Hack:
MIX M-Prize: How to plan and run meetings that engage people's minds, hearts and spirit to get more done, in less time, with more fun.

By Bob Wiele - Founder and President at OneSmartWorld Inc.

October 15, 2010 at 12:42pm

meetings

human capital

intelligence

smarter

collaboration

Moonshots

Humanize the language of business

Enable communities of passion

Capture the advantages of diversity

Summary

One elephant in the room is bad meetings. Managers spend approximately 50% of their time in meetings and they consistently report that 50% of that time is wasted. So, 12 weeks a year of zero productivity from the people who are among the most highly paid in the organization? Build a simple solution that progressive leaders and managers everywhere can use to systematically tap into talent and improve meeting results.

Problem

Why do so many smart people spend so much of their valuable time at work in so many meetings that accomplish so little?

Solution

Develop a management innovation that is like a "smart lean" approach to collaboration. Help different people get on the same page quickly to build high quality relationships, increase meeting productivity and accelerate innovation. Build it around a universal common language for collaboration. Develop a set of practical online tools to map thinking skills and integrate the common language into simple, smart lean type processes for meetings and innovation initiatives.

Practical Impact

Three stories- 1) In 2010, WestJet, Canada’s most progressive airline, tested our Smarter Meetings system and achieved a 558% ROI (as reported in a federally sponsored research project on return on investment from training) from training a cadre of their managers in how to tap into the brain power of people in a disciplined way and save time.

2) The Premier of Manitoba used our RIP IT/ Rapid Innovation Program as the platform to bring 100 business and community leaders in the province together to work on 6 key economic issues and prepare recommendations to the government which the delegates voted on– all in 6 hours of working time.

3) After 10 years of data collection on thinking styles of working people, we now find that people are increasingly choosing to be less creative in their thinking – no wonder Canada continues to fall behind on all innovation measures – as the twin enemies of innovation, complacency and mediocrity, lurk in the shadows.

First Steps

Change is tough. Take a page from the Heath brothers. Break it into bite size chunks. Demonstrate how it works real time. Meetings are a critical pain point in virtually every organization. Find the progressive leaders, the outliers who are looking for an edge, who are committed to the maxim that all of us are smarter than anyone of us. Declare portions of a meeting as a smarter meeting and give people a process path to think through issues together. Find them in schools, colleges, corporations, government agencies and not for profits.

Credits

Thanks to all the giants on whose shoulders and backs I have clung to and worked from - Robert Sternberg, Jerry Rhodes, Chogyam Trungpa, Marcial Losada, Gary Hamel, Barbara Fredrickson, Carol Dweck, the Heath brothers, Richard Daft, Michael Roach….

Documents

The Cost of Bad Meetings.pdf

Investing in People WestJet 558% ROI.pdf

Images

Videos

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October 27, 2010 at 7:27am

Daniel St. Germaine

This is very interesting. I like the idea of a common language and I think that this is something that so many organizations don't think about when it comes to meeting and sharing ideas.

October 17, 2010 at 9:09am

Hanan Abdulmalik

This sounds wonderful! I spend more than 50% of my time in meetings and am ready to invest in a system to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of my meetings. Great idea Bob! Will be in touch...

October 18, 2010 at 11:02am

Bob Wiele

October 18, 2010 at 10:02am

Bob Wiele

Thanks for your kind words Hanan. Innovation is all about taking an idea and bringing it to market - that is what we did with our meetings productivity system. Managers and meetings go together like English fish and chips - too much fat and grease and not enough nutrition. I felt that so many people like you spend so much time in meetings that seem to sap the human spirit and not get the ROI - return on intelligence - that is critical to accelerated high performance. We worked over the past 5 years to come up with a real and simple solution that can accelerate collaboration and harness the diversity of brain power that sits around a million tables every day in meetings. The real challenge seems to be helping people 'grow up/step up' and get beyond the immediacy of egos and shift up to play the meetings game at a higher level. I like what the Heaths said in Switch - one way of changing behavior is to change the rules of the game to allow people to behave differently for a specific period of time. If great minds think alike, in a smarter meeting, all minds think alike - at the same time. This is such a critical management challenge. We need a paradigm shift from meetings as a wasteland to meetings as vital places where great work gets done.