In these next few posts as we enter 2025, I want to share career-changing (maybe even life-changing) skills. I say life-changing because being good at these things can eliminate a whole lot of unnecessary pain and suffering. You will be a happier, more productive, and less stressed human being if you master:

1. How to have the best (and fewest) meetings of your life

2. How to make feedback easy and impactful

3. How to excel with data

4. How to think more creatively

5. How to Sell Yourself & Your Ideas

(that last one is a course I’m teaching on Maven.)

More to come, but that is the roadmap ahead of us for the time being.

How to have the best meetings of your life

In the US alone, we waste about $37 billion a year on ineffective meetings. I personally believe that this number is misleading. The true cost of bad meetings is probably 10X this, maybe more, based on the fact that even “effective” meetings so often lead to strategies, decisions, and action that falls woefully short of what could have been.

In terms of raw value, there are very few things more important than being great at meetings. It’s shockingly common for people to underestimate the true cost of bad meetings, and in doing so, they sacrifice so much potential while opening the door to so much waste and error.

The simple truth is this: if your team is not great at meetings, you won’t operate anywhere near your full potential. You will move slowly, make poorer decisions, and make more preventable mistakes. People on your team will dislike each other more, people will be hesitant to speak up and share critical information, and when they do, they’ll be shot down and berated. And after suffering inefficient, unintelligent, or needlessly-hostile meetings, people will become frustrated, leading to ambivalence, disengagement, and turnover.

This isn’t some overly-dramatic depiction of meetings. This is raw, observable reality that you probably live every day.

How people cannot see that bad vs. good meetings change the entire game is beyond me. People treat meetings as if they are some casual necessity and basic habit of the business operation that by-default goes well enough. Huh? How is that opinion even remotely viable? What evidence is there that meetings are of middling importance or that they by-default go well? None whatsoever.

Meetings are the platform for nearly all critical discussion and decision making, and they are actually highly-unlikely to be efficient, intelligent, aligned, cooperative, or actionable. They are something to take very seriously and be highly-skilled at, and anyone can learn to be a world class facilitator and contributor in meetings.

Yet sadly, most teams are terrible at meetings; “terrible” being a fair term because most meetings could easily be ¼ the length and 5x the value, including the meetings people felt were okay or “effective.”

A company practically only has to be good at two things if they want to be a high-performance company: good managers and good meetings. But the statistics show that most companies are actually very bad at both of the most important parts of the whole business, forcing them to fight big headwinds for every inch of progress.

Meetings (and meeting equivalents like robust slack discussions and email threads where ideas and decisions are happening) are the actual medium of a business. This post is going to give you everything you need (both to understand and to do) to go from wherever you are to world class at a skillset that will transform your performance.

Our Agenda

1. Define “meetings” - this might seem dumb, but let’s make sure we are on the same page about the scope of this topic

2. The 9 different types of meetings you have all the time

3. “We have too many meetings” is a wrong, useless, and counterproductive take

4. The Scale of Meeting Skill: Learn the 10 point scale for meeting attendees

5. The step-by-step process for the best meetings

   1. What to do before the meeting

   2. How to open best

   3. How to facilitate best

   4. How to end a meeting best

6. Advanced skills (next post)

   1. Understanding and managing conflict

   2. Pushing and challenging people’s thinking

   3. Using culture as your bodyguard

   4. When to have a big meeting so you can have fewer small meetings

7. Time Design - How to get 20% of every week back (next post)

This is a very valuable post. It’s only for paid subscribers.

Defining “meetings”

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to use the word “meetings” to represent all group dynamics that involve sharing and reacting to ideas, aligning, or making decisions. While most meetings occur within rooms and Zooms, it is very useful for you to remember that email threads, slack discussions, text messages, and even casual discussions can (and should) be seen as meetings because the exact same skills that make meetings go well apply to making these other interactions go well, too.

You are going to be building a very potent set of skills as you learn everything below, so it’s in your own best interest to deploy these skills more broadly than just conference rooms and virtual meetings. These skills will make you a better moderator if you are running (or have to take over) a group dynamic, and they will make you a more effective and appreciated participant, so your ideas get through and your presence carries a more appropriate level of gravitas.

Outside of the typical “meetings,” simply ask yourself: “Am I a part of a group discussion, a proposal of ideas, an effort to align, or a decision right now?”

If the answer is yes, even if you’re just looking at an email or slack/teams channel, you are in a meeting.

Types of Meetings

While there is a seemingly-infinite list of meeting types and topics, the overwhelming majority of meetings will have one (or a few) of the following objectives.

1. Experience and Share Vision

2. Pitch Something

3. Build an Effective Strategy or Plan

4. Design Something (Well)

5. Get in Sync, Ensure Awareness and Alignment

6. Share Feedback, Findings, or Issues

7. React to Something Pragmatically

8. React to Something Creatively

9. Boost Confidence and Morale

Here is a PDF explaining how to do each of these things well:

Almost everything you do is built of these ingredients. The “flow” of a meeting is simply what we feel as the style and objective shifts throughout a meeting.

• A 1:1? That’s probably 5 + 6, maybe with a little 7-9 added

• A leadership offsite? 1 + 2 + 3 + 6 + 5

• A project management status meeting? 5 + 7

• An analytics or data science presentation? 6 + 2 + 7 + 8

• A product design workshop? 1 + 4

• A town hall meeting? 1 + 5 + 9

Each of these 9 topics and objectives requires an entirely different skillset. In my experience, people might be good at a few of these things. But most people misapply skills, using the approach for one topic on another. This is probably most common when people apply the skill of pragmatic reactions to creative endeavors like vision, strategy, or design.

Since many meetings cover multiple topics, people have to understand when and how to switch gears, creating chapters in the meeting where new rules apply. While this might feel complex at the surface, it’s actually extremely simple to manage in real life, and we’ll talk about how later in this post.

Too Many Meetings…

Many people hold the very popular belief that we should have fewer meetings.

I want to show you why this is a dangerous belief to hold, and an even more dangerous belief to spread.

Holding and spreading this belief completely misses the actual problem your team needs to solve, and it might even cause the problem to worsen: when it comes to meetings, you NEVER have a quantity problem. You only have a quality problem. Your quantity problem is a symptom of your quality problem.

We will not become a better team or company if we simply eliminate meetings. We will only become a better team if we have great meetings. And one of the best benefits of having great meetings? We won’t need very many of them.

Famously, Shopify deleted every meeting on people’s calendars in 2023. The theory of this scorched earth approach goes like this: if a meeting is actually important and necessary, it’ll get added back. If it isn’t a critical meeting, we just gave everyone that time back.

But there’s a problem with this theory if you are tempted to copy it. You need to know why everyone who tries this approach has to keep re-doing this exercise.

The trouble with napalming the calendar is that it doesn’t fix the root quality issues that lead to so many meetings in the first place. It’s treating the symptom instead of the disease.

Let’s follow the logic here: if meetings are important, the meetings will return.

Yes.

But does a meeting being important imply in any way that the meeting is effective? Well-run? Insightful? Actionable? Cooperative? Smart?

No.

In fact, it usually means the exact opposite.

As the importance of something rises, it actually isn’t the norm for humans to get better at that something. It’s actually the norm for groups of humans to do worse as the importance, complexity, urgency, and stress of things rises. Humans do the easy stuff well. But when stuff gets harder, we get misaligned, frustrated, and expedient. Our different incentives and priorities reveal themselves. Our differing knowledge and expertise reveals itself. Our ability to react well to things, to show tact, to be vulnerable, or to solve problems well instead of quickly is tested.

So those most important meetings that come back first? It’s likely (virtually guaranteed) that these are actually the hardest meetings to do well. It’s likely that these are the least-effective, least well-run, least insightful, least actionable, least cooperative and least intelligent meetings.

And what happens when we have important but ineffective meetings? We immediately start scheduling more follow up meetings to deal with the debris. And not just follow up meetings with the same group as the first meeting, but an explosion of 1:1s, smaller groups, and a whole fractal of secondary interactions to address the intellectual and emotional fallout of the important meeting gone wrong.

Bad meetings make more meetings.

Eliminating meetings is not the answer.

If someone wants to eliminate meetings, it’s understandable why they feel this way. But they are wrong. It is probably a complete waste of energy, it is a morale killer as people’s platforms for clarity get indiscriminately questioned or demolished, and it doesn’t even work.

Participant Intent and Skill

So let’s get focused on quality, instead. But this is another place where people are putting their energy in the wrong place.

If I guessed how many meetings I’ve been in, I’d say it’s somewhere between 25-35,000, conservatively. That’s 20+ years of watching human chemistry unfold around almost every conceivable topic ranging from vision to strategy to project management to budgets to feedback and reviews to reviewing mistakes, learning, and fixing the things we got wrong. We’ve designed products, gotten into the technical weeds, and reviewed sales materials. I’ve been in meetings about buying and selling companies, about fixing employee morale and relationship issues, about who should run a key project or business unit, and on and on.

And I’m guessing you’ve seen a lot of the same.

At first, it seems like the structure of meetings is the problem when things go wrong. We need things like agendas, time/flow management, and better preparation. But eventually, everyone realizes that the real issue is the intent and skill of participants themselves. The best meetings don’t go well because of structure. They go well because participants have good intentions and high skill, able to thrive even when there isn’t structure. And many meetings go poorly despite their structure, simply because attendees come with weird intentions, nonexistent self awareness, and low skill. This creates a clear spectrum of participant ability that we can see in plain sight every day.

Some participants are totally unskilled. This is clear when people turn everything into tension and dysfunction, cause topics to come off the tracks, and are personally responsible for why a meeting is inefficient and ineffective.

Other participants are masterful, where they have both the diplomacy and the brilliance to tackle even the most sensitive topics, get conflict back on a productive path, and cause difficult discussions to go better than we could have imagined walking in the door.

So I want to propose that you start your great meeting journey by truly digesting the following 10-point scale of participant intent and ability, and start to realize that structure and preparation shouldn't have to do all the work to overcome what is fundamentally an issue with participants.

Here are the 10 levels of participant intent and skill:

1. Hostile / Homewrecker - Takes everything and reacts with friction, difficulty, disrespect, and lack of values or integrity.

2. Friction-creator - Has a generally-negative disposition that things won’t work, takes a self or team-centric rather than company-centric stance on topics, is cynical, creates counterpoints and then later abandons them when they lack substance, lacks basic diplomacy and respect, and pushes back on things that have to happen either way, spending 50 instead of 5 minutes agreeing to a go-forward plan.

3. Weak - Reflects poor alignment or Dunning-Kruger competence issues, reveals some self-centeredness or myopia, struggles to contribute productively to move discussions forward, unable to get into details, or pushes for outcomes without having sufficient competence, appreciation, or openness to inputs.

4. Below-average - Creates slight friction or shows lack of preparation, aloofness, situational awareness gaps, or alignment issues. Commonly loses focus while checking email and phone in meetings, rationalizing they are multitasking while they are actually continuing their aloofness cycle by not focusing well enough on anything.

5. Average - Gets functional results in a generally-cooperative setting, often focused more on participants’ comfort than the topic and efficacy of the meeting. Tends to use a lot of words to say simple things, wrapping things in extraordinary diplomacy and storytelling to maintain peace and optics, and creates platforms for others to do the same, meaning most meetings have < 10% information density. Not a terrible thing, but highly-inefficient when done over the course of 20+ hours of meetings per week, reducing functional professional efficiency by > 50%.

6. Above-average - Organized and efficient meeting facilitator, but lacks the ability to push themselves or other attendees toward thinking intellectually, strategically, or creatively. Uncomfortable pushing for higher standards of conduct or intellect when behavior or dialogue could be much better. They know it is important to set a higher standard, but due to a lack of confidence and cultural permission, they sacrifice to maintain the peace, leaving potential on the table.

7. Strong - Starts to bring out the best in people, push thinking, and drive smarter dialogue and decisions. Has both the competence and confidence to navigate topics at both the high level and details, ensuring meetings, ideas, and decisions are never naive, resulting in vastly superior strategies, fewer mistakes, and better readiness for the real world execution challenges ahead.

8. Exceptional - Creates and upholds clear standards for highly-intelligent and cooperative dialogue that leads to smart, logical, future-thinking, resilient decisions and outcomes. Does not allow heuristics, shortcuts, Dunning-Kruger, or any common team dynamic issues (Overton Window, Abilene Paradox) to interfere with quality thinking and decisions.

9. Elite - Drives both efficient and eye-opening dialogue that spurs taste, breakthroughs, opens strategic paths, and uncovers ways to save extraordinary amounts of time, money, or other resources. Elite at problem solving and problem avoidance. Handles complexity by heading right into it and dismantling it.

10. Meeting Mastery - Demonstrates total mastery of both facilitation and contribution resulting in startlingly-brilliant dialogue and decisions. The degree of brilliance can create a feeling of imposter syndrome and questioning belonging in other participants, especially those who are newer to the team and have not seen these types of dynamics before. Transformative to how people see meetings and group dynamics as a setting for genius instead of a setting for painful compromise.

There is not one single thing I just typed that is hypothetical or theoretical. I can name at least 5 examples of real people at each level. If you’ve never seen 7+ before, it’s because you have only worked in companies that suck at meetings with people who suck at meetings. If one of your competitors has a bunch of 7-10s and you have a bunch of 3-6s in meetings, you are in big trouble.

So, here’s the question you and your team need to wrestle with: On this 10-point scale, what would you say is the skill level of most people in most of the meetings you’re in?

For most people and teams, it’s going to be around 3.

Out of the 25,000+ meetings I’ve been in, the overwhelming majority of people in those meetings are levels 1-4. Increasingly, I see more level-5 and level 6 people these days as companies try to be “nicer,” which is good, but not good enough.

But seeing a 7? That’s probably less than 1 in 50 people.

An 8? 1 in 200.

A 9? 1 in 1,000.

A 10? I can count using my fingers.

Anyone can be at least a 7 in every meeting. And I think everyone can be an 8 if they put effort into it. But most people are a 3.

No amount of structure or preparation is going to fix a meeting full of level-3 participants. People need the intent and skillset to set a high standard for the quality of thinking and decision making happening in meetings, and that’s going to require that we overcome deep biological instincts that are getting in the way. The real reason people suck at meetings.

Let’s talk about that next.

Our brains were not designed for good meetings

I believe anyone is a lot better off once they understand the scientific explanation of our struggles in the business world. That’s why I started this newsletter (and CORE) in the first place. Without this clarity, we keep asking for outcomes without understanding the real biological reasons we face problems in the first place.

So let’s understand and appreciate that meetings are predestined to be difficult because of how our brains work.

The “nominal” brain (meaning a brain with all of the normal parts, working in proportion) is going to be bad at most meetings, especially the important and complex ones. This is because the nominal brain is actually programmed with the core objective of energy conservation and personal safety, not fast-paced, context-switching brilliance.

200,000+ years ago, not a single human had the type of day you have every day. Most humans made fewer decisions in a year than you make in a morning. As we became more sophisticated and society became more complex, we had a lot more to keep track of, but the world operated at human pace. But as we get to today’s business world, we have so much to keep track of and such a superhuman pace of consuming and acting on information that we actually have two biological issues that act as real limiters:

First, the brain still wants to conserve energy and prioritize personal safety. It doesn’t want to think hard or take risk. It wants to take mental shortcuts, it wants to use memory to just do the thing we did (that worked) last time. It wants status quo instead of change, because change is harder to think about and riskier to do. It doesn’t want to think about consequences and how today’s decisions will feel tomorrow, because that uses tons of mental energy. Most brains do not like to think (check out this alarming research), and that is at odds with what we need brains to do all day.

Second, the brain has a very real set of limitations about working memory and complexity before it starts to struggle to keep track of things. Most brains can only keep 7 ideas in mind at once. But a lot of business decisions might need us to consider 9, 15, or 100 things at once. This means that, in a very real way, many decisions physically exceed the brain’s capacity. This is why people rationalize a guess and check approach of bias to action, etc. It’s because their brain is lost in the puzzle today, so it feels like the only viable approach is to give things a shot and see how it goes.

Great meetings require people to understand and overcome these two biological issues. They require people to accept that the best dialogue and outcome is not going to feel good or at all natural to their brain. The best outcome will actually require them to push themselves past comfort zones so we can activate truly-intelligent, high-energy thinking, logic, creativity, and intellect instead of always using the low-energy tools of memory and safety, best practices, status quo, looking up solutions, etc.

The smartest teams therefore are makers. They literally invent solutions in their meetings. They might use best practices and references as inspiration, but they always make something. It’s like a custom suit, cut and sewn to fit perfectly.

The rest of teams are copiers. Rather than inventing and making, they look answers up and copy them. They look up what they did in the past and copy it. Or they look up what other teams like them did and they copy it. This is the low-energy, comfortable brain approach to work, and it’s why these teams perform at a significantly lower level.

If you want to have the best meetings of your life, you have to have level 7+ participants. That can only happen if these participants force their brains into making mode instead of copying mode, enthusiastically experiencing the discomfort of deeper thinking, pushing their brains, using logic and creativity to imagine, analyze, deduce, and predict.

A good mental workout is going to hurt. Embrace the suck. Embrace it together. Help each other pull through it as a team. Start to see how great meetings make you feel like a group of professional athletes, pushing yourselves to be at your best. It’s worth it.

Opening, Sustaining, Ending

A meeting, similar to a great piece of music, does three things well: it opens well, it keeps things going and evolving throughout, and it ends well. Meetings are the same. A bad opening creates a bad meeting. A bad middle creates a bad meeting. And a bad ending creates a bad meeting.

And don’t forget the stakes: bad meetings create more meetings. And they’ll probably be more bad ones.

How to open meetings well

An orchestra gives us a good template for how meetings open well.

Have you ever watched what orchestras do before they start playing? They tune their instruments and warm up their fingers and arms. First, they prepare themselves and tune their instruments individually. Then, they play a single note together, ensuring that their instruments are all tuned to each other, too.

What would happen if an orchestra just walked in the room, pulled their instruments out of their cases, and started playing music? It would sound like total shit. Even the slightest difference in tuning between any two instruments would be instantly obvious, turning symphony into dissonance. A single person whose fingers were stiff or shaky could be heard making mistakes.

I won’t belabor the metaphor because it’s probably painfully obvious that this is exactly what you see happening in meetings. People enter cold with their instruments in whatever state they are in and jump right into the music. It isn’t symphony. It’s dissonance.

A team will never have good meetings while it naively insists that an orchestra should enter the room ready to roll. That just isn’t how the human mind works, and that just isn’t feasible among a group of people who were just minutes ago focused on a totally different topic, engaged in totally different work. Minds carry inertia. It’s just a fact.

So we have to do something when meetings begin to interrupt the default inertia of each mind and get the orchestra ready to play something great.

The technical term for getting a mind into the best state for what it’s about to do is called priming. Once you understand priming, you will never look at meetings the same way again.

Priming is simply exposing the mind to ideas that affect how it will approach subsequent ideas.

For example, if I open a meeting about how we can improve customer retention, I can prime minds by saying:

• We need to improve customer retention, but we have to do it with zero budget.

• Pretend money is no object…what would you do to improve customer retention?

• Our most important segment right now is customers who like our products for fashion, not function. It’s okay if we lose some of our pros while retaining our fashion segment.

Those three versions of the same meeting will go very differently. That’s how priming works.

You can use priming about anything, including budget, timing, sacred cows, importance, level of decision intelligence, necessary teaming dynamics, level of participant intent and skill, etc.

Since so many people lack awareness of how their mind works, priming often looks like it creates subconscious “forces,” almost like it’s magic. But it isn’t magic…it’s just showing people how to tune their instruments to the same frequency and prepare their minds for the style so the music sounds a lot better.

Priming can be thorough and arduous like at Amazon (where the first 30 minutes are about reading a brief), or it can be really quick and simple. You’ll want to do some priming within the calendar invitation (think of a very good title and fill in the body with the meeting type and answers to the 4 questions below). And then you’ll want to re-do that priming in the first 3-10 minutes of the meeting. It can be done quickly and it makes a world of difference.

Here are the things you want to be sure you cover while people are tuning their instruments.

1. Why we are here - why this topic and why now

2. What success looks like

3. Basic principles and predictions about how the meeting might go

4. Any rules or structure you’ll want to use

Does that list seem obvious? Priming often involves saying things that we believe are obvious. But when we skip even obvious things, the instruments and the musicians are infinitely more likely to make garbage.

Why we are here and why now probably doesn’t need an explanation.

What success looks like might not either, but be sure that you reference the 9 meeting types to define success for the meeting phases and the meeting overall…success in design is NOT reacting pragmatically. Success in vision is NOT sharing findings. Make sure you truly understand the definition of success (using the PDF to help you) for the type of meeting you are having, and don’t let someone get this mixed up.

When thinking of basic principles and predictions, think of the mindset and interpersonal dynamics people will need to succeed (open mindedness, Yes-And, compassion toward the customer instead of fanatical ROI focus, etc.). Think about who is in the room and their habits so you can propose principles that counterbalance their instincts. Think about the assumptions and inertia people hold around things like cost, having tried things in the past, etc. Use your full intellect to think about how things will probably go wrong, and come up with the principles that counteract those issues. This will become very natural within a few weeks. You’re more perceptive about this stuff than you might realize.

And when thinking about rules and structure (we’ll talk about this next), think about any worksheets, procedures, scoring methodologies, or strict dos & don’ts you want to impose on the meeting.

The opposite of priming is hoping. Hoping that people know why they are there. Hoping that people understand the basic principles and rules of engagement. Hoping that people’s known habits and instincts will magically vanish in this meeting. Hoping that people will be self aware. Hoping that someone who is consistently a level 3 contributor will show up as an 8.

Hoping is absurd. Hoping is a fool’s strategy. Stop it. And don’t let anyone else hope their way into meetings.

Never, ever skip priming.

How to have the middle of a meeting

The middle of a discussion is where you’re going to see differences in perspectives and personalities start to show up. It’s where you’re going to see your priming start to get challenged as people forget why we are here, what success looks like, and the principles we should be operating on. The middle of the meeting is about platforms, not priming.

Platforms are basically what give us the permission to point at something wrong and feel entirely empowered to fix it. Everything you say during priming (like let’s be open minded) is also a platform during the middle of the meeting:

“We already agreed at the beginning that we are going to be open minded, so let’s not go down this road and let’s try that again with a more open minded approach.”

The same can be true of meeting type. When this is a meeting to gather feedback and insights, you have the permission and platform to remind people that we must actually accept and digest the feedback, not dismiss it or ignore it.

We need platforms because the human brain is highly-likely to see things from a personal perspective and revert to that perspective when the going gets rough. This means that seeing things from another’s perspective or a more objective and neutral perspective is actually very difficult for a lot of people. People have personal reactions to objective truths, and those personal reactions are a misfire that cause us to lose our objective view.

One of the easiest ways to overcome this issue is to employ some structure like a decision making or discussion framework.

Consider buying and using something like Workshop Tactics. This simple system gives you a bunch of options for how to approach even the most complex topics using a structured, step-by-step approach that causes people to be more objective and creates platforms for uncomfortable discussion, admissions, vulnerability, and appreciating perspectives other than our own:

But remember this: frameworks are a crutch, and they are never used by the best teams. Your goal in using them should be for them to become obsolete, not for them to become habits or stay crutches.

This post isn’t about using crutches to force you to become great at meetings. It’s about how to become authentically great, and these tools are a helpful stepping stone to hop onto, but later to hop beyond.

The middle of the meeting is about facilitating structure, even if it is beyond the capacity of human brains (frameworks and drawn-out stuff on whiteboards and easels can help keep track of things the mind can’t). The middle of the meeting is what causes people to truly understand the problem they are solving, to accept truths and facts, to navigate tricky ideas and assertions, and to prepare their brain’s logical systems for generating conclusions, strategies, and immediate next steps.

How to end meetings well

If you’ve handled the middle of a meeting well, the end is going to be something every brain starts to crave and visualize.

The end of a meeting is when your brain’s logical systems see a path. They see how to achieve that definition of success we started with, using all of the knowledge, ideas, and dot connecting we did in the middle.

Across the various types of meetings, we can experience this feeling in different ways:

• In the town hall, our brain can feel the path to victory

• In the analytics and data science meeting our brain can feel the path to generating a better result

• In the 1:1, our brain can feel a path to becoming unblocked or taking feedback and turning it into new and better habits

• In the design meeting, our brain can feel that what we have designed is something people will love

It is critical to realize that great meetings do not need to force conclusions and next steps. In the best meetings, conclusions and next steps are instead a feeling of clarity that has been achieved, making the next steps obvious instead of forced. If people don’t see the natural path at the end of a meeting, it only means two things:

1. The opening and middle were not good enough

2. They are a level 4 or worse participant

So when you think about having the best meetings of your life, get really focused on this idea that the beginning and middle should make the end feel super obvious to everyone.

This is a perfect place to quickly touch on another popular but wrong idea: bias to action.

No human being or team should have a bias to action. Not ever. Action is simply the wrong word. Action is indiscriminate, and a bias toward it will encourage people to attempt the most idiotic ideas and actions imaginable. Instead of an intelligent meeting that makes brains feel that next steps are logical and obvious, a bias to action pushes brains to force next steps and conclusions prematurely.

Remember priming. If you prime a human brain with the idea that we should be pushing toward action, that brain starts to see high-quality thinking and discussion (the middle of the meeting) as the enemy instead of the friend.

A bias to impact is what we are actually looking for. And nowhere does this matter more than when we have meetings. If the people are primed to create real impact, the middle of the meeting will be celebrated, as the brain fully appreciates that the middle is what makes our action effective. If we have an hour to spend improving the effectiveness and impact of our chosen actions, let’s use the hour well and end with a high-impact path forward. If we instead use the hour to argue for action instead of achieve logical clarity, we waste it and emerge with a lower-impact path forward.

It’s truly that simple. The time you have allocated for the middle of a meeting should be used to maximize the likelihood of impact, not to debate that we are overcomplicating things.

A bias to action is something people use to combat having too many meetings, especially if those meetings are about making decisions and we’re starting to overthink a decision, taking weeks to work through what we could have decided quickly.

But remember, the reason we are taking a long time to make a decision is a quality problem, not a quantity problem. We aren’t having too many meetings because we are spending too many hours on the decision. We are having too many meetings because we are spending too little intellect on the decision, approaching the problem poorly instead of brilliantly, and the natural consequence of that approach is elongation of timelines.

I implore you: never again use the phrase bias to action. Instead, change one word and the team’s meeting ability and functional IQ raises by 50 points.

With the idea of impact instead of reckless action in everyone’s mind, you and your team will naturally end the meeting well. There’s nothing particularly special about this list:

1. What is going to happen, and when?

2. Who is going to do it?

3. What is the timeline and approach for follow up, assurance, and measurement?

Too many meetings end with a decision made, but zero real commitment to driving the impact. A real close to a meeting always has a timeline, a who, and a second timeline for when we will reconvene to review progress or results. Without a when or a who, you have not closed the meeting. You are simply going to have another one to discuss why nothing has happened later.

Putting it all together:

So, here is your critical path to have the best meetings of your life:

1. Recognize meeting types. Do not have meetings using the wrong style.

2. Stop saying that you need to have fewer meetings. This is a huge mistake and waste of time. Focus that energy on improving meeting quality, instead.

3. Recognize just how bad contributors might be. Do not try to fix meetings using meeting structure. Educate yourselves on the fact that nobody is a good meeting participant until they are level 7. Create a rigid standard that attendees do not sink below this level.

4. Recognize that the human brain does not default to being good at meetings. Its desire to conserve energy, its desire for safety, its limitations, and its desire to be self-referential are all in the way. Everyone must accept this and forfeit comfort, embracing the “hurts so good” pain of a great, intelligent meeting.

5. Open all meetings with priming. Zero exceptions.

6. Use the crutch of structure and frameworks until it becomes completely natural and intuitive to manage the middle of meetings autonomously. Fully abandon structure and frameworks when you surpass them. Do not become stuck with them.

7. Close meetings by sensing when the logical clarity has reached critical mass and the path forward feels obvious. Try to avoid forcing clarity and paths. This will be hard at first, but your team will develop the feeling of actual impact-centric clarity.

8. Swap bias for action for bias for impact. Never look back. Bias for action is permission to be dumb. Bias for impact is permission to be brilliant.

Advanced Skills and Calendar Design

Next, we’ll dive into advanced skills around conflict management, getting to level 7+ as a participant, how culture helps you have better meetings, how and when to have big meetings so you can have 50% fewer small meetings, and how to design the calendar once you have a set of meeting cadences.

Start to digest where you and your team are strongest and weakest within these 8 critical steps first. I’m here to help.

What questions do you have?