A conversation with Elise Keith, Founder of Lucid Meetings

“The way that your organization and your team meet is either something that can emerge out of habit and grow organically, which may or may not be a good thing, or it’s something that you can design. It…starts by actually looking at what you’re doing and having an honest conversation about whether that’s working for you.” -Elise Keith

Elise Keith is the CEO of Lucid Meetings, a company that leads with innovation to improve the quality of organizations’ meetings. She understands the reality of taking a detailed look at the structure and underlying processes behind organizations’ meetings to identify areas of opportunity for better engagement and exceptional performance. Elise believes successful, everyday meetings are achievable and encourages teams to lead with conversation and tailor-made meeting experiences. According to Elise, the ultimate challenge is for every team member within an organization to initiate the meeting about meetings and watch the benefits of your organization unfold. 

In this episode of Control the Room, Elise and I discuss the layers of rules for “the meeting,” in productive organizations, the impact of creating custom meeting systems through Lucid Meetings, the significance of effective decision-making, and the need for intentional conversations about the meetings that take place in your organization. Listen in to hear how Elise reveals the methods behind productive meeting outcomes and the importance of clarity before, during, and after your next meeting, while allowing everyone to ultimately succeed. 

Show Highlights

[2:47] Lessons Learned While Creating Lucid Meetings
[12:42] Rules of The Meeting & Productive Organizations 
[18:58] The Creation of Elise’s Custom Meeting Systems   
[25:15] Effective Decision-Making in Your Organizations 
[30:46] Elise’s Unique Reading Approach & Final Thoughts 

Elise’s LinkedIn
Lucid Meetings
Decision-Making Process
CODA tool

About the Guest

Elise Keith is the CEO and Founder of Lucid Meetings. The company’s mission is to seek out innovative solutions for teams to meet more effectively and efficiently. For over a decade, Lucid Meetings has created accessible tools and resources for teams to achieve organizational success. Elise is also the author of the highly praised book, “Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization”.  She spent her early career as a technologist and product manager with Higher Logic and remains inspired through her work in research, publication, and project management surrounding meetings today. Elise currently resides in Portland, Oregon with her husband and three children. She leads with curiousity in her mission to create effective meetings for different types of teams and actively listens to people’s meeting stories.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a change agency that helps enterprises sustain innovation and teams work better together with custom-designed meetings and workshops, both in-person and virtual. Our master facilitators offer trusted guidance and custom coaching to companies who want to transform ineffective meetings, reignite stalled projects, and cut through assumptions. Based in Austin, Voltage Control designs and leads public and private workshops that range from small meetings to large conference-style gatherings.

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Full Transcript

Douglas:

Welcome to the Control The Room podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all the service of having a truly magical meeting.

Douglas:

Today, I’m with Elise Keith, founder and CEO at Lucid Meetings, where she helps teams run successful meetings every day. She is also the author of Where the Action is, the Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization. Welcome to the show, Elise.

Elise Keith:

I’m glad to be here, Douglas.

Douglas:

So help listeners understand how you got started.

Elise Keith:

So I began my career in technology and when I started, I worked for a company that built asynchronous collaboration software for international standards organizations. And the organizations that we serve, they do amazing work. It’s not sexy work, but it’s amazingly important work. They bring together people from industry and from government and consumers, and they decide how the world is going to function together. So how wide are the roads going to be, or how much lead is safe to have in our paint? All of these things that are fundamental rules governing commerce and trade.

Elise Keith:

And I found that the way that they made these decisions was in meetings. And so I’m watching these organizations full of people who are literally competitors. So in some ways it’s basically organized collusion at the international level, literally competitors clearly in the room for different reasons, come to agreements within defined periods of time and get the documents signed. And then I would go back to the office and our engineering team would be arguing about how many spaces a tab should have in it and are we going to do Python or are we going to do PHP? And we couldn’t come to agreements in a timely way about anything.

Elise Keith:

I was like, “Okay, what’s going on here because at the office, we’re all on the same team, right? We’re all trying to achieve the same thing, right? And yet we were not as successful and it turned out it was the meetings. It was absolutely when you make it very, very clear how to participate, to get things done while you’re together in the room, people can succeed, and that’s powerful. And so we started our company to help make that possible for more teams more at the time.

Douglas:

And what were the big lessons that you learned once you started to dig deeper into the why and what was going on around the efficacy of these sessions these standards bodies were using, what did you start to learn?

Elise Keith:

It was so fascinating, because when we started the company, we were technologists and we’re like, okay, we’re going to build software that helps more teams be successful and makes it easier for these committees to be successful as they go through organizational change and transition. And so what can you see from the outside that this requires? And when you look at it from the outside its rules and its agendas and its documented minutes, and I was like, “Oh, okay. Well clearly people just need to know that they should have an agenda and then they’ll be successful.” And so we’ve built software that helped make all of that go. And that was great for the committees who in fact did have agendas and structures and rules and whatnot. It helped them save some time and automate some things they were doing otherwise.

Elise Keith:

But we start to attract people who were interested in having that same kind of success, understood that they should use an agenda, but weren’t governed by the same kind of clarity that the international committees were about what the agenda should have in it, about who should run it, about how everybody’s meant to participate. And they would come to us and they would try to use our software and they would completely fail. So we’ve learned through that process that a lot of the things that you will find in the blog posts that you can read a hundred bazillion thousand of, that say, “Hey, for better meetings, do these five things,” were just ever so much trite baloney, because that’s not actually where success comes from.

Douglas:

So what’s the hallmark of the success? I tend to agree that there’s lots of things you can read around, let’s go do these things. And sure, those are behaviors. It’s almost like when you ask a baseball player what they do to hit a home run, they’re like, “I never take my eye off the ball.” And then you put a high-speed camera on and they’re not looking at the ball. So what were these real underpinning behaviors and tactics that were really creating the better meetings?

Elise Keith:

So I think your baseball example is a great example because the distinction, both in the committees that we used to serve, and some of them were definitely better at it than others. And then in the businesses and other organizations we’ve researched since then, the distinction between those who are successful and those who are not is whether they play as a team. So it has to do with, if you think about any sport you’ve ever been part of, you don’t start by playing the game as your first thing. You start by learning the rules of the game, practicing some of the fundamental skills, deciding who is playing which position. And then you enter into the game. Not every play is the same when you play. You have different moves and different strategies that you use at different times as the game progresses. Whereas in the business world, oftentimes they just set people free and they say, “Go off with your team and run a better meeting, and you’ll probably need an agenda.” It’s very much like saying, “Hey, if you want to be successful, physically eat less and work out.” Well, sure. It’s not wrong. It’s not incorrect, but that’s not exactly a plan.

Douglas:

That’s right. It makes me think too, I always hear, “No agenda, no attenda.” But-

Elise Keith:

It drives me crazy.

Douglas:

People don’t know how to make agendas or what should be on it. That’s no place to start.

Elise Keith:

Well, and it’s also not true. A, people who say that will accept calendar invites every day that have no agenda on them-

Douglas:

100%.

Elise Keith:

… because they don’t expect anything else. And B, you can absolutely run a great meeting without an agenda.

Douglas: 

And it’s funny, I think it comes back to a couple of things you just said. You said clarity of an agenda. And I think this notion of clarity of agenda requires clarity in the first place. And in order to have clarity in the first place, we have to understand our purpose.

Elise Keith:

That’s right.

Douglas:

And I agree with you. You can have a great meeting without an agenda, but you cannot have a great meeting without clarity of purpose. And that needs to permeate your attendees as well as who’s facilitating the meeting. That just hit me like a lightning bolt when you were saying clarity of agenda. It’s like, yes, it all starts there.

Elise Keith:

Yeah, absolutely. I think you could have a lovely conversation without clarity, just because you click. We come together and we’re like, “Oh, we’re going to spark and it’ll be awesome.” And people make the mistake of thinking that that translates to larger group settings and it translates to effective business outcomes, and that conversational spark while wonderful is not something that you can then scale once you’ve got more than five people in a room. And it’s not exactly the sort of thing that says, “And we know what the decision is for the spring campaign, who’s doing what and all of the things that we actually… the honest to goodness business stuff we need to get done,” isn’t all about just sparking. So for that you need some actual skills.

Douglas:

No doubt. It reminds me of a BBC report that said most ineffective meetings actually form of therapy. And the thing I always consult with my clients on is look, that’s fine. In fact, we should probably honor that need that people have around connection, but if we don’t honor that purpose and we don’t intentionally create those moments, then they’re going to throw stuff on the calendar to soak up that need. And then now we’re self-medicating and we’re just throwing stuff to the wind. And we’re probably going to walk out disgruntled thinking, “Well, that meeting sucked,” when actually, no, someone threw it on the calendar just to connect.

Elise Keith:

Well, especially if you’ve got that terrible mix of folks where half of them talk to think. “I process out loud and I need an audience to help reflect back what it is that I’m actually thinking,” versus folks who think deeply, quietly on their own to get work done. And you put them together and you can grind to a halt. It’s really challenging.

Elise Keith:

One of the clients I worked with had some really significant challenges around too much wasted time and ineffective meetings and they ended up solving that in a really lovely way, I thought. So they created an organizational ground rule that you needed to come to meetings 10 minutes early, which is pretty extreme. That’s a pretty big arrive early window. And of course not everybody hits it all the time, but they then take that 10 minutes beforehand and they created a second rule, which was to embrace stewardship. So whoever called the meeting is meant to show up early enough to make sure there’s coffee and that there are enough chairs and all of these things are in place.

Elise Keith:

And then in those 10 minutes they greet each other, they say hi, and they watch funny videos on YouTube, or they exchange safety stories or they do whatever it is they need to do. And they’ve found it’s been a a massive sea change because with that small talk stewardship welcome moment at the beginning, they’re able to start on time and get through their business quite quickly. And now their meeting load went down by an average of 40% across the board, which is huge.

Douglas:

There’s probably a unintentional consequence of that too, which is if you’re starting meetings 10 minutes early, that means you can’t have back-to-back meetings anymore.

Elise Keith:

That’s exactly right.

Douglas:

So that buffer time creates some free time.

Elise Keith:

Well, and it also made them so they no longer start meetings at 8:00 AM because they’re like, “Oh, if people are just arriving to work at 8:00 AM, they can’t be 10 minutes early, can they?” So overall they became more efficient in the time that they did meet because it put constraints on how many open slots there were, and more human because they have realistic transition times.

Douglas:

Yeah. I was just interviewing Marcus Carey on the podcast the other week and he has this mantra around connection before content. I think it’s smart and we never really had that mantra, but it was core to everything we did because we acknowledge the fact that not everyone shows up on time, especially in the virtual world. So programming something in, if you’re sitting there just staring at the walls or making some awkward small talk while people are arriving, you’re wasting time. That’s valuable time that could be programmed to do something meaningful. So anyway, I loved that they did that. Even if folks don’t want to do an extreme 10 minute thing, they could totally just think about how you embrace the stewardship. I love that piece.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. It was really lovely. It was really lovely. So I run this program, this meeting called True Transformation Program with clients who looking to overhaul their meetings and they develop new agreements. So like we were talking about before, you are more successful as a team when you know what the rules are. So they formed these agreements about that are going to govern their behavior. And in their case, they took them and they created signs and they put them up in their conference rooms. They were stewardship and come prepared and all of these things, which then became something that greeted clients as they walked in. And they said, “This is what we do in our meetings. We’re glad you’re here. And this is what we will do with your business.”

Douglas:

That’s cool.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. And it just became this sort of permeating way of being in their work. Now, whether it survives like the next several CEOs, we’ll see, but for the moment it’s awesome.

Douglas:

That’s great. I was also thinking similarly about the sports metaphor and the rules of the game, and I think so often there are assumptions that people will understand how to show up at work and there’s basics like you know how to use a calendar and you know how to this and that. But I think there’s a lot that’s A, not thought about, or we’re just assuming that, “Oh, it’s fine and yeah it’s just quite a bit missing.” So what are some examples of rules or you spoke about the stewardship and these kinds of things, but what are some of the rules of the game that people should be considering, or the types of things they should be exploring so that they don’t just assume or default their way into bad encounters?

Elise Keith:

So we run a survey actually with whole companies to see what they currently believe in, what their practices are and whatnot. And you can chart the practices that lead to really great, consistently effective meetings across the company, versus sort of okay, all the way through, on basically a maturity scale. And no matter which level an organization’s performing at, when you do this initial survey, people in leadership positions can all spit back to you the words of things that you think they’re supposed to know. “Now, we’re supposed to start on time. We’re supposed to end on time. We should have a clear purpose for our meetings. We should have outcomes. We should make sure everybody talks. We need to be more diverse.” They can spit back the talking points. And then when you look at what they’re actually doing, very few of them are actually doing those things.

Elise Keith:

So while there are a lot of ground rules or norms or agreements that I like better than others, it really doesn’t matter what I like. What actually matters is that they’re having the conversation out loud amongst themselves, within the company, because while they all maybe individually think they know what to do, they’re not doing it in practice. And they’re not doing it in practice for two reasons. One is that while they think they know what they ought to do, most of them have had no training. So I was talking to a CEO of a fortune 50 company, he’s been in business 30 some years, spends 30 plus hours a week in meetings and has spent exactly one day of his entire career in meeting training. That is entirely all of his job, is running and attending meetings and he’s had one day of training on how to do his job in 30 years.

Elise Keith:

So the thinking you know and actually doing that you know, there’s a big gap there, but the bigger gap is that even if you do know it, it doesn’t feel safe to actually do it in an environment where that’s not the practice.

Douglas:

That psychological safety piece is really critical. And sometimes, gosh, it permeates so many levels because it’s having to buck the system, even though I know and I’ve heard and I’m pretty convinced it’s the right thing to do, it’s much easier to go with the flow and do what everyone else is doing.

Elise Keith:

Absolutely.

Douglas:

And also, let’s take a look at how often junior people are the ones facilitating meetings, and there is a senior vice president in the room, are they really going to tell them we need to put that in the parking lot? Are they going to let them go on about this thing that’s off topic?

Elise Keith:

Yeah. There’s this well-documented phenomenon called the leadership blind spot where if you look at what’s required for people to feel like a meeting’s a good use of their time, it’s that they knew what to expect going to some degree and that they had a chance to participate. So who’s got all those boxes checked? It’s the person in charge. So pretty much every meeting that you set, you’re like, “Yeah, that was pretty awesome. Wasn’t it? Woo-hoo.” So the people who are in the position to make the change don’t perceive the need for change in the same way that everybody else does.

Elise Keith:

But that thing where I have worked with senior leaders and they’re like, “Okay, I know I need to cancel some meetings on my calendar, but how do I pick who to dis-invite without making them feel bad? How do I politely decline a meeting that seems to be a waste of my time? There isn’t an agenda here and I think I want to do one, but how can I help the team understand why I’m doing this new thing for the first time?” Those are scary conversations for a lot of folks.

Douglas:

Yeah. And it’s interesting how you point out there’s just a lack of training, there’s a lack of actually putting some of these ideas into action, because it seems safer just to not do anything. Or when we do start to entertain, “Oh, maybe we should do this. Maybe we should do that,” and it’s like, “Oh gosh, that’s going to be a lot of work. And what if I get it wrong? And it might blow up in my face. It might get worse.”

Elise Keith:

Yeah. So I was talking a little bit about how early in my career, I started with how the committees do this. The committees, when you work with them, it’s really clear. These are the meetings we run. We run them this often. When you show up, here’s what you can do as an observer or as a participant, or as a voting member or as a chair. The rules of the game are clear. And if you show up, you know how to play. And at the company I was working with at the time, we were pretty dysfunctional, but then the development group started working with Diana Larsen and Jim Shore and we adopted Agile and we got better. And the parallel there was really striking because one of among many, many things that Agile done well does is it makes clear which conversations you have when and how they run.

Elise Keith:

Here’s how backlog grooming works. Here’s how a retrospective works. Here’s how a standup works. The rules of the game and the structure and the expectations are clear, and then all of a sudden you can play. And it doesn’t mean just because it’s structured and clear that it’s rigid. If you’ve done script planning, there’s all kinds of ways to come up with your estimates, and playing with that is fun. And with retrospectives, there’s all kinds of ways to run a retro and playing with that is fun. But the fact that you’re going to run one, and this is why, and this is about when, that gets baked into your culture and that is what we see across the board.

Douglas:

I think that brings up a really interesting topic that I know we both are fascinated by and this is meeting systems, and I think Agile or Scrum specifically is a great example of a meeting system that’s just like, you can go get a book and read about it and go, “Oh, here’s how I implement this meeting system.” I think Entrepreneurs Operating System is another example of a meeting system. Not as many meetings in that system, but still it’s like, here’s a cadence and an approach to do that.

Elise Keith:

Here’s the level 10. Here’s the… Yep.

Douglas:

And so I know that you work a lot with your clients to develop custom meeting systems. So I’m curious to talk with you a little bit more about that, because it definitely comes up when we’re doing magical meetings, workshops and stuff, and I encourage people to think about at least diagnose what’s happening because if we don’t actually look at it and think about it, we don’t start to identify those rules of the game. And a lot of that’s become inherent or just a ritual or custom and people haven’t really thought much about it. And so even just I’ve found encouraging people to just stop for a second. Have you ever thought about having a meeting just to think about your meetings? Just what’s going on, let’s talk about it. So anyway, I’m just super fascinated by this and would love to hear your take on it.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. I think that’s really the critical work to be done. The agreements are great and finding top level guidelines is nice, but they’re really guard rails. And they’re guard rails on when in doubt, if we don’t know what else to do, be a good steward and hope it will work out. But the thing that really enables performance is having a system. And the first step, and we do this with all of our clients. And actually we just co-developed with Coda, a tool for people to start running some of this on their own, which is really cool and fun to check out. The first step is to get data because all of those safety issues we were talking about before, when you ask people, “Hey, what’s going on with your meetings and what should we do with our meeting,” you will hear the same kind of stuff you could have read off of any blog post. “Yeah, they’re mostly fine and I like connecting with my team, but we should have an agenda,” or whatever it’s going to be.

Elise Keith:

But you can bust through all of this generic stuff by starting by creating an inventory of the actual meetings you hold, and then asking some pretty important questions like, “Hey, why did we do this? What part of our business is this related to? Where is it that we’ve got meetings that some people think are critically important, but not effective, and other people think they’re not even important? Maybe those people don’t need to be in the room. Where are we doing meetings where we could have, could have done an email?” Like the options that way. When you look at it and you put them together, that first step allows you to see some of what the system ought to be. And then after that, it’s really useful. And I think probably you find this in your Magical Meetings work to understand the distinction of different types of meetings and then how you use different kinds of meetings to achieve different results at different parts of your system.

Elise Keith:

So if you’re running a project with a client, you wouldn’t do a kickoff every week. That will be silly. You need a different kind of conversation to help move work along. So we’ve got a lot of work on understanding what the different types of meetings are and how you put them together into sequences to achieve different kinds of results. But it just starts by actually looking at what you’re doing and having an honest conversation about whether that’s working for you.

Douglas:

I think you hit a key word there, sequences and something that we’ve been real big fans of are railway diagrams, which is popular and it’s a way that, I don’t know if you’ve seen this before, but it’s how they’ll document syntax of programming languages, because that’s something where sequence matters, like this word literally can’t go after this word or after this word, these four, you might proceed, et cetera. And so we found that that’s also a great way to document your meeting system, because you know, like you say, the sequence matters and you wouldn’t do a kickoff in the middle of the long engagement.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. I actually got a copy of your book just the other day. And I think, do you have an example of that diagram in there?

Douglas:

I think there is a railway diagram in there. Yeah.

Elise Keith:

Yeah, awesome. We use flowcharts mashed with the tables. The flow chart has the what comes before or after whatnot. And then the table has the here’s who involved and here’s where you can find the template if there is one, all of that stuff. And when you get to the point where you’ve got templates for some of those conversations, it’s killer for unlocking performance across your organization. So I do a planning meeting with a client. Anybody can run it because I got a template. You got to cover these things.

Douglas:

It’s funny because people always talk about agendas are the most important thing. And I feel like a template or a structure or some sort of arc, some journey that we’re going to take people on, it’s much interesting than an agenda because a lot of times it really baked down agenda, it’s like what’s your agenda, what are you trying to accomplish or is this some manipulative effort or something? Whereas a template I feel like really has the right sentiment to it because the idea is, what’s the flow that we’re going to follow and how does it get us where we need to go? And we can insert any content we want. We can insert any purpose we want. But the template is the rules that you were talking about earlier, how to play the game.

Elise Keith:

Yeah, absolutely. I think in terms of agendas, people have got such confusion about what an agenda is meant to be. It has become because of that thing where most of the people running meetings have never been trained and they’ve just picked up habits from the other people who are never trained before them, agendas have become the laundry list of topics we might discuss in this time, and people get through maybe five out of the 10 and that’s not what an agenda is meant to be.

Elise Keith:

An agenda’s meant to be the version of the process that you share with your attendees, so they have a sense of what to expect. So if your plan is this rich template that’s like, “Hey, we’re going to connect and then we’re going to explore this,” and whatever your journey is going to be, then the agenda you might send to somebody else might just be like, welcome, business, wrap it up. The story behind it is richer for sure. Absolutely.

Douglas:

100%. And something we touched on in the pre-show chat that I wanted to come back to that I think is really powerful is this notion of decision-making. And I know you have a tool that you wrote about before, around decision-making criteria. I think you published it on your blog and we want to get that link up as well as the Coda link. But also folks can certainly go check out the link and whatnot, but just wanted to hear just some of your thoughts around what’s critical for good decision-making and just what should folks have top of mind as they’re thinking about making decisions in meetings?

Elise Keith:

So I think there are two pieces that are super important to having effective decision making across an organization. And one of them, again, it’s that rules of the game thing. It’s having some understanding of how you make decisions in your organization and it’s not like, “Hey, we do consensus and every single thing we do should go through consensus,” or, “Douglas makes all the decisions because he’s in charge.” Actually, what you can do is identifying many different ways of making decisions and then create a matrix, and we have a template for this too, with your team that outlines given the nature of the decision, which process will we use? So I think that’s step one. Is there absolutely decisions that should be delegated to the person closest to that work?

Elise Keith:

And there are decisions that you own, absolutely, and you should get some advice from other people before you make it, but that’s yours. So outlining that and being clear when you walk into the room, “Here’s how this decision gets made, now let’s talk,” is a huge deal.

Douglas:

I think that clarity around expectation and the how, it gets people into so much trouble when we… Throughout my career, I’ve been in so many meetings where people walked out upset, but only because the leader held the meeting just to collect information. They had no intent in delegating the decision, which was fine. But the people that were upset, the expectations were mismatched. They thought they were going to be included in the decision and they weren’t. And that’s totally fine, but I think the trouble is when we don’t clarify our intentions.

Elise Keith:

Absolutely. Completely agree, completely agree. Being extra clear about basically the meta decision, deciding how to decide upfront is critical. And then I think the thing you were getting that is criteria. So we tend to be okay at finding options. There are folks who get stuck in false dichotomies where they’re like, “Do we approve it or not?” As if those are your only choices. Often if you have at least three viable choices, “Do I go for A, B or C,” you’re in for a better decision.

Elise Keith:

But then how do you rate those three options? What criteria do you use? And one of the things we pulled together was basically a standardized list of questions you could ask for pretty much any decision that helped people pick between multiple options and have a reasonable shot at it being at least a well-considered decision. So I think that’s important for sure.

Douglas:

Another thing we spoke about previously was this notion of pre-mortems and the power of storytelling and how getting people to think about the potential outcome, like if we were to make this decision today and we went with option A, what does the future behold? And so I’d love to unpack that a little bit more for the listeners. What is this idea of pre-mortems and how can it help us with decisions?

Elise Keith:

Yeah. So in this standardized criteria, there were really three elements. One of them was logistics, like literally, what would this cost, what would it take? And one of them was a vision of success. So what’s the impact if we succeed, both on us and on our community? And then the pre-mortem question, which is let’s say we go for this, let’s say we go and we decide to open a new office in Chicago, what if that fails spectacularly? What’s the impact then? And more importantly, why did that fail? If that fails, what will have happened to make it fail? So that is a decision-making technique, the pre-mortem that was popularized by Gary Klein, who is a researcher who looked into all kinds of ways that we can get in front of our natural cognitive biases, all of our, “I think I’m awesome,” or, “I’m afraid of this,” or whatever it is that you’re short-cutting in your head and force yourself to think through the story of, “Six months from now, I made this decision and it went wicked wonky. What happened?”

Elise Keith:

Every time I run that particular one, I love it because we end up having these conversations about ways in which we failed in the past. “We forgot to get legal’s approval or the budget wasn’t adequate, or the situation around us changed.” And while it sounds like it’s probably depressing, what ends up happening instead is people go, “Well, you know what? We can prevent that problem by getting legal on board today,” or, “Hmm. I think I have a template that fixes that part,” or, “You know, we can get funding from my uncle,” whatever it might be, but then you’ve cast forward and you’ve anticipated problems, and your plan becomes so much better should you choose that option.

Douglas:

So I want to switch gears here really quickly and talk a little bit about meeting books. We’ve both written some books and we’ve got lots of friends who write meeting books and our libraries are full of different meeting books. We were recently just chatting about how you’ve got a technique for discovering what’s new and finding the nuggets. So I’d love to hear a little bit about your approach and how you go about that.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. Then you should definitely talk about how you go through it too because I would love to compare notes on that.

Douglas:

Yeah, let’s do. Yeah.

Elise Keith:

I will tell you that the story starts with me feeling like an idiot, but I was listening to the Mission Critical Teams Institute podcast, which is put on by some folks I met, and they interviewed these amazing, amazing folks like NASA astronauts and whatnot about how they do the work that they do. And they were running an interview with Daniel Coyle, who wrote The Culture Code, which is one of my favorite books about meetings. Now, Daniel Coyle would not say that it’s a book about meetings, but if you read it, it is. It’s just full of meeting after meeting, after meeting. And as I was listening to it, the guy doing the interview said, “Well, I went back to my notes from when I read your book the first time, and I wanted to touch on this,” and it hit me like a ton of bricks that I have been reading all of these meeting notes and books and never taking notes.

Elise Keith:

What if I were to sit down every day and make myself actually read the darn book? So I have a notebook that is devoted to my business and meeting related reading, and I’ve adopted Cornell style notes. So I sit down and I’m like, “Okay, this day I’ve got the section where I take the fact-based notes and put what page it was on, and then a column on the left where I keep my insights and my questions.” And I work through it. And for every book I scan the intro and then I read the takeaways at the end of the chapter. And then I go back and I work my way through the chapter, catching the notes of something that might be kind of interesting in that particular chapter for later reference. And then before I start the next day, I scan my notes for up to that point and re begin.

Elise Keith:

And it’s way slower. It’s a way slower way of going through these books, but I just finished Daniel Stillman’s book, Good Talk and I’m currently reading Joe Allen and Karin’s book about Suddenly Virtual, and like mostly they’re covering ground that I’ve read before, but I picked up so much more by slowing down and making myself actually go, “Wait a second. What is it here on this page that might be a little bit different? Or what’s here that I can bring into my own work and use in a way that I hadn’t before?” So I wish I had gone back and done Culture Code and Dare to Lead And some of these others that are all full of meetings with actual notes. Would have saved me so much time.

Douglas:

I love that. I was telling you earlier, one of my mentors has a speed reading technique where he only reads the first paragraph of every chapter and he studies all the figures and graphs and then reads the glossary and the index. And if there’s anything that he doesn’t understand, then he goes and tries to figure out what it is he missed. So it’s much more of a focused devouring where I’d love this slowing down. And it reminds me of one of my technique. My wife hates it because she believes that you should not write on or markup books, but I underline my books because I have no plan to sell them or have them in anybody else’s possession and they improve my experience with the books. So this is crazy. If I really want to devour a book fast, I will buy it on print and on audible, I’ll listen to it on two X speed and I’ll underline as I go.

Elise Keith:

Yep, that’s the way to do it.

Douglas:

Then after I complete the entire book, then I’ll go back from the very front and I’ll read everything I underlined. Then separately, I won’t take notes, but I’ll write down what that means for me or how I’m internalizing it. And so I’m doing some internal integration, I guess, is what you call it from a learning science standpoint. I found that if I really want to put something into action, especially if it’s something that has a specific application for my business, like it’s a marketing book or sales strategy book or something, I’ve found that to be really effective for me to put it into action.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. I feel like a silly, silly person for not having clued in to how important it was to stop and write things down earlier. I was a theater major in college, so I didn’t have to write basically anything. I didn’t have to do much to succeed to get through that, which was awesome, but maybe not the best learning training that I could have had. And after I had started doing this, it really has dramatically improved the depth with which I am able to appreciate and apply what I’m reading.

Douglas:

Yeah. I’ve got friends that tag and catalog and have digital notes that are tied to Kindle eBooks and stuff. And I was like, man, if only… It’s something about having a physical book in my hands that gets me so much more excited, but that works really well for them because they can recall stuff pretty easily just based on tags and sort and filter and things. So it’s pretty cool.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. I always find that my kids talk about this too. They’re like, “Why would I ever want to book and why would ever do that because I just look it up.” And the challenge I have with that is that to just look something up, you have to remember it well enough to know that you need to look it up. There are some things that are just not present in your mind all of the time with any kind of depth that allows you to then go and retrieve them.

Douglas:

I wonder if there’s a tool or an app that might help solve that problem for the nomads.

Elise Keith:

Maybe. Maybe. Fun stuff.

Douglas:

Excellent. Well, I think that brings us to a wrap today. It’s been so much fun talking with you about meeting systems and decision-making, and the need for structure and maturity models around meetings. I want to just give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Elise Keith:

Yeah. So the way that your organization and your team meets is either something that can emerge out of habit and grow organically, which may or may not be a good thing, or it’s something that you can design. And while the conversation required to design your meetings, your everyday meetings effectively can be a little bit awkward and scary to begin with, it is one of the most powerful conversations you can have. So I encourage you to do that. Go ahead and have the meeting about meetings and see how much better you can make your work life.

Douglas:

It’s been a pleasure chatting with you today, Elise. Thanks for coming on the show.

Elise Keith:

Thank you. Looking forward to seeing you again.

Douglas:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe, to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.