Elise Keith, Author, Co-Founder & CEO, Lucid Meetings
Author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization, Elise Keith‹co-Founder of Lucid Meetings‹reveals eye-opening strategies companies can use to structure beneficial meetings, create a healthy workplace culture, and propel overall team momentum. Known as the Meeting Maven, Elise offers unprecedented expertise that inspires audiences, proving that meetings shouldn¹t be fewer or shorter‹but better and more effective.
https://www.lucidmeetings.com/
https://www.lucidmeetings.com/templates
https://blog.lucidmeetings.com/blog
https://jelisekeith.com/
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AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
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[00:00:55] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling Up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Elise Keith. She is co-founder of Lucid Meetings. She's author of Where the Action Is: The Meetings that Make or Break Your Organization. She's known as the meeting maven. I'm excited about this. To geek out on meetings and meeting discussion and how to make more effective meetings and how to make sure that people are using meetings in the right way. They're important organization with that. Elise, welcome to the program.
[00:01:21] Thank you for having me. I'm so thrilled that you're ready to geek out on meetings. You know, I think there are some stats out there that, you know, there's something like 50 million meetings happening every day in the U.S. is something I.
[00:01:34] I should figure out what it is during this episode. There'll be some millions of meetings happening. And I'm sure not only not all of them particularly well run. So hopefully, hopefully we can talk a little bit about how to help people with meetings. But before we begin the meetings, let's learn a little bit more about you, your background, how you became the meeting even. Tell us a little bit of the story.
[00:01:53] Right. Because because you don't go to kindergarten and say, when I grow up, I'm going to be a meeting maven. Right. Nobody does this. But I you know, I got to say, probably most of us haven't found our passion in a way that we expected we would. But for me, I went in, I went to college, thought I was going to be an artist, found that wasn't going gonna be the thing. Join the business world and found myself in lots and lots of meetings, of course.
[00:02:19] Now, coming from an arts background, a performing arts specifically, you come from a perspective that you're gonna collaborate together to hit a high quality result by a date. Right. Like there's just no question that you're going to meet effectively ish.
[00:02:34] So a lot and a lot because, you know, let's be honest, it's, you know, theater and music.
[00:02:38] Exactly the point.
[00:02:40] But that's part of the dance and the assumption that you're all gonna pull together and you're gonna make this thing happen on this date with quality is just it's a given. And then I joined the software world and I was continually faced with like, well, we can't possibly make that decision now. And while you can have time or quality or you know what? But you can have high quality has gone up. Yeah. And I'm like I'm like, dude, if we're doing Aida, you know, that's an opera. It opens on Friday and there's an elephant there.
[00:03:10] Like, there's just no there's no way around that. Just the story does not work otherwise.
[00:03:15] It didn't make sense to me. And and as I worked through that world and saw the way that they they met all the time. But there wasn't necessarily a lot of great forward momentum happening in all of that until I had an opportunity to work with international standards organizations, the legal profession. And then I worked in a company that brought in really high quality, agile coaches and we adopted Agile. And in each of those three worlds, they had a way in which they met that was prescribed. Right. Every week we start, we we tackle this question together as a group in a 45 minute call. And that decision is made and we go. Right. And when I saw how even though all of those rooms are realms are very different, that when you designed the meetings to achieve your goals, everything changed. They achieved their goals. The drama went away. The confusion about how things worked went away. And and when you see that power, boy, you just can't unsee it. You just can't unsee it. And it's everywhere. So you can see it in in all of the industries across the spectrum, in all sectors. There are ways in which people meet that are incredibly powerful and to help them achieve results that other people can't achieve. So if you go and you read most of the current leadership literature, go read Daniel Coyle's culture code or, you know, Brené Brown's dare to lead or, you know, any of a number of things. And you'll find that most of them are actually books about meetings.
[00:04:44] At one level or not, groups of people having conversations, trying to make decisions or are trying to clarify a direction, resolve an issue. Yeah, it's it's kind of the essence of it.
[00:04:54] Right. And these are our values and this is what we're trying to achieve. This is how we meet because that meeting and designing that meeting with intention is the best way to make sure that what you want to have happen happens.
[00:05:06] That's why I think it's so important to this audience, is that, you know, I think if you look at, you know, different types of businesses, you know, service based businesses, because, you know, is fundamentally dealing with, you know, people involved in the delivery of the value to customers.
[00:05:18] Know, you just end up in that sort of. My meeting kind of frequency and high meeting complexity kind of, you know, if you're to do a little two by two matrix here in terms of type of businesses and businesses that are high meetings, I just think service based businesses run into this all the time and they just they run into inefficiency. I'm particularly at the that the leadership team level is as a company grows and skills, you know, getting those meetings right, those strategic meetings, those planning meetings, you know, the quarterly is the annuals, that the monthly is the weekly is the daily. You know, getting those getting that rhythm is is important. Having, you know, having that checklist and having that process is, you know, is key to making them work too hard. So tell us about the book. How did the book come about? How how have you kind of crafted your position in the meeting space? And tell us more about lucid meetings.
[00:06:02] So lucid meetings, you know. So we had this we had this red truck moment, right? Like once once you're in the market for red truck. You see them everywhere. And for us, the for us, it was that the well-designed meeting. And as you mentioned. Right. The specific sequence or the cadence of well-designed meetings being just a game changer in terms of enabling growth and scale and cohesion as you develop your businesses. And we say, okay, you know, but so many people are doing this terribly. Why might that be? And because we were software developers, we're like, OK, well, let's create a software platform that, you know, makes it easy to do the right thing, which we did. And, you know, we we got our Gartner cool vendor and, you know, it's all fabulous and lovely. So lucid meetings has a we have a meeting management platform is one of our core software offerings. But one of the things we discovered was that software is a technology, it's a tool. And like any other tool, you kind of have to have some skills to be able to use it.
[00:07:02] You know, you don't put my kids behind the, you know, the wheel of the farm combined or any tractor tool. They're not equipped, you know. So we had a lot of people coming to us who are trying to have software solve their meeting problem. And then they get kind of frustrated. They're like, well, I've got an agenda. But we still run like terrible meetings. And it's like, well, yes, you do. So let's back up here and look at what you're trying to achieve and how meetings are fitting into your business and what how how many you should be having and all of that and started doing research and publication and writing and consulting and after several years of doing that. That's where it finally pulled that together into the book. So that's when that came out. Got it. Yeah.
[00:07:42] And what's your take? I mean, there's there's a lot of meeting haters out there meeting, meeting back there. You know, they should we should just have less meetings. You know, we just shouldn't be meeting anymore. Get it? What's your kind of do you have it you ristich or a guideline for companies or for for leaders inside companies in terms of how many meetings, as to meetings, how many, how long you know, how long is a meeting that's going on? Too long. What are your kind of heuristics around some of these things?
[00:08:09] Well, I think the I think the key to all of that is, is a mindset shift right at the beginning, you know, because you could you're right. Like a lot of people approach meetings as if there should be a simplistic answer. You know, there should be some kind of role. Right. You know, meetings are a waste of time. Why should I have to deal with them? And you can see the sweep through companies that especially as they hit that growth curve like slack, went through a big growth curve and they found that they were meeting all the time and they weren't clear why.
[00:08:38] So they canceled all their meetings. And that's a that's a really common thing to do. But it's it's like saying, my goodness gracious, we've gotten a little overweight here. Let's stop eating. Yes. And then and then we'll see if food comes back. But probably we don't need it. Yeah. Like. That's a great way to, like, encourage the quick everybody run to McDonald's because I'm starving. You know, it's it's it's not with designed with intention.
[00:09:04] So what we found is that in every single industry there is there is a sequence of meetings you can design that achieve goals. So the question about how many meetings should you be running and how often and all of that has to do with what you're trying to achieve. What we found in our research was that, you know, when we looked across all those industries and took out all those patterns, there were 16 distinct types of meetings. And when you learn what those are like, a problem solving meeting is good for, you know, take give you one guess.
[00:09:37] It's all right. It's not a great meeting for brainstorming. It's not a great meeting for, you know, contract negotiation or building trust. And, you know, goodwill with your company has its primary goal. Its goal is to solve a problem.
[00:09:54] So it doesn't have a lot of the problems or the people. People are just not using the right kind of meeting format or meeting structure to accomplish the goal or problem. Probably some of the problems. They don't even have the goal. Assuming they have a goal, is that picking the right structure to use to to effectively address the goal from a meeting format point of view.
[00:10:11] Absolutely. And then once you can see that there are these distinct types of meetings, right. Then you can put them together in sequence. It's a puzzle. So you talk. At this strategic meeting rhythm. So this is the thing that, you know, leadership teams adopt that helped them figure out how to set their strategy. And then once they've got a strategy, how to make sure that they're executing towards that strategy and not just executing in general. And that that strategy stays fresh. Right. So as as they learned more about the universe, they they understood that strategy gets put into line with what they now believe about the universe. And there's a very specific sequence of meetings you can run at a very specific time and date. And altogether, like one of the most popular downloads on our Web site is a packet that says, here's how to run those four meetings. Exactly. And how long they should take. And, you know, we find when people pick that up, they will go from doing things like we hate meetings. So we only have one meeting with our leadership team every three weeks and it goes for five hours. And we hate each other.
[00:11:15] Or, you know, but they try. They're trying to reduce meetings. So they just they only do one. And it's long.
[00:11:20] And we seems that like meet in and out every day, all day. They pick up this pattern. And I'm sure you're familiar with the pattern very much like that. And they find that they're using less than 10 percent of their work time to set their strategy and manage to that strategy. So well-designed in sequence. It's incredibly efficient and enormously powerful because you're no longer guessing, right? You're no longer guessing. How are we going to decide what to do?
[00:11:46] It's interesting. You mentioned Agile before, and I think that there's a principle that I will often use when I'm working with leadership teams on on their meetings schedules. And then they kind of complain about, oh, yeah, well, we do a quarterly we do a monthly meeting and it's really aren't we don't like it, you know. So, you know, we don't want to monthly's anymore. We just want to do Quarterly's. And I kind of tell them the story of ALGEO and kind of the principal. If something is hard and difficult, you should do it more often, meaning that media that you're part of.
[00:12:13] The problem is, is that you're because it's you know, if you just push it off, if you if you're releasing code once a month and it's hard and painful and you decide you're only going to release code once a quarter so that you have to go to the people, you're actually you're kind of burying the problem, you're just pushing the problem off and instead should be releasing code, you know, every week or every day, you know, and forcing yourself to get better at it. And I think the same thing is true with these meetings is that if meetings are hard, you should do them more frequently shorter, but with more intention and more focus and more clarity, because that's what's going to drive media performances, is doing it more frequently and that's going to force you to be better at it. And I think that's that's a concept that I kind of pulled over from Agile into the leadership teamwork that I do. It was kind of curious because I know you've got some, you know, software background. Do you see sort of similarities in that kind of process improvement philosophy and media practices?
[00:13:01] Well, absolutely. And I think it's you know, so you take that same one and it's common and agile. Right. So you've got a daily or at most a weekly check in in the agile teams, because anytime where you're interdependence is high and the rate of change is high, you need to exchange information more often. So, you know, there are times when you can go a month or two months, but that's when you're doing like international committee work hit you. You don't actually work together and you don't actually care if the project's done for three years, right? Well, that's what you can afford that.
[00:13:33] Yeah. And I think you hit it, which is the is what is the pace of change or what is the rate of change you the environment or the context you're operating in or that you want to be driving. And the faster you want to change, the more you want to be it. I have leadership teams that do daily models. I mean, they're doing five minute stand-ups with the whole leadership team. You know, it's not every day at least two, 3 times a week.
[00:13:50] We do that and we do our daily huddle as an asynchronous huddle. So there are other ways once you realize the function of that, you can you can move it around. So you can design it to work for your environment. So in our case, we're a remote team and we do ours in in our, you know, our chat app and everybody checks in. But we don't lose that cadence. We don't lose that check in rhythm. So when you look in that with that speed of innovation idea in other domains, you know, if you go look at people who are doing emergency response or tactical military work, they have an action review process which anybody who's done software will know is a retrospective. And the more intense the situation, the more often they'll run them. So there are teams that will run their action reviews hourly.
[00:14:32] You know, just look at what happened over the last hour. What do we learn? What do we need to do differently? How do we reorient?
[00:14:38] And, you know, it's a five minute meeting, but it's if you want to rapidly learn an impact change, you don't meet less me more with greater intention and greater focus and greater skill. But even on the customer service perspective. Right. So what's easier, right. Selling to a customer that's already bought from you or selling to a new one, engaging the customer? Re engaging and customer you've lost touch with or having a great conversation with a customer you talk with on a regular basis? I think probably in the coaching world, right. If you've got coaching clients that you don't talk to every two, three months, that's probably a more challenging situation than the coaches clients you have a weekly check in with. Yeah, no. Absolutely right. That rate. Well-designed meetings makes a big difference.
[00:15:22] Now, when you talked a little bit about doing asynchronous meetings and stuff like that, and I think there's the idea that once you get good or once you kind of figure out the basics, there's lots of ways you going to evolve and adapt and kind of change the formats to fit your situation. I generally suggest to most of the teams that I'm working with is that we kind of start with the basics.
[00:15:42] We start we start with the base model and then we can going to build up the options.
[00:15:46] It's going to a shoe ha ri approach to the meetings. Again, you need to learn the basic moves and you know those in martial arts.
[00:15:54] No other issue really is that you need to learn the basic moves and then you put them together in patterns and then you can start figuring out new combinations and maybe, you know, or unique situations stuff. But getting the basic agendas right. Getting the basic process right. Getting people trained. I talk about training people on meetings, you know, and then and then once they once they figure that out, then you can start to do the after action reviews, you do the retrospectives, you do the process improvement, figure out how to make them better and evolve your particular mode. But you have to understand those principles first.
[00:16:23] Well. So that's completely true. And what we found. So we did. One of the things we did research into while we were writing the book was what were what were organizations doing that were really, really successful with their meetings? And what did that look like as they became more and more successful? So basically we outline kind of a performance maturity model routinized.
[00:16:44] And, you know, there's a there's a free diagnostic on our website so you can go and take it and, you know, see how your how your organizational practices line up with, you know, the best of the best in the world. But the reality is, is that while the farther father you get into executive and leadership kind of roles, the more likely it is that you'll spend most of your time meeting at work. Right. Meetings are how leaders lead. You got stick with it. But fewer than 25 percent of the folks in the leadership capacity in the U.S. at least have any training of any kind.
[00:17:15] Every business MBA student should have a course for a design and run effective meetings.
[00:17:21] It's a little it's a it's a weirdly criminals sort of oversight. Isn't it like we're going to have all of our leaders spend all of their time doing this, but we shouldn't train them. And we do know that half of that time is totally wasted. Like, can you imagine if any of our other production processes had a margin of error of 50 percent or greater? We're just like, sure, yeah. Let's go for it. No problem. Yeah, but that's well that's what it is so often when an organization actually goes, oh wow, we need to do this. And they come to work with us. We do a quick start process, which is very much about like, okay, let's figure out where you are.
[00:17:58] You know, map out your meetings in a way that you start to see them for the system they are as opposed to, you know, having that doom loop oriented gut reaction of, you know, meetings are a waste of time or have to fix my meetings, you know, start to look and see. Oh, wait a second. You know, the meeting I'm having with my clients is a very different thing than the meeting I have with my team, which is very different from the meetings I'm having with vendors. And then, you know, take some skills training and begin to design those key pivot points. You know, I completely agree with you. I think once you get onto it and seeing what those systems are, you can pick up off the shelf like whole meeting designs for four, you know, soup to nuts. Here's how we go from point A to point B on this kind of business process as a starting place. Let's start with some. Somebody else got great.
[00:18:46] Yeah. I mean, honestly, I basically have templates for leadership teams looking for strategy, development, strategy, execution that breaks down the three year meeting through your planning meeting, the annual planning meeting, the quarterly planning, the monthly, the weekly and the daily.
[00:19:01] And I just give them the leverage as they get. You're the agenda as you're going to start with and we're not going into smaller ones. So we'd start with the three year plan and then we got a quarterly and then I'll do an annual and then we'll trim the monthly number of a weekly and then we'll do daily. So I got to titrate them in.
[00:19:16] But there is a standard set that they start with because it is as a system. I mean, I like that that idea that you mentioned, that it it is part of a rhythm, part of a system that has logic, has intention, and each one is quite different. And there's there's very specific things that you do and do not do. And each one of those meetings.
[00:19:29] Absolutely. That's awesome. You know, we have an online gallery of all kinds of templates that you should work with us and help us. Help us. Well, we'll spread some of your your will. Archaeology. Yes. On that.
[00:19:42] Well, it's fascinating because with what I find is, you know, having been coming from the natural world and kind of learning that discipline of the iteration process and backlog and the daily standups, it just impress upon me sort of the system nature of it.
[00:19:55] But you can apply that to any any particular kind of context or situation, whether it's, you know, a software team looking to deliver, you know, code programming code or whether it's, you know, a production team, a marketing team, a leadership team. It's just getting clear on what are you what are you trying to deliver? What is the system you're trying to put in place? What are the touchpoints? Where do you need to get on the same page? Where do things go? Where do you need alignment? Where you need. Where you need to prioritize it, just then figuring out how those meetings are gonna solve each one of those problems and making sure you're clear on what each one is.
[00:20:26] I think that's entirely true. And, you know, if it if it's OK. Give an example. Because we ran into this recently. So we were from a software perspective, we have you know, like I said, we do services and we do training and we do publications and all of that. But we also have this meeting management platform and we found that it was hard to get through some of the enterprise pilot processes because when you get into selling software in the enterprise world, you're dealing with 97 committees. You know, the business brings you in to solve this one problem. But I.T. says this and procurement says that. And, you know, Sally-Ann, accounting doesn't like the color, you know, whatever it is.
[00:21:03] So there's this giant circus of monkeys to manage through success. So we step back and we say, well, hold on a second. Where the meeting design company, let's let's look at what needs to happen across that pilot process in terms of understanding how the decisions get made, making sure that we're staying on top of issues, making sure everybody feels supported and that we're moving towards a place of success for everybody. And we designed a meeting flow for that that laid out the 10 meetings we need to have and which sequence how often over a four month period and design each one of those meetings. And now when a client comes to us, they can say, well, what will this look like and how do I need to be involved and how do I need to plan for my time? And we can say these are the conversations we're gonna have in this order. Here's what your team needs to commit to. We need you to be able to make these kinds of decisions, you know, and we're we're starting from a completely different place than when you walk in and you say, well, hey, you know, let's go work it out.
[00:22:00] Give me a credit card number. Yeah.
[00:22:01] You know, it's incredibly powerful because there's a very, very clear and we never lose we never lose touch with exactly how that process is going and how they're making their decisions and how we need to adapt.
[00:22:14] Well, I think that idea that Munich meetings fit into some kind of process design is key. And I think on the sales process I think is as fascinating just because I think happens, if not 90 percent of the sales process really is about educating the customer on how to buy.
[00:22:28] Typically, they don't know how to purchase the thing that they're trying to. You're trying to sell them.
[00:22:32] So, you know, you get you can talk benefits all you want, but if you haven't, you haven't coached them on, you know, what they think about what data they need to collect, who they need to have involved, what are the criteria they're they're going to use to make a decision.
[00:22:42] What's their timeframe look like? That's the bulk of sales. And I could see having a good set of meetings designed to really have the right conversation at the right time, given a process flow that you've designed, as is how how you're going to be successfully, not only successfully converting or getting getting through the sales process, but managing it from a cost of sales point of view to make sure that you're not just dumping huge amounts of money and time and energy into sales. Thinking around selling things to people that don't need them or not could be successful clients ultimately.
[00:23:10] Absolutely. Well, and the other thing that's really fabulous about having a defined way, the way you know, and this is this is the thing, right? When you define your meetings, what you're defining is the way that we do things, which essentially means that you are defining your culture, you're defining your approach to engaging each other's teams and engaging the world.
[00:23:30] But when you define the way you can then have a place where where as you learn going forward, you can adapt and make changes. So you're not winging it from first principles every time. Right. So in our kickoff process, we have pulled in techniques that are from cognitive and Nerio and economical behavioral economic philosophy that make those much more powerful meetings. And we had a place to pull those in as soon as we learned those techniques. Right. We were like, oh, hey, here's a great here's a great idea. We're like, oh, there's a great idea that I can apply in my process right here, right now. So that was really, really powerful because I've got a thing to work on. But from a scale perspective, the other thing that's incredibly powerful about it is that I can pull on a new account manager and say, this is how you run these meetings. And there is people like I can scale my team so much faster because I have a way to bring them in to. And that's that's huge, you know, because you just don't want to trust or just leave how everybody knew in your company talks to your customers or treats your employees to chance.
[00:24:38] And I think that's that's the secret to most these companies that are struggling to figure out how to the scale. You know, they get to a certain point and then they kind of hit a ceiling. And oftentimes it's because they've got some bottleneck where some person, you know, is the holder of that piece of information or the holder of that process. And it's all in their head. And, you know, until they figure out how to unpack that and get that into a defined process and, you know, a defined set of agendas and meetings and steps, timeframes. You know, it's you're just not going to move. You know, I can move that through that constraint. Right. That that is going to be a gating constraint for the growth of the business. And if you start to figure out how to put these things in place. The other thing, too, that I think is really important is, you know, having those meetings will document that you're having the agenda and the process. And it's almost impossible to do process improvement on these kind of activities, on any kind of knowledge work without having some kind of. Well, this is the way we do it. Then we can reflect back on, OK, well, what's working, what's not, or what outcomes do we have and what we're desirable or undesirable? Well, what do we do that contributed to that? Well, we don't have the agenda. If we did that, there was no agenda to it. It's it's nearly impossible to then go back and say, all right, well, let's try it this way or let's change what we're doing here. Let's ask this question first and then that question. You know, that you have no basis to be able to actually improve in the future.
[00:25:52] Absolutely. Absolutely. And then once you have that basis and say, you know, you're talking about like establishing that pattern and having that be a leverage for scale. Right. And leverage for improvement. So here's a here's a story from a giant company. So Cisco recently, last three years decided that they were gonna pay attention to all the research on performance management where, you know, you look at everybody's potential and their their goals for a year and you do, you know, make them fill out sheets and review them and do their raises back on that. And the research says that that just completely doesn't work. So they ditched their performance management system and they said, you know what, we know what works is engagement. We know that employees who trust one another and who are excited about their work, they find it meaningful. They're engaged with the company, outperform the others. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna work on increasing engagement. And the way that they found that worked was they implemented a process for managers to have one on ones with every team member once a week using two specific questions. And because they had two specific questions and they had a system for doing those, and they could measure whether or not the team leaders had those one on ones, they were able to see that, yes, indeed, when they had that one on one with those two questions, engagement went up, performance went up. So they scaled it and they said, OK. Now, if you gonna be a team leader, you have to do this at least 90 percent of the time. So they they now had a thing that they can put a performance metric around it. Right. Meeting performance is job performance. And then they were able to roll it out and increase engagement across 15000 teams globally because they had a well-designed meeting as the core of how that worked.
[00:27:33] Yeah, it's fascinating. I mean, it's kind of one of those cases of when is would when something is so simple, like it appears so simple. You know, you appreciate how much work was put into getting those questions, right?
[00:27:46] Absolutely. I'm sure there are one hundred and fifty questions they went through to find that do that were most affected.
[00:27:51] So, you know, it's really about getting getting getting the getting the questions right and making the meeting actually quite simple, but simple in the right way. That's really going to drive the results that you want, right?
[00:28:02] Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, obviously, they had to keep it simple because. Hello. Fifteen now, isn't it? But that doesn't mean, you know, in any one particular environment. That's exactly the way you ought to do it. But it. Sure. So a useful place to start.
[00:28:17] Exactly. So let's let's sneak in one more question around virtual teams, because I think this is one thing that I see coming up a lot for companies who are distributed, who have people in multiple locations and they're doing all this, you know, using some kind of technical platform. Any any best practices or anything that you've seen that has been particularly effective for teams that are in that format. I know that that is a particular challenge. And I noticed coming up. I think more and more for companies that are, you know, distributed, what are some things that they can do to improve their meetings, move from a virtual room when they're doing a virtual team, then virtual meetings.
[00:28:50] So when you go remote, you know that the core remains the same. If you don't understand, if you lack basic meeting education skills and you don't have a well-designed meeting in the first place, so you're clear why you're having it, what it's meant to produce and you know how to get from point A to point B. You have to start there, right? Basic meeting design is the same requirement in a remote world as it is in an in-person world. But assuming you've got that, let's assume you've got a well design meeting your and you're trying to adapt it for a remote setting. So there the key is about expanding your understanding of technology.
[00:29:24] So there are over 200 companies that build software specifically for online meetings and meeting enablement. And only 20 years, 50 of those are about are things like Xoom and Skype and whatnot that are about communication. Most of the rest of them are doing things like giving you technical platforms for doing agendas and minutes and whatnot, which is what our company does and technical platforms for things like online brainstorming or visual collaboration. So if you're using something like Kanban boards or, you know, surface mapping, right, there are technology platforms that allow you to do that with remote teams. So that's a really important thing. If you've got a primarily remote team, make sure you have enough technology to support that. And then the other one is that you need to you will need to adapt things to push more of the work you're doing into writing. And that may mean more. pre-Work. But it also means that in the meeting you want to have people writing together in real time while you're talking. The first involved gets them. They're gonna be multi-tasking.
[00:30:31] There's just no way around it like this fellow. It's like we're just talking here. Like, I want to kind of look up that template real quick, you know? So how do you get them multitasking on task? Yeah.
[00:30:41] And one of the ways you do that is you give them a job to do so. Note taking. Pulling up research. Contributing ideas in writing. You know, all of that is one of those ways that you both get people in more deeply engaged, but also increase the richness of what you're creating together so that you've got a better institutional memory for what happened there.
[00:31:01] So that kind of thing. So you gotta gotta broaden your technology library, get people multi-modal, engaged in what you're doing, and then keep the sessions shorter.
[00:31:10] Good suggestions sucks. Otherwise, just no.
[00:31:13] Yeah, I do. I find that it's about 2 hours as I can do about 2 hours since in the editing I have our break. As people say, there's a technology overhead fatigue that sets in. So you run eight hour meetings with the team in person and and we can keep the energy pretty high, but about 2 hours online. And then we got to take a break and come back to.
[00:31:32] And what's fascinating about that. So we did a series of templates on doing strategic planning as a remote team. Right. Strategic planning isn't something you do in an hour and a half. This shows not so in that series of templates. What we did is we broke it into four two hour meetings. And what was really fascinating about that. I'm not sure I'll go back to doing full day in-person strategic planning, because what happens is when you when you've got like say let's say you do your visioning as your first unit, you know, you create your big story and you do your vivid vision work and whatnot. And then you go away for three days. Well, what happens in that three days?
[00:32:09] Your whole understanding of that vision and what that means and all of the implications that you then build into the mission or the key result or whatever you're whatever your thing is that you're doing, is radically better. You know, it's radically better. So it takes a week instead of a day. But the result is is so much richer.
[00:32:27] Yeah, it is. Having done a lot of these, virtually no. It's just fascinating playing with a different kind of moods and the templates and how to facilitate an online versus in person. I think it's it's a huge area that is yet to be explored or there's still a lot to be developed. You know, cultural differences, timezone differences, like all those become factors that you kind of go into your strategy for planning this. We're gonna run out of time here. This has been a great meeting. Great conversation. So we had a timeout. We had the intention. We had an agenda.
[00:32:55] If we want to find out more about you, about Lucid Meetings, about the book, what's the best way to get that information?
[00:33:00] So our Web site is lucidmeetings.com. And there is a wonder world of templates and diagnostic surveys and all kinds of tools you can find there, as well as access to the book and the our online school. All of that's there. And then if you are interested in talking specifically to me, my web site is jelisekeith.com.
[00:33:22] Great. I'll make sure that all of that is in the show notes that people can click through and get those things again at least. Thank you so much. And a pleasure. A lot of great information here for all of our listeners. I really appreciate you taking the time today.
[00:33:32] Oh, thank you for having me. It's been fun.
[00:33:35] Thanks, Bruce. It's been an amazing talking. We thank you. I appreciate it.
[00:36:23] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.