Episode 154: How to Fix Your Broken Meetings

Whether we like it or not, meetings are essential in running an organisation. But when was the last time you attended a meeting without feeling bored? Meetings are supposed to help us get work done more effectively. It’s an opportunity for us to raise issues and make critical decisions. But despite their importance, very few of them are done well. Does anyone really know how to run a meeting without it turning into a boring one-hour slog?

Dr Carrie Goucher joins us in this episode to discuss better work communication and how to run a meeting. She also explains how to disagree with other people in meetings while maintaining good relationships. Then, we lay down simple and practical actions making meetings shorter, more productive, and better.

If you want to know how to run a meeting effectively and productively, stay tuned to this episode.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:

1. Learn how to plan meetings beyond just hygiene factors.

2. Discover how to engage and encourage people to speak their minds during meetings.
3. Find out how to run a meeting that everyone will agree was interesting, helpful, and productive.

Episode Highlights

[04:16] How Carrie Got into Meetings

• Carrie’s work has always been about helping people and companies collaborate better. The sticking point for many of those companies was meetings.

• She got highly interested in meetings as a place where critical things happen or don’t happen. She ended up doing a PhD in it.
• She used her PhD research and current knowledge about culture and leadership to address meeting issues in organisations.

[06:07] Planning Beyond Hygiene Factors

‘We want to stay psychologically safe, we want to keep our job. But more than that, we want to be somebody who is high-value to our place of work.’ – Click Here To Tweet This

• Setting agendas and starting on time is important, but they’re not enough to ensure a productive meeting.
• Many forces are at work in planning a meeting, from power and hierarchy to tribal forces.
• Centuries ago, wanting to stay safe in the tribe was a life-or-death matter. Today, we want to be psychologically safe by being of value and keeping our jobs.
• Hygiene factors include starting promptly, finishing on time, having a session plan, and making sure everybody speaks.
• Having standing meetings that rotate around makes us forget what they’re there for in the first place.

‘…Make sure everybody speaks. I think it’s a lot more complex than that, but it’s a really good start. Did everybody have the chance to say what they thought? And if they didn’t? It’s a question you can ask at the end.’ – Click Here To Tweet This

[09:57] Carrie’s PhD in Meetings

• She was most interested in understanding what we would find if we looked beyond hygiene factors and took a more systems approach.

• Carrie’s approach is to make people talk about their experience of meetings and how they connect with things outside the meeting.
• Her findings indicated that meetings are a systems problem. There are various stages we need to go through before and after the meeting.
• The social contracting that happens before a meeting can be quite harmful. A simple way to clear this up is to engage people beforehand through a quick conversation.
• Her research showed two sides to running a meeting: facilitation and using light structures.

‘When people have different expectations about what a meeting is supposed to be, about how it’s supposed to be run, what we’re supposed to get out of it, what our roles are going to be, that’s actually quite harmful in the meeting itself.’ – Click Here To Tweet This

[15:02] How to Encourage People to Speak Up

• Going around everybody helps clarify and speed up the process of turn-taking. It gives everybody the opportunity to speak and a bit of preparation time.

• Other than work-related questions, it could also be just pure fun. You’ll be amazed at how it can change the dynamic.
• Doing this early equal contribution models how we want the rest of the meeting to go. It shows that everybody’s views, data, and insights are essential.
• Another technique is inviting people to consider a question and write down their thoughts. Then, have them share what they think upon reflecting on it.
• Giving a good briefing, clarity, and timeframe for what you’re asking them to do allows more people to provide more valuable contributions.

‘If it’s unrealistic to get people to prepare something before or to think about something before, then give them a bit of time in the meeting to write that down.’ – Click Here To Tweet This

[21:42] Addressing Hierarchy

• Meetings are usually run by people in authority. It is human nature to show deference to people with higher qualifications than us.

• Those people should demonstrate that they value everybody’s opinion and validate, encourage, and appreciate everyone’s contributions.
• It’s easy for people with more senior roles to see what’s wrong with what somebody has said. But direct criticism will only make people reluctant to contribute.
• Always remember that there’s an audience in meetings. It’s easier to restore a one-to-one relationship than a group.
• Think about how you can address critical things without criticising them.

[24:58] Disagreeing without Criticising

• There are two types of conflict: the task conflict we want and the relationship conflict we don’t want.

• These two conflicts often blur together, ending up in a situation with lots of false positivity. It’s thus critical to identify how to separate them.
• Use the VAB framework: validate, appreciate, boundary. Validate what they’re talking about, appreciate their contribution, and bring back the conversation to the task.
• It doesn’t mean nobody will ever feel criticised, but it offers a balanced approach. Over time, it builds trust to speak about the task more directly.

‘Keep the conversation around the task, around the evidence, around the outcome.’ – Click Here To Tweet This

[29:13] ‘Yes, but…’

• When setting boundaries, instead of using the word ‘but’, try to say ‘and’.

• Something we say habitually has a significant impact. The word ‘but’ can invalidate your earlier agreement about something.
• There are ways to give the ‘Yes, but…’ a constructive place to go rather than running them into two parallel sequences.
• Asking people to write down their ‘buts’ from an idea acknowledges the importance of their internal thought processes.
• Asking everybody to critique your idea can be a way of establishing that it’s beneficial and normal to critique ideas.

[34:04] How to Run a Meeting

• A good session plan includes the purpose of the meeting, questions, decisions to be made, and expectations from people.

• Once you have a good session plan, you’ll have a platform to use.
• The best way to move the meeting forward with authority is to go around, verbally collate your progress, ask questions, and make suggestions.
• In these ways, you’re stimulating and prompting people to take the steps towards your purpose.
• A shared canvas or document helps capture what has come out of the meeting.

‘Given what we’ve achieved so far, what is the best possible use of our time if we want to get to Zed?’ – Click Here To Tweet This

[38:53] The Four Quadrants of a Meeting Documentation

• First is establishing any set decisions. It’s useful for people who weren’t in the meeting or in case you forget something.

• Secondly, identify what needs to happen next and who is responsible for it.
• Third, determine who you need to communicate the documentation with or involve in any established decisions.
• Fourth is a car park or what came up that is for another meeting.

[42:17] How to Run a Meeting with Time Constraints

• The best way is to break the meetings into chunks and use the time limits as a creative constraint.

• Think about the best structure that can speed up the decision-making process. Some strategies are to use a voting technique or a third-party timer.
• Giving people a five-minute break to switch between topics allows them to prepare for the next phase.

[45:11] How to Share Information in an Engaging Way

• The first thing is to give people choices. Some people prefer listening to a recording, while others prefer emails or a newsletters.
• Put your key messages in your heading when writing. Then, provide bite-sized, scannable content with lots of subheadings.
• The thing about work communication is that out-of-work communication sets the bar for it.
• Our brains already understand the formats of what we usually receive. You can borrow some of those principles and apply them internally.
• Meetings are part of an ecosystem of how we communicate and get things done at work.

45:13] ‘Give people choices.’ – Click Here To Tweet This

[48:56] Carrie’s Top Three Tips for How to Run a Meeting

• Set people up with the right expectations.
• Get people to contribute as early and equally as possible to set the tone for the rest of the meeting.
• Capture the meeting outcomes on a shared canvas using the four quadrants.

About Carrie

Carrie Goucher is a business culture practitioner and the founder of FewerFasterBolder. She has a PhD in systems engineering and is a specialist in meetings and meeting culture. Bringing in her expertise, Carrie has worked with various organisations on their meetings for over 18 years. She is passionate about addressing the system and transforming how we think about meetings.

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Episode Transcript

Rachel Morris: Most of us think that meetings are the things that happen in between all the real work that needs to be done and view them as an evil necessity, but like or not not, for many of us, meetings define the culture of where we work. They’re often the only way we have to raise issues, make decisions, or even clap eyes on our colleagues. So why are they so bad and so hard to get right? j

I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s because they’re run by humans with buttons and triggers and conflicting ideas and priorities, just like any other gathering of humans. So why do we put so little thought into doing them right, particularly when some of us spent so much time in meetings, and some of the decisions we make in meetings are quite literally life or death? Like anything, I think that with a bit of thought, planning and understanding, you can transform your meetings from bad and boring to helpful and, dare I even say, interesting.

In this episode, I’m chatting with Dr Carrie Goucher, who has a PhD in meetings. She’s worked out some fundamental principles and hacks, and has created a FewerFasterBolder system, which can transform your meetings. Since this episode, I’ve started to use her meetings capture canvas in my meetings, which has made it so much easier to record and share discussions, decisions and actions.

If you’re thinking that because you don’t currently chair any meetings that this episode isn’t for you, then think again. There’s stuff we can all do to make meetings better, even if you’re not the boss. So listen to this episode to find out the basics which must be present in any meeting from the get go, how to disagree with other people in meetings without wrecking the relationship and some astonishingly simple and practical actions you can take immediately to make your meetings shorter, more productive, and just better.

Welcome to You Are Not a Frog, the podcast for doctors and other busy professionals in high stress, high stakes jobs. I’m Dr Rachel Morris, a former GP, now working as a coach, trainer and speaker. Like frogs in a pan of slowly boiling water, many of us don’t notice how bad the stress and exhaustion have become until it’s too late, but you are not a frog. Burning out or getting out are not your only options. In this podcast, I’ll be talking to friends, colleagues, and experts and inviting you to make a deliberate choice about how you live and work so that you can beat stress and work happier.

If you’re a training manager or clinical lead and your teams are under pressure and maybe even feeling overwhelmed, we’d love to share our Shapes Toolkit training with you. Our practical tools are designed by a team of doctors and practitioners who know what it’s like to work in a stretched and overwhelmed system, with topics like how to take control of your time and workload, deal with conflicts and managing stress.

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It’s wonderful to have with me on the podcast today, Dr Carrie Goucher. Now, Carrie is a business culture practitioner, and she has done a PhD and is a specialist in meetings and meetings culture. She is the creator of FewerFasterBolder, that is an approach and some techniques for transforming how many things are led. So welcome, Carrie.

Carrie Goucher: Lovely to be here, Rachel.

Rachel: Now, I wanted Carrie to come on the podcast because meetings are something that I don’t think we do very well in healthcare. I’m not sure anyone does them very well. Carrie, what do you think?

Carrie: No, they aren’t. They’re mostly mediocre at best. There are some great meetings, but for most people, their meeting experiences, negative.

Rachel: Yeah. So you have really dug deep into meetings and how to make a better meeting. What led you to that in the first place?

Carrie: My work has always been about helping people and companies collaborate better, so things like culture, relationships, ways of working, building an adult to adult culture, but for many of those companies, the sticking point was meetings. So I remember somebody saying to me very, very clearly, “If you’re going to change our culture, you have to start with our meetings.”

I loved working with companies on things like design thinking and agile and lean and coaching and all sorts of things that we now know help organisations work brilliantly, but I couldn’t understand why all that evaporated when it came to meetings, except for a few handful of really good companies. I’m not a very patient person myself, so I found sitting in meetings pretty boring and frustrating as well.

I got so interested in meetings as a place where input really important things happen or don’t happen in companies that I ended up doing a PhD in it. Then when I read the 300 or so papers written exclusively about meetings, I just could hardly believe what I was reading. I couldn’t understand why the research that had been done so far seem to me to be about tick box exercises they did.

Was there an agenda? Did it start on time, etc? We know so much more about the human psyche at work and about behaviour and what makes people trust each other and what helps us make progress on things and get clear. So I used my PhD research and everything we now know about culture and leadership to try and address that in organisations, and that’s how I landed where I am now.

Rachel: Wow, that’s interesting. So everything was just looking at like, is there agenda? Does it start on time? That’s a really low hanging fruit, right? That’s the thing that everyone thinks, “Well, that’s pretty obvious that that should be there.”

Carrie: Yeah. They’re hygiene factors, so it’s not that they’re not important, but on their own, they are not enough to ensure that we have a powerful productive meeting. There are so many forces that work from power and hierarchy to tribal forces, so where we want to look useful in the tribe. We want to stay safe, and hundreds of thousands of years ago, that would have been a matter of life or death, whether we were safe in our tribe, whether we had to go and fight tigers on our own.

Now, it’s not a matter of life or death, but nevertheless, we want to stay psychologically safe. We want to keep our job. But more than that, we want to be somebody who is high value to our place of work. Now, we never want to look like we’re not doing enough, or that we didn’t think of something, or we asked a stupid question, or we weren’t on it. So there are so many forces at work and just simple hygiene factors while it’s so tempting to say if we just kind of really double down on those and are really disciplined and always have an agenda.

It’s just not quite enough, but we can now understand what is enough and what simple sort of sometimes quite annoyingly simple things are enough to trigger really helpful behaviour and helpful conversations.

Rachel: So Carrie, very quickly, just lists for me, what are those hygiene factors that really are the no-brainers that just really should be there to make a meeting effective, that we can get out of the way now and just go, right? If you’re not doing those, then at least do that, right?

Carrie: Yeah. So they would be things like starting promptly and finishing on time. It’s a basic, basic thing, which means that people’s time is respected. So clearly, in medicine and clinical work, like everywhere else, things happen to diaries. But broadly speaking, if you’re late, say, “I’m very sorry. Please carry on.” If you’re running the meeting, then finish on time so that you’re not leaving people with an overhang to deal with.

Have a clear plan of what you’re going to talk about. I would recommend a session plan, not an agenda. The main thing being where are we trying to get to today. So particularly meetings where we have one every week or every month, the sort of standing meetings that rotate around, we kind of forget what they’re there for. There’s something about meetings that’s quite resistant to change.

It’s not that easy to stick your hand up in a meeting, say, “Hang on a minute, why are we here, again,” in a PCN meeting or something like that. However, some group reflection on what is the most useful use of our time in these sessions as a group is a really good start, and that can form the basis of what some people call an agenda, I would prefer to call a session plan, which is the these are the things we’re trying to achieve while we’re here.

So those would be the three really basic ones. Another one that people add quite a lot is make sure everybody speaks. I think it’s a lot more complex than that, but it’s a really good start. Did everybody have the chance to say what they thought? If they didn’t, it’s a question you can ask at the end. Before you close the meeting, you can say, “Does everybody feel they got the chance to say what they wanted to say?” That’s a sort of checkpoint for you and for others. So all those things will be a great starting point.

Rachel: Great. So those are the hygiene factors that if they are all present, that will mean that people don’t get really irritated and et cetera, but they don’t necessarily make the meeting absolutely, brilliantly fantastic.

Carrie: Exactly right.

Rachel: So I’m really interested, Carrie, when you were doing your PhD, and I was gonna say, I’m not going to ask you to sum up your three years of PhD in five minutes, but actually I am. What was the one thing that you were really interested in? What did this lead you to finding?

Carrie: I was interested in understanding if we looked beyond some of these hygiene factors, and we took more of a systems approach, what would we find? There aren’t particularly excellent academic books written about meetings. But mostly, the studies that have been done were dominated by asking people, “What meeting did you go to last? Were you satisfied with the process? Were you satisfied with the outcome?”

Then listing a number of factors that people have to say if they were present or not, or to what extent were present, including all these hygiene factors. I felt, if you only asked about those factors, you’ll only hear which one of those are important. I wanted to flip it on its head and take a much more inductive approach and say, if we ask people to talk about their experience of meetings, and what happened before and what happened after and to link them to other things.

Clearly, meetings are just part of other things. We don’t have meetings other than to achieve something. If we’re not trying to achieve anything, it’s a pure social, and that is slightly different. That’s not to say meetings don’t include a bonding and connecting element they absolutely do, but pure bonding, that’s social, that’s different. So I was keen to understand if those things were trying to achieve in the meeting to serve a purpose outside of the meeting, how did all that connect together?

I learned some really interesting things. So my research findings indicated that absolutely, meetings are a systems problem. They’re not something you can just fix between 10 and 11 am while you’re actually running the meeting. So we need to understand a little bit more about what’s going on around them. But there are also various stages that we need to go to that go through that start before the meeting and finish after it.

So for example, my results show that there’s a big piece of stuff that happens before a meeting, which is around social contracting. Clearly, in a contract contract, everything’s written down, and we sign at the end of it. In a social contract, nothing’s written down, but we hold it as an expectation. So where people have different expectations about what a meeting is supposed to be about, how it’s supposed to be run, what we’re supposed to get out of it, what our roles are going to be, that’s actually quite harmful in the meeting itself.

So a really simple way to clear that up is to share an agenda beforehand, or share a session plan in an invitation, and also to ask people what they want to get out of that session. So that process of getting clarity and engaging people beforehand, which can be as simple as an email or a very quick conversation. That makes a huge difference to what happens in the meeting. That’s what my research shows.

My research also showed that there are two sides to running a meeting. One is facilitation, so how do you, with your words and your body language, keep the meeting progressing towards its goal and keep engaging people and keep involving people and getting the best out of everybody there. The second part is how do you use some light structures, so how do you put some scaffolding in place that gives people a few simple rules, either for all of the meeting or part of the meeting that, again, frees people to contribute better.

So in many, many aspects of life, where we want frankness, focus, maybe even a bit of fun, dare I say it, with our colleagues, flow, all of those things work best. Often with a clear understanding of what the rules of the game are when we’re in a group interaction. So football is one example. There are many others. In a meeting, it is helpful to have a few little pictures in place that people rather than a total free for all, where actually what happens is power and hierarchy dominate.

Rachel: I love that concept, because you’re absolutely right. If no one knows when they’re expected to speak or anything like that, then yeah, you will just get the most dominant people or you’ll get the extroverts. I’m an extrovert, and I find silence really uncomfortable. So if there’s a silence of the meeting, I’m sitting there, and my hands go, “Don’t butt in. Don’t butt in. Don’t butt in.” Often people do need that silence to jump in.

But if you know that you’re going round and everyone has going to have a chance to say, then that’s great, isn’t it? Then people don’t have to worry about butting in or being dominant or being too quiet or whatever, I think. That’s a well known technique. I’m just thinking for when we teach about group facilitation, small group facilitation and teaching. If you’ve got a really noisy student, you’ll then go round so that they take their turns with everybody else.

So there always are a few people in the meeting, you know that you’d really like to hear from but they don’t speak up. In your research, did you find any specific structures that really does help people to speak up?

Carrie: I think that there are a few options. The one you mentioned earlier about rounds is a really helpful one. So that just clarifies and speeds up the process of turn taking, and it gives everybody an equal slot. A round works really when you ask a question or give people a couple of questions to answer and some kind of indication of concision. It could be “in two words, please share…”, or it could be in one minute or whatever it is that we’re going to go round everybody. This stage will take 10 minutes when people have a little look at the clock and look at the number of people around and do a little bit of mental arithmetic and come up with their own conclusion.

So it’s up to you how formal or informal you make that, but it does give everybody the opportunity to speak, and it gives them a little bit of preparation time, particularly if you tell people the order in advance. So people know that, “okay, I’m going to be the third.”

So certainly that’s a great technique. Those questions, they can be sharing data. So you might have a number of people who have a number. I don’t know whether that could be missed appointments or a patient metric or anything else that is material to the meeting. That’s a really good way to get some of that data right at the start.

It could be something that asks people just to share a bit of the world they’re bringing into the meeting. So you could ask people what their workload is, and in two words, give me your workload in a temperature. So I’m on a rolling boil, tepid, hair on fire. So it’s an opportunity to people just bring a bit of where they’re at, a bit of humanity in through the door, or it could be just pure fun. I used to not do the fun, what I used to plan the fun ones and not do them, because I’d get there and think, “oh, everyone’s too serious. They wouldn’t want to do it.” I stopped doing it at one meeting, and it was full of engineers. They said, “Hang on a minute. Where’s our question about animals?”

Rachel: Where’s the fun bit? Okay, give us three fun things that you’ve done, Carrie.

Carrie: So a nice one is if you’re on a video meeting, hand on heart. Are you wearing pyjamas right now? That’s a good one. Good Cambridge one. How many miles have you cycled this week? There was another one in that particular organisation about cake. You’ve got to be brave to go for the really fun ones. But I think if you can think of something and you can count it as a bit of an experiment.

Say, “Just for today, we’re just going to try something different. It’s been a long day. We’ve got loads to do tonight. Let’s just take one minute to . . . “. If you feel there’s something that people are ready for that with a bit of humour they will accept, then you will be amazed at how that can change the dynamic. The other thing that happens when we do this early, equal contribution. So rounds are really good for starting meetings is with modelling how we want the rest of that meeting to go.

So we’re modelling and demonstrating that everybody’s view and data and insights are important, and we are providing a template for the kind of interaction that we want, which is concise, succinct, equal, involves quite a bit of listening to others. So it’s a nice technique to use. Another technique is to invite people to consider a question and to write down their thoughts on it. So to give them some time to work, we call it alone together.

So that they can gather their thoughts, reflect even if it’s only for a couple of minutes, and then have a chance to share what they think having had enough time to consider it. So some people love shooting from the hip, and that’s how they think they go to meetings. Suddenly, all these amazing things come out of their brain that even they hadn’t thought of before, and if it wasn’t for the meeting, they couldn’t have produced that ‘content’.

But for a lot of people, that’s not how they work, and it can almost be quite shaming to be asked to contribute immediately to something in a meeting. If it’s unrealistic to get people to prepare something before or to think about something before, then give them a bit of time in the meeting to write that down, could be a couple of minutes. Now clearly, if you can give people something to consider beforehand, that’s great.

So if you’ve got a weekly practice meeting, you might say, “Okay, for next week, could you have a think about X. Come ready to talk about Y.” Give them a little reminder midweek somehow. Then at the start of the next session, you might want to give them one minute to think about it just in case they haven’t already. All these things are much, much more neuro inclusive as well. So we know that neurodiversity is far more prevalent than we ever realised.

There will be people in your team who are neuro-divergent. There will be people who are probably neuro-divergent, but they don’t realise yet. They’ve had no kind of diagnosis. So doing things that allow, that give people really a good briefing, clarity on what you’re asking them to do, and a bit of time to do it in their own space, that’s really worthwhile and allows far more people to contribute and to provide a more valuable contribution.

Rachel: That’s really interesting, I think, really, really important. I have used techniques in my teaching and training where people talk in pairs first, and then contribute. But actually, I think that writing down is almost even better, because even in pairs, you then say, right, can you feed back, and it’s always the most dominant one in the pair that feeds back, right, but they’ve got the quiet one.

But I love that writing down and not only helps with neuro divergence, but it also helps with hierarchy. The problem with our meetings, I think in healthcare, is that they have a lot of hierarchy, no matter how much the doctors think there’s no hierarchy here. We’re all good friends. I think it is still felt, particularly by the newer, younger, more junior members of the team. They really, really, really feel it, and so that will massively help with that as well, right?

Carrie: Absolutely. I guess if hierarchy is part of the issue, and clearly it is human nature does show deference to people with higher qualifications than us. It just is. Usually, meetings are run by people with ‘higher’ qualifications. So the responsibility is on those people to really demonstrate that they do value everybody’s opinion and to modify their own behaviour to validate, encourage, appreciate other people’s contribution.

So if you’re in a highly technical role, it’s easy to see what’s technically wrong with what somebody else has said, whether it’s a clinical point or something different. That’s part of what your job is to pick up detail and to kind of pick up things that are not right or unsafe, but it can make people very reticent to contribute. Actually, you only need to do that once or twice for that to be remembered.

So I remember I had a colleague, very senior colleague in the first organisation I ever worked in, and he was a very exacting person. But I remember saying to him, “You’ve never ever said anything critical to me, or you’ve never framed anything from a critical point of view or made me feel criticised, or I have never felt criticised in your presence. Why is that?” Because I said, “Clearly, you have very high standards.” He said, “It just breaks the relationship.”

It doesn’t mean I can’t address things that matter to me, and we can’t improve things. But as soon as I frame something as a criticism, we’re very quickly off the mark, tell somebody what their point isn’t right. It just whack a great block off that relationship, and that will take me another six months to rebuild that. I need good relationships to do my work well, and that stayed with me for the last 22 years. It’s a really hard discipline.

But the thing about meetings is, there’s an audience. So whilst you might just about be able to kind of restore that relationship one to one if something’s said, it’s much harder in a group, because 3 other people or 10 other people have witnessed somebody criticise, and so it might be interesting to talk about. Okay, so how do you raise things that are important without criticising?

Rachel: Yeah, that’s such a fascinating comment, Carrie. I do remember having another conversation with someone about meetings, and she was a very senior leader in healthcare. She said, in meetings, she just shuts up, and she always tries to speak last because she knows the minute she speaks with her opinion, no one else will give their opinion because she’s the most senior in the room. Boom, she knows that we’ll just shut everyone down.

That has really got me thinking particularly or thinking about criticising because one of the things we talk about a lot on the podcast is how do you tell people what they don’t want to hear, and how do you disagree with people well. I completely take your point, but now we’re in a quandary, aren’t we? What if you are discussing a really thorny subject in a meeting and you really do disagree or someone is blatantly wrong, what do you do without, like you said, knocking a chunk off that relationship?

Carrie: Yeah, yeah. So there are two types of conflict. We want one. We don’t want the other. So there is task conflict. We want this. We want people to disagree about the task, and it is crucial that we do that from a fundamental point of view to keep patients safe. It’s also crucial they do that, so that we improve how we work so that we get the best out of our resources. Whereas smart people disagree about something, that’s where magic happens. We want task conflict.

What we don’t want is relationship conflict. Relationship conflict is we’re no longer debating the task or the implication is the person is wrong, the person hasn’t done enough, the person is inexperienced or wrong or difficult or bad, or something negative. The problem is that the two end up blurring together, and what we end up is in a situation where we have lots of false positivity.

So for example, 10 people share an idea each, clearly some are better than others. To avoid any kind of conflict, somebody says, “Okay, great. Well, that’s 10, brilliant ideas, let’s go away and do them, lovely. We’ll put some effort behind all of them. Great.” Well, I go, “Hang on a minute. That’s madness.” We can end up in this sort of area of friendliness and rapport, where it’s not okay to say anything that doesn’t sound like, “Oh, brilliant, thank you so much. That’s absolutely brilliant.”

Then you never really know that that’s not what people are really thinking. So all the kind of important stuff is hidden, and that doesn’t help either, that doesn’t build trust. That’s rapport over relationship. So the answer is to get really good at separating those out. Over time, you can speak much more directly about the task. The trust based is sufficient that you don’t have to, you have to qualify anything or say anything too carefully.

But at the start, it can really help to use a little framework called VAB, so validate, appreciate, boundary. You can apply this to lots of different things, including how you handle if somebody is talking a lot in a meeting. So the validate part is you express the fact that you understand what they’re talking about. So it’s almost like a playback. “So it sounds like you…” So it’s a clarification piece, and it’s a kind of, “Okay, got it, heard you.”

The second part is appreciate, so you are valuing the contribution, and the fact that it’s enriching the conversation, even if you’re not going to agree with it. So to appreciate you might say, “I can really see why that is seems important, or for you that is important.” Or “I really appreciate you bringing that to our attention or bringing that to the group,” or “everybody’s ideas are valuable, because it gives us more things to choose from,” or “it’s really helpful to understand different perspectives. So thank you for that.”

Then the boundary part is where you can bring it back to the task. So if it was somebody talking a lot, you could say, “So it sounds like you’re talking about this. I’m really glad you’re bringing that to our attention. Today, we need to focus on X.” Mostly, people will say fairplay. If you were to play that video of that interaction to a hundred people, how many of them would say, “Oh, that was very critical.”

Probably not many, so it doesn’t mean nobody will ever feel criticised ever again, but it’s a very reasonable, balanced approach to take. Over time, it will rebalance the ability to talk about things that matter, without people feeling criticised. So we’re trying to keep the conversation around the task, around the evidence, around the outcome. There’s one word I didn’t use at the start of every boundary. I wonder if you might have spotted it. So when I say, “And today we’re going to focus on…”

Rachel: Yes, “but”.

Carrie: Yeah.

Rachel: “But.” “But.”

Carrie: I didn’t use “but”. It’s really difficult not to use “but”, and I do forgive the odd “but”, but if you can possibly say “and”, it’s more powerful. How do you find the “but, and”?

Rachel: It’s interesting, Carrie. I was speaking to a colleague the other day and everything I said she agreed with, but she started her response to me with, “Yes, but I think this,” and then would sort of agree. It started to really get on my nerves, and I thought why is she doing this? Is she just trying to exert authority, or show that she knows as well or something? It was really odd, and I just found it really irritating. It reminded me of the recent Alan Partridge show. Now, you’re an Alan Partridge fan, right?

Carrie: Of course, I live in Norfolk.

Rachel: So he’s interviewing a reporter on his TV show, and he goes, “So don’t you think that childhood poverty is because of this?” She’ll go, “No, Alan. Actually, it’s not.” Then his Alan psychic would say, “Yes, what don’t you think it’s because of this?” She goes, “Yes.” Then whatever Alan says, she goes, “Yes, but,” and then whatever the other woman says, “Yes, and then.”

We laugh about this all the time, and it’s got us very in tune to the “yes, but”. Even if you’re agreeing with someone, some people seem to want to assert their authority or so the fact that they know stuff, by saying, “yes, but” even if they’re sort of agreeing. It’s a very old thing. So it’s not even a disagree that people say “but” so that’s just my little hobbyhorse sidebar.

Carrie: So “yes, but” is a flag placing, ground claiming statement. For many people, it’s a verbal tic. It’s just a habit, something we say a bit like sort of or a bit like. It’s something we say habitually. Its impact is significant. It can invalidate everything you said before. You’re really saying, I mean, I like you and everything, but.

Rachel: But.

Carrie: I’m not being funny or anything, but.

Rachel: But with respect.

Carrie: We have all these things that we use to then we’re kind of saying, the bit you really need to listen to is what I’m going to say next. There is a place where “yes, but” is very helpful. I use it as another structure. So if I’m presenting something, and actually when I’m teaching and coaching for FewerFasterBolder, one of the things I do is say, if I’m in real life, I say there’s a flip chart at the back. It’s got a big “yes, but” at the top, and you’ve all got post it notes.

Every time we talk about something and you think, “yes, but that’s never going to work in my organisation,” or “yes, but what about dadadada,” write it on that post it note. If it’s not burning, and you want to talk about it later, write it on the post it note, put it in the back of the room. If we have a video meeting, then it goes in the chat. Actually, you can just informally say to people, “I’m going to share . . . on this, and every time I say something and you think, ‘yes, but …’ write that down. At the end, let’s talk about all of those.”

Because what you’re doing is giving people a place for that energy that thought, you’re giving a constructive place to go, rather than them running two parallel sequences in their brain. So they’ve got the thing where they’re listening to you and trying to kind of understand the thing they’re being told. The other part that saying, “Yeah, but this is irrelevant, or this is not helpful.”

You’re acknowledging the importance of their internal thought processes and using that for the benefit of the group later, so really easy thing to do and a great use of the but.

Rachel: You can also, and I’ve seen it done where you present an idea and you say, “Right, we’re gonna go round, and everyone’s gonna tell me one reason why this idea isn’t going to work,” which could be quite, quite helpful. So everyone has to pick holes in your idea, even if they love your idea, which means that the people who really hate your idea, fill in good companies, and then feel more apt to sharing.

Carrie: Absolutely, another really nice structure. You can see how you can get quite creative and playful in a serious way. So by asking everybody to critique your idea in turn, you’re also saying it’s really important that we critique ideas, and it’s absolutely normal and expected to do that. So you can use these structures to model what you want people to do more organically in the rest of the meeting.

Rachel: So we’ve talked a lot about sort of getting some structures so that everybody can talk so that they’re not feeling criticised, so they will speak up. What else did you find in your research really, really makes a difference to how effective meetings are and how people feel about meetings and the organisation in which they work?

Carrie: So there are lots of things we can say to help meetings progress, rather than just saying, “Shall we stick to the agenda? Let’s get back to the agenda.” So assuming we’ve written a really good session plan, which might include what the purpose is, what we’re trying to get out of it, a couple of questions, the meeting needs to answer a list of any decisions that need to be made, plus a bit of expectation around what you want people to do.

“So it will be most helpful if everybody comes ready to . . .” “It will be really helpful if you are happy to speak frankly about your experiences of . . .” So assuming you’ve got that in place, you’ve then got a platform from which you can return. So you can say “Okay, the questions we were asking ourself in this meeting are A, B and C. Where are we at with those questions? Or the decisions that we said we’d make these two decisions, where have we got to? Have we got enough information?”

You can start to gather. What often happens is it’s not as simple as that. So it’s not like, “Oh, yes, we have made that decision. Great. So let’s write that down.” Normally, there are some things we agree on, some things we don’t. We don’t feel like we really got to the bottom of it. There’s some people we haven’t really heard from. So a nice way to handle that is to do around. So we need to make this decision.

Could you summarise where you’ve got to, so whether you need a bit more information, or whether you’re leaning one way or the other. You can gather the threads in other ways, so you can start to collate verbally, or you can write it down, but you can even just verbally collate what’s happened so far. So you might say, “Okay, these are the things I think we’re clear on, and these are the things I think we haven’t yet got clarity on.”

That will stimulate people to say, “Oh, actually, I think we are clear on that.” “Brilliant. Let’s add that to the we’re clear on sides.” So you’re prompting people to then take the next step towards your purpose. You can gather some other threads as well. You could say, “Okay, so I think this is what we know, so far, but it’s clear that what we don’t know is a, b, and c thing. And you’re just stimulating people to say, “Oh, well, I could find that out by . . .” or “do we really need to know that? No. Okay.”

You might say these, it sounds like these are things we agree on, and these are things we don’t yet agree on. Well, these are the things we’ve done so far. These are the things still to do. So you’re kind of verbally organising the material that’s been shared in the meeting so far, very, very simple, easy, neutral way to do it. You can also ask a question. So you can say, “We have x minutes remaining, or we’re halfway through. Given what we’ve achieved so far, what is the best possible use of our time if we want to get to zed, by the end of this session?”

So you pose it back to the group. You can also make suggestions, and these are things you can do whether or not you’re leading the meeting. You can make suggestions. Would it help if we went around individually, and just got a very quick three word indication from people on where they sit on this or what they think we should do next? So those are some of the things you can do in the meeting to move it forward with authority, but without being authoritarian, without unilaterally making a decision and say, “Well, it sounds like we’ve decided this. So let’s move on.”

Then the last part is about how do we capture what has come out of that meeting. So it might be that you produce quite a lot of documentation at the moment, or it might be that the problem is you don’t produce any documentation at all, and no one’s no one’s very clear. I tend to find people either have way too much and it’s too formal, and no one reads it, or there’s not enough, and everybody leaves with a different idea.

By the time you get to the next meeting, well, no one’s got a clue. I like to do something in between. So my research points to using a shared canvas, so a shared document, whether that’s on screen, on a flip chart, a Google Doc or even a document that you’re writing on, but in a big enough pen and in a big enough writing that other people around the table can see. Nothing needs to be high tech here.

What you’re doing is saying we’re not only taking our own individual notes, we are trying to produce a piece of work together that we’ve agreed. What I would put on that are four categories. So I do have a format, a template for this, which I’ll give you a link to, if that’s helpful. But you can just draw it yourself. So take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, draw a line across the middle, four quadrants, what have we decided, so what decisions have been made today.

That’s often a thing that we don’t put into our documentation. We say what we talked about. We say what the actions are, but we don’t say what were the decisions. Actually, it’s really useful for other people who weren’t in the meeting to see what those decisions were. If you’re anything like me, you forget that you decided something. So it is a really simple, helpful thing to capture. What next, so that’s a bit more than actions which can be very tactical. But what needs to happen next, and who is responsible for that?

Next quadrant, who do we need to communicate this with, so who do we need to share this document with, who do we need to tell or involve in those decisions that we’ve made. The final quadrant is a car park, so what came up that it’s for another meeting. It’s important, but it’s not for it wasn’t for today.

Running a car park is a really useful discipline because it allows you to say to people in a meeting, “That sounds really important. Today is about X, so let’s put it in the carpark,” without that being something where you’re just trying to get people to shut up about something they’re talking about. If you genuinely use your car park and unpark the cars and get them back on the road again in the next meeting, then people will be happy to put it in the car park because they know it will be well treated, and it will come back out again.

Those will be the simplest, most annoyingly logical and obvious things that don’t take any more time, that don’t need any more money, that don’t need any technology, but that my research show make a really fundamental impact to people’s clarity, their commitment and the level of action they take afterwards.

Rachel: Well, you’re right. It’s really fundamental, really simple, but we just don’t do it. You’re absolutely right. We just don’t do it, and I think even if everyone next some other meeting just did that four quadrant thing. I think it would be really, really powerful. The other thing I’ve got in my head, Carrie, is that in healthcare, we often got very difficult meetings, because they’re very time limited, even though you probably need a three hour meeting to discuss some of these issues.

You’ve got an hour, and then maybe people turn up half an hour late because they’ve got their surgeries going on, etcetera, etcetera. We try and fit so much stuff in. Like, there’s all this information. No one’s ever read it beforehand, then there’s like 10 different decisions that needs to be made. We might even try and force a palliative care or vulnerable adults meeting that you’ve got to do every month to review your list in there as well, and you get other people coming in.

What’s your advice around managing that sort of smorgasbord of “Oh, my gosh, we got to do everything in this partnership, meeting all this whole practice meeting that we have once a month, and we just never gonna get to it”?

Carrie: So I think break it into chunks and use the time limits as a creative constraint. So if we need to make these decisions, what structure can we use to speed that up? So can we make the way we share the information about it more precise and concise? So that doesn’t take 10 minutes. Can we put a little structure around how we discuss it so quickly listing out the pros and the cons, or the decision making criteria, or whatever it is?

Can we get smarter about that? Then can we use some kind of doc voting technique or something to kind of speed up that decision making process? The other thing you can do is use a third party timer, so put the stopwatch on your phone and some kind of fun that ring at the end of it. So rather than you as the facilitator constantly saying, “Oh, we’ve got two minutes left or three minutes left.”

Actually, the phone beeps when the time’s up. When the phone beeps, okay, at this point, now we need to make a decision, or say we don’t have enough information, we need to come back to it. Then finally, break up the chunk. So if you’re asking people to context switch a lot, so from some decision making, which is about how the clinic is run, or something to do with the practice strategy, I don’t know, these really big meaty issues and then to flip across into something that’s very clinical, discussing a patient caseload or something.

Then give people a five minute break, or do something in that five minutes that allows people to have a bit of a reset, and then bring them back into the new phase almost as if it’s a new meeting, that kind of frame people up for that next phase, so it feels different. Those are the kinds of things you might consider.

Rachel: That’s really interesting. I have heard that about time as a creative constraint before. You’re right, you actually focus more, don’t you think. You’ve got five minutes to talk about decision as opposed to five hours, and you really focus on the important bits about it? So you one thing that strikes me is we, I think in healthcare, often spend a lot of time giving information out in meetings, which is actually really boring and doesn’t need to be done in the meeting.

But I think people do it because they think well, if I don’t do it in the meeting, I can’t guarantee that people are going to read it or get this information. I do know one department that during COVID actually released a podcast to keep everybody updated. Now, that sounds dreadfully difficult. Oh gosh, we have to record a podcast but literally it is as simple as recording a voice note into your phone and then sending that around, and then people can just listen to it on their way home. etc, etc.

But how would you suggest people share information in ways that people will engage with and listen to but not necessarily in the meeting? Or am I asking an almost impossible question?

Carrie: No, it’s a great question. So the first thing is to give people choices. So some people will lap up a podcast that will perfectly suit them as they drive back from the school run or something like that. Other people will skim a well signposted newsletter, so an email, and to give people a few different options, other people like group type chat. I mean, the simplest form of a podcast is, as you say, a voice note in a WhatsApp group.

For a lot of people, recording a voice note is a way to convey something that’s hard to put into an email without writing a lot of words to get tone across. I think another thing that’s helpful is some kind of written format that’s in a similar structure every week or every month, whatever it is, so you get good at picking up the data from that. So that could be an email with four really, really clear sections with great headers.

Without getting too much into the detail of an internal comms and copywriting technique, headings are what we use to scan. It’s how we read something without reading it. So when I see something at the top of an employee communication that says November newsletter, I want to weep into my porridge, because I feel like that’s the only bit they’re going to read, some people, and that’s your prime real estate, so put your key messages into that.

For some people, those key messages will be the things that make them read further. So providing very bite sized content, which is what I would call scannable, so lots of subheadings. You could just read those subheadings, and you’ve essentially got the message, plus a call to action, a link or something at the end. That’s what our brains are wired to receive. The thing about communication at work is the bar is set by communication outside of work.

So part of the reason that many people are frustrated, patients and clinicians with NHS systems is the gap is so wide between what we used to find car insurance quotes or what we used to do our online shop or, and so on. So actually, you can get brilliant if you just look at the things that you receive yourself that really work, and then apply some of those principles or even do a version of that, because our brains are already geared up to understand those formats.

So you can borrow some of those formats and use them internally, and people will get the sort of semiotics of it. They know what that means just by looking at the shape of it.

Rachel: That’s absolutely brilliant advice. Carrie, I’m just thinking, actually, I’m gonna have to get you back to talk about communication in the workplace, because it really goes with the meeting, so that goes hand in hand with all of that, doesn’t it?

Carrie: So I think one thing that might be helpful to say is meetings are part of an ecosystem of how we communicate and get things done at work. They’re not standalone events. They knit together with email, conversations, everything on our online systems, all the different ways that we communicate, and that’s partly why sometimes people find meetings frustrating is because there’s repetition.

So consider meetings as part of this whole web of communication and use them for what they’re really good for, which is humans talking about uncertainty and using judgement together.

Rachel: I love that. We’re going to have to finish but before we go, what would be your three top tips for running really good meetings at work?

Carrie: Say firstly, set people up with the right expectations, make a social contract, whatever that looks like in your practice or your clinical or your hospital, so that when people arrive, they’re already clear. Their defences are down, and they are ready to participate. That’s one. Two, get people to contribute as early and as equally as possible, probably with around, set the tone for the rest of the meeting.

Then three, capture the outcomes on that shared canvas with four quadrants, decided, next, who should we communicate this with and car park.

Rachel: Brilliant. You’re gonna share with us the link so people can get that canvas if they want to.

Carrie: So it’s fewerfasterbolder.com/resources, and there you’ll find a meeting invitation templates and the capture canvas. You don’t need to sign in, provide your email address. You just hit download and off you go.

Rachel: That is fantastic, Carrie. That has been so interesting. I’ve been furiously scribbling notes, because we’re going to revolutionise the way we do meetings in my organisation as well. I’m going to commit to that now, because I can see everything that you’ve been saying just makes absolute perfect sense. I’ve been thinking, so my day is spent in MDTs and vulnerable patient meetings where we didn’t get as much done and then we didn’t get on to other things that we needed to do and all these things.

It’s so, so important. I know, Carrie, you provide sort of consultancy. You have courses about how to run better meetings. If people want to find out about that, how can they do that?

Carrie: So the best way is on the website, so fewerfasterbolder.com. You can register for the e-course. You could join a cohort of pioneers, so people who are trying to change meetings across whole organisation. The other place is to follow me on LinkedIn where I post not quite every day, but most days, something that is insightful, helpful, practical, around facilitating group work, running meetings, changing meeting culture, so some food for thought and some annoyingly obvious practical things as well.

Rachel: Fantastic. So we’ll put all those links in the show notes that. Carrie, thank you so much for being with us today. Will you come back again at some point?

Carrie: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.

Rachel: Thank you. Bye bye.

Carrie: Bye.

Rachel: Before we go, just to let you know that Carrie is offering all You are Not a Frog listeners 25% off the FewerFasterBolder meeting leaders e-course price. This course is three hours of powerful and actionable learning, plus templates, scripts, and a playbook of meeting tools to draw from. You’ll learn the psychology of meetings and how to use it so that every meeting you lead is much more valuable in less time. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

Thanks for listening. Don’t forget, we provide a self coaching CPD workbook for every episode. You can sign up for it via the link in the show notes. If this episode was helpful, then please share it with a friend. Get in touch with any comments or suggestions at hello@youarenotafrog.com. I love to hear from you. Finally, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please rate it and leave a review wherever you’re listening. It really helps. Bye for now.

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