Chief Decision Officer

One of my strongest opinions about organizational audits is that you learn more from attending a meeting for a few minutes than from spending ten times that amount of time reviewing data. That’s because data tells you where the organization was last quarter, whereas how effective its meetings are tells you where it will be in a few years.

Seth Godin recently published an intriguing post on the topic. He observes that meetings often occur with no measurable outputs, participants show up unprepared, and little attention is paid to learning from past decisions. He then proposes a Chief Decision Officer, whose job “isn’t to make decisions. It’s to create the conditions for the organization to do a better job of it.”

I wouldn’t take the idea of a Chief Decision Officer literally (or of a Chief Meetings Officer, for the matter). But “are we deliberate about how we run meetings?” is a question every organization should ask, and one where many low-hanging fruits lie.

In fact, running meetings effectively is a skill. It can be trained, and even a small bit of training can produce dramatic improvements. The trick is to focus not on long procedures or introducing new tools, but rather to select a few key things that must happen for a meeting to be good, and push these aggressively.

Here are some examples:

• Are progress updates passive or active? In other words, are they used to communicate the status quo, or to actually move projects forward, for example, by discussing and addressing risks and blockers?
• Do participants come to meetings already prepared? Jeff Bezos famously had his Chief of Staff help participants prepare for meetings with him, ensuring they made productive use of everyone’s time. (This was in addition to his more famous “Silent Start” rule, where participants begin meetings by silently reading a shared document, to ensure that strategic decision-making starts on a shared understanding.)
• Can participants get to the point quickly, explain it clearly, and argue their case well? If not, they may require a tiny bit of training or coaching.

I could go on, but you get the point. Meetings should be productive. If they aren’t, either you have meetings that shouldn’t take place to begin with or, more likely, you have people who haven’t yet been taught how to have productive meetings.

What to do about it? I suggest resisting the temptation to devise a comprehensive improvement plan. Instead, record a meeting, watch the replay, and look for low-productivity moments.

What caused them? A poorly named agenda item that nudged the discussion in the wrong direction? A speaker who couldn’t explain their point clearly? Unprepared or unnecessary participants? A lack of focus on making progress? A discussion that went in circles because nobody clarified what decision needed to be made? People avoiding disagreement? Or participants settling too easily for “let’s have another meeting next week”?

Then, pick one of those causes and address it, whether by redesigning the relevant agenda items, changing meeting invitations, or training the relevant participants.

Next week, pick another cause and address it. And go on like this.

At some point, get your subordinates to do the same in their own meetings.

You don’t need a more structured process than that. Trying to scale it or specify it excessively risks being counterproductive. What matters isn’t implementing a meeting improvement program, but developing the habit of noticing what’s unproductive and doing something about it.

And that’s a habit that will serve your organization well beyond meetings.