas and they we start whittling them down to a few and saying that's what we're going to work on. And Sam Kirner calls this bit in the middle here, it's kind of a funny name, the groan zone, uh where you're kind of like battling out the ideas against each other and it starts to feel quite tense. So this is like the uh this is essentially a model of collaboration, a model of how a meeting kind of should work. It and it's not even in the best case scenario. It's like in the scenario where you understand how meetings work as a model, but I still think it's broken. And I think how meetings really work is exactly how I showed you. It's pure chaos. It's like all over the place. People are jumping in and out of the meeting. Someone will turn up late. You never really know what's going to happen. Someone just might be in a bad mood. Like literally, someone being in a bad mood could completely throw off the results of a session. And so, like, how many of you been in a meeting and someone being in a bad mood probably changed the outcome dramatically? Yeah. Well, I mean that like think about that. Think about the fact that your entire career might be decided by someone just being kind of grumpy. Like that's the thing I didn't want. That's why I wanted to have some control over these sessions. Like I don't want, you know, six months of design work just destroyed and thrown out because someone didn't eat enough before the meeting, you know, or ate too much. And so for me, when I look at just add more there for detail, guys. When I look at beatings, I think that we need to first of all accept that it's human nature for these types of sessions where we're coming together, sharing ideas, kind of, you know, banging things together to figure out what to do. We accept that those things are just kind of messy. And if we accept that those things are kind of messy, then we don't need to fight against it. That's a first the first part of what we call emergent facilitation where we accept that even though we'd love if people would stick to this, you know, divergent convergence system, it's not realistic because every person coming into the room is a new vector for making it weirder or or kind of messing something up. And as you know, you can have the best workshop or meeting of all time and then someone just doesn't turn up because they're sick. someone turns up two hours late because they just felt like it and then everything has to be reset. So what we're trying to design at my company is systems so that we can go into any company with any topic, any challenge and I can send one of my employees there and it doesn't matter how chaotic it is, we can help them get to an outcome. And a big huge part of that is just understanding that meetings inherently are chaotic and that that's actually okay. That's not it doesn't mean the company is broken. The amount of companies that I hear saying like we go into a company, I'll talk to them about meetings and they're like, "No, Jonathan, like this company's Like nothing works here. Nothing ever gets done here. Everyone's always fighting. Like it's just so political." Everyone always says it's so political. I'm like literally you're telling me what every other company is telling me on the planet. That's just called a bunch of people coming together to do stuff. And what I really what I actually want you guys to leave here with today is it kind of kills the tension when I have to sit back down, doesn't it? Instead of like changing a slide. So like where a lot of us are today is you know meetings suck or meetings are the tax I have to pay to get my real work done to I love meetings because this is where I get to be human, right? This is where you actually get to bring in your creativity. Talk about the thing you're actually being paid to do. Maybe you're a designer, developer, whatever it is. And if you take ownership of meetings instead of just being a participant dragged along by a meeting, you can actually make it so that the team you're working in and the the the meeting itself that you're in helps the team to unlock their superpowers, helps the team to do the things they actually want to do instead of just getting in the way of things. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Kind of. >> Yeah. >> Kind of. >> Yeah. You guys know what I'm talking about? >> Okay. All right. So, let's take a little break. I have a question for you guys. So, Norway, I'm trying to figure out what makes Norway special. Okay. I've only been here one day and I know you guys have like a lot of rivalry between Sweden and Denmark. I've been hearing stuff. Okay. I spent a lot of time in Sweden. I spent a lot of time in Denmark. I've been hearing the stories. I've been hearing what you guys say about them as well. And I want to bring an objective truth to all of this. I think you guys have the best snack game. Okay, best snack game. And so what I want to do, so I've been asking around what I want to do here. This is this is important. This is part of this is totally relevant to what I'm talking about, right? We're getting distracted, but we're okay, right? So, what I want to do is review some Nordic snacks or Norwegian snacks for you guys, and I'm going to I'm going to decide which ones are the best between the ones that you guys who I've been talking to just in the halls have told me are the absolute best ones, right? So, we've got here Smash. Who likes Smash? Who get Okay. All right. Okay. I'm going to be trying Sm. By the way, I'm gluten intolerant. I'm going to be up after eating these things for you guys. Okay. >> So, we got Smash. All right. What else we got? We've got Melkiss Jockalad. Okay. Okay. All right. We've got Milkus Joelad here. How does that look on there? Just black. Okay. Great. And we've got the one that I think has created the most excitement amongst the people, which is Kik. And And just in case I was wrong, I also brought the small one because I couldn't get a straight answer as to whether it's the big one or the small one. It's a big one. That's a lot. And like so for this one, are you supposed to like put the bits of orange around the chocolate? You just eat them separately. All right. Like but like not completely separately. Not this first and then this completely separately. Wait, you eat this and then you stop you finish this and then you start eating this. Oh, there's some Okay, there's a little bit of tension around this topic here. Okay, so throughout this talk, the rest of this talk, I'm really trying to figure out which one of these is the absolute best. But I can tell you when I arrive at the airport, I haven't tried any of these ones yet. When I arrived at the airport, what are they called? This bag I got? What animals? There's like a big bag full of different chocolates. I like devour the whole thing at the duty free airport. I feel so sick afterwards. >> Okay. Should we actually figure out how to fix the meetings problem? Cool. >> All right. You guys kept asking me about chocolate, so I couldn't do the thing I was here to do. Okay. So, actually, before we do that, I've got a question for you guys. What was a meeting or a gathering, whether or not you were running it or not, whether you were just a member of the group, where it just felt great. It just felt good. It felt enjoyable. I want you to think about that for a minute and then I'm going to get back to you. It just felt great. A meeting, a gathering, some sort of collaboration that felt great. Think about it by yourself for a minute and I'll get back to you. A lot of people eating those chocolates. It's making its way up. I'm impressed. Look how far the smash has gone. Those happy faces. I'm learning so much from Jonathan. He's very smart. If your company paid for you to come here, this would be the screenshot for what you learned just to show them that it was worth their money. All right. So, I'm going to ask you to do the same thing again. Just find one or two people around you and tell them about a positive hell yeah experience you had in a collaboration and I'll give you about three minutes to do that. All right. Okay. What did you guys notice about the positive ones? >> What was different? >> Structure. >> More >> more engaging. >> More engaging. >> Common goal. >> Common goal. What was the >> I was the decision maker. >> Human connection. >> Laughing >> and laughing. human connection laughing. That's >> user tested. >> Flow. It feels like it's flowing. It's not just stopping the whole time. >> Being prepared. >> Open-mindedness. That's a big one, actually. >> Fewer people. >> Fewer people. Yeah. >> Being concise. >> In concise. Very difficult for some like me. >> Chocolate. Hell yeah. Come on, you got it. That's what I was waiting for. Chocolate. We go back to another full review. Um, I asked them for a lot of time, so you know. Um, okay. So, the some of the things that you guys said there that I really enjoyed. One was just like laughing like the the being in a meeting where people are actually laughing when it's in flow. That the just like how you feel in a meeting is just as important as the outcome itself. But uh you also mentioned structure being prepared. Being prepared I wouldn't rely on. So that's one of the things it's you know if you own the company and you can guarantee how everyone works at that company then you can like maybe like demand it. But for myself and my team or for people working in companies where there's maybe turnover or you're a consultant, you can't really expect the same thing to happen in each environment. And so what I want to show you guys uh today in the last 15 minutes here is a structure that you can use in any type of environment that just takes a little bit of the tension and the stress off a session so that it does feel like it's flowing more and it doesn't feel so kind of chaotic in a bad way. It could be chaotic in a good way. So, let me show you something that we came up with to help our internal facilitators at AJ and Smart uh design sessions for clients even though we can't really tell what the client is going to be like before we get there and we don't really necessarily know the topic they want to work on. And so, this is something that's very robust and works in pretty much any scenario. The only catch is that there does need to be someone in the group, someone in the team who says I want to run the session or I'll take responsibility for doing this. And this is something that almost no team has. So most teams that we go to, the person who's running the meeting is the person who sent the calendar invite. But then this person who sent the calendar invite is responsible for both keeping the meeting on track and actually coming up with ideas and and and and and whereas if there's someone in the room even if they are taking part in it who takes the role of hey I'll facilitate this like I'll bring us through this and the reason I'm going to do this is so that you guys can focus on what your actual actual work is and I'll take some of that burden off. It's a game changer. So let me show you something that will really make this much easier if you take that role and you decide to go into a meeting. So this is the super chaotic meeting. This is generally what a lot of meetings feel like and it's not a problem. It they they are like that in many situations and people people try to solve this by doing a lot of preparation by making meetings shorter. That's another thing that uh people try to do or companies try to do. if we have shorter meetings or if we have less meetings. That's another thing. We'll solve bad meetings by just having less meetings and then decisions still need to be made anyway. They just get made like in different ways. And so what I want to show you is if the company you're working at changes nothing, this still works. If everybody on your team is still chaotic and doesn't play by the rules of meetings, it still works because actually that's what being a human is. It's not something wrong with the team. It's not something wrong with your company. This is just how people work together. So, one of the things that we did was we created a very simple structure for meetings that goes through four phases of a meeting. So instead of trying to figure out when the divergence is happening and when the messy middle is happening and when the closing is happening with the convergence, we just came up with a structure that shows us the four most common phases of a meeting. So that we as the facilitator or you as the person maybe helping running this meeting can actually in your head you know where the team is. You know where this the meeting is at and you can help bring people back to where they should be to to help them get stuff done. And we call this the four C's. And actually I'm going to have to draw it on a new thing because look at look at what I've done here. So oh there's a fresh one here. So the four C's. So we have the start of the meeting, we have the end of the meeting and what the four C's does is just adds a very very simple structure. First you have the collect phase. So instead of starting a meeting with like the previous way where at the start of the meeting you're both starting and closing topics meaning you're you know making decisions in the in between starting new conversations. What you're saying here is at the start of the meeting we're not trying to make any decisions. Let's take the stress off the start of a meeting. We're just trying to collect all the challenges that are associated with what this meeting is about. And in this case, if it was about the retreat, it would just be collecting, okay, what are all the questions we have about this retreat? What are all the like broad kind of directions and things that challenges and and whatever like do we have some like data from last year's retreat? Whatever it is, it's a very low stakes couple of minutes, maybe 15 minutes depending on how long the meeting is. We're just collecting stuff that we can work with. The next phase is called choose. So we're going to choose as a group what we're going to focus on in this meeting. And so maybe in this case the laptop thing would have come up still, but it wouldn't have been a problem because the facilitator could have asked the person who set up the meeting, do you want to park that for later? And the cool thing is the person who has the laptop problem now feels seen because they're think the reason people freak out in meetings is because they're like if I don't say my thing that I've been holding on to for the last 3 weeks it'll never get done like my thing will never happen. So that's why they have to like put their thing into any type of meeting. What you're doing here is you're saying we're collecting all the stuff. You're either visualizing it in person, on some post-its, on a whiteboard, on a mirror board, on a Google doc, it doesn't matter. And you as the facilitator can say, "Hey Dave, your laptop thing, what I'm going to do is we're going to talk about this at the end of the session." And that sounds like that could be a different meeting. Let's stay on track for the retreat thing. And maybe in the retreat section here, in the choose section, instead of trying to choose everything, instead of trying to choose where we're going to do it, when it's going to happen, all of these things, maybe you guys as a team get realistic and you say, "We have 45 minutes for this meeting. Maybe we should just choose the dates. Maybe that's the only thing we need to do this time." And so the choose phase might simply be having a conversation about which other things don't have to happen today and which one thing can we focus on today. Because the next phase where which we call create will take the you know let's say we're talking about the location we'll just focus on the location. Now in the create phase we can just talk about where we want to do the retreat and brainstorm and you know open up our laptops and look at ideas of where we want to do the retreat without Dave being like yeah but what about my laptop? I think a MacBook would be nice and and the you know the paternity leave thing coming up and then actually I think we should increase paternity leave in our company because you know the these things they can still come in because again we're human. We don't want to be regimented as facilitators want to allow these things to happen but it's like oh Dave that's a really Dave that's a really great great point about your laptop. uh do you mind if you know earlier I said do you mind if we talk about that after and it's like visualized and I won't forget it whereas if you were just like Dave that's not not now then he's lock he's going to hold on to that to the rest of the meeting and he's not going to have the time and space that's he's dragging that laptop thing around with him the whole time into every meeting and he can't he might have the best idea for the location of anyone on the team but he can't think about it cuz his laptop is covered in hair and he needs a new one. Okay, how did it get covered in hair? That's the next phase. So, in the create phase, we're brainstorming. We're coming up with ideas for one thing. Not all these things at the same time. We're coming up with ideas for one thing. And at the very end, we have a ton of ideas. We have a ton of different directions. And we spend time deciding on what we're going to commit to which commit often missing in meetings because the commitment is usually we're going to have another meeting. And the cool thing is we're not the what makes this very I guess robust is that we're not trying to solve everything. We're training teams at companies that it's better to get one thing done than nothing done every time. It's better to have a little bit of progress every time than essentially just constant frustration. And once teams start to not feel like meetings are this big irritating timewasting thing, but actually a place where useful things can get done, then it doesn't feel so bad if you're not do not talking about certain things that the team wants to bring into the meeting because they know meetings are low stakes, easy to start, easy to finish, and it's not this big scary thing. So the commit phase is really just about saying these are all the things we could do. I think as a team or we as a team we're going to do January this month to this month whatever or we've got two different dates and we're going to bring them to the person who's the sponsor who's going to pay for the whole thing and then in the next meeting we can decide on the loc on the like um country or something. And so a meeting when you have phases like this in a meeting you as the facilitator and I think it's always good to just have one person who's designated as keeping of keeping track of what's going on in the meeting. It's not a meet it's not a someone who's documenting the meeting. By the way I think sometimes facilitators are confused for hey this person documents the meeting. We have AI for that. We don't need that anymore. The facilitator is like a conductor of the meeting. They're trying to make the whole thing feel smooth, feel like it's in a flow, constant flow state, helping people understand, hey, we're going to get to that. We're going to come back to this. We're going to come we're going to we're we're here right now in the map. And the cool thing is the facilitator also knows I should check the time, too. Oh it's only 3. So the facilitator also knows, hey, we're 10 minutes out from the end of the meeting and we haven't gotten to the commit stage yet. And so a facilitator knows it's time to transition us into that direction into this stage instead of the usual thing that happens is we're all talking up until the last second and then someone says my next meeting is about to start and then it's like whatever whatever we'll just you know we'll we'll talk about it later and things get dragged on forever. So meetings this this is just like one super simple structure you can use if you want to bring people through any type of meeting. Obviously, there's some nuances to how you can do it. There's lots of different workshops. Jake has a ton of amazing workshops in his books on our YouTube channel. It's free. You can find like 600 hours of free stuff on there. But the main point here is that the main two things I want you to take away with today is it's maybe it's going to be three, four, or five things. I'm just going to say two so it sounds like easy to digest and then I'll lie. So number one is that meetings the the meme about meetings suck. The general sentiment about that meetings are a waste of time. Meetings are taking you away from doing the thing you actually want to do. This is fun and it's also kind of brings us together. Our hatred of meetings kind of brings people together in a company. But if you can be the person in your company who changes this I hate meetings. they're the tax to actually meetings are maybe where the most human interactions are happening in this company. If you can even slightly change the mood around meetings in your team, it can dramatically change the outcomes for what you're trying to create. And especially if you can take that role of taking the burden of running a meeting off of your team or just use someone on your team and assign them as the person who takes takes that burden off the team and you can swap around each time, whatever it is. Then every time you go into a meeting, you know that everyone on the team and especially for company owners or team people running teams here, if you're if you're working with like if you have like seven people in a room, you know how expensive that is. Do you know how expensive it is when nobody actually gets to do what they're being paid to do and their entire job is just learning how to talk and when is my turn to talk and like do I take notes now and how does this work? like people. It's it's a massive waste of time to have really talented tech employees, designers, like developers, whatever in a room not even barely paying attention because they're just waiting to get out of the room. And what we've seen is if you can actually change that vibe in a company, change that entire perception of meetings as you know it's in the way to actually it's a place where I get to be creative it can completely change the outcomes of the teams can make people much more excited to work at a company can also just let people do the thing that they were hired to do which makes people pretty excited and I genuinely think I I don't see so many other options for how this is going to go. I genuinely think that a large amount of the tasks that like I said the real work, the execution work we do will be automated. And I don't necessarily think that's always a bad thing. I think that there's the possibility now for us to move for a lot of us to move away from pure execution work more into strategy, creative work. And sometimes that's the thing that's the most exciting to do at companies. But the f the higher you go or the the closer you go to strategy, the closer you go to like creative work, the more vague it gets, the more blurry it gets, and the more likely it is that you're going to be in groups of people talking about things that are unclear. And I think I'll leave you with this. I wasn't this is not like some poignant point or something. It's just going to end at some point here. I'll leave you with this. Like you know the things the things we're trying to do in meetings today are not what our brains are made to do. You know we're our brains are probably made to plan very simple shelters and like how to find food whatever. Now we're now seven of us are sitting around in like six different time zones planning a three-year project where people are moving in and out of it. completely abstract and it's really hard to just be like this is what we're doing. So we should give ourselves like a little bit of you know it's okay that these things are difficult. We should let ourselves off the hook for finding meetings irritating. But I do hope that there's a couple of people in this room today who will move from the meeting meme of I hate meetings to meetings suck and all of this stuff to taking that at least some of that burden off of their team. maybe uh deciding to you know there learn some facilitation techniques all of which are free online for the last like 100 years and just helping their teams get the best out of themselves and honestly for me nothing has been more satisfying as going into a team who's super burdened by their meetings who has this kind of like helplessness around nothing ever gets done here to we actually are making stuff again cuz People want to make things. People don't want to be sitting around stuck in some sort of loop of just talking about nothing. People want to make things and you can be the people who help them make things. Thank you very much. All right, there we go. You got to see me on stage talking about facilitation. Did you notice that little weird thing that I was drawing on the overhead projector? That's a whole other story. By the way, the reason everything is so chaotic here, I already said that. So yeah, that's one of the ways I pitch uh facilitation to large groups of people who might not yet be really excited about it or interested in it. And hopefully it gave you a couple of ideas of how you could talk about it, too. If you're one of the people who's watching this and wants to actually deliver workshops to clients or to your teams, I've made a one-hour video down below on how to sort of transition from what you're doing to being able to do that full-time if you like or even just if you're doing it already, how you can increase the day rate for that. And that is a link down below here somewhere in the description. I hope you like that. And if you like this video, you know, we've got a lot of other stuff like this on our channel. and uh hit the like button, hit the subscribe button and YouTube will show you more of that when we have new stuff. We have new videos almost every 2 weeks and you know when I I'm not traveling. And uh yeah, I never know how to end these videos so I'm just going to like stop talking now. Goodbye. Bye. Oh, you're still filming. I'm done.