Summary

Stuart Gillis of Seventh Wave was interviewed about making meetings more effective. He explained that meetings were often inefficient due to being held out of habit, dominated by a few individuals, and having poorly constructed agendas. Gillis proposed solutions based on Nancy Klein's "thinking environment" framework, advocating for treating all attendees as "thinking equals," using structured rounds to ensure equal participation, and being ruthless with agendas by removing informational "downloads" and framing topics as questions. He also detailed the concept of being a "generative listener" and stressed the importance of encouraging respectful disagreement to achieve better outcomes. He concluded with a list of actionable tips, such as questioning a meeting's necessity and banning "Any Other Business." 

 

Key Points 

  • Meetings were frequently a "bugbear" because they were inefficient, often dominated by the same few people, rarely kept to time, and seldom resulted in progress or a decision. 
  • Many meetings were held out of habit ("because we always have") rather than for a clear purpose, which diminished their value. 
  • The principle of "equality," where every attendee is treated as a "thinking equal" and given an equal opportunity to contribute, was crucial for effective meetings. 
  • A practical method to ensure equality was to use structured "rounds," where each person speaks in turn without interruption. 
  • Agendas should be ruthlessly streamlined. Items that were simple information "downloads" should be sent via email, and all remaining discussion points should be framed as questions to stimulate thought beforehand. 
  • Being a "generative listener" meant focusing one's attention on helping the other person think for themselves, rather than listening competitively to formulate a response or interrupt. 
  • Organisations achieved better results when they encouraged respectful disagreement and debate within meetings, as this process often led to a superior "third way forward." 

 

Transcript

Transcripts are auto-generated.

 

Announcer (00:01):
The Cambridge Marketing Podcast with Kiran Kapur, brought to you by Cambridge Marketing College. See their range of courses and apprenticeships at marketingcollege.com.

Kiran Kapur, Host (00:13):
Hello and welcome. My guest today is Stuart Gillis from Seventh Wave, who describes himself as a generative listener and a time-to-think facilitator and a coach. And we're going to be talking about how to make meetings more effective. Stuart, welcome. I will come on in a moment to what a generative listener is because that's very intriguing, but can we start with why meetings are such a big bugbear for people?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (00:39):
Hi, thanks. Thanks for the invite on as well. Well, I guess meetings are such a bugbear because they're so inefficient, I guess. I worked for nearly 40 years. I'm sure I don't sound old enough to have done so, but anyway, so I worked for 40 years in various different roles corporately and lost count quite early on to the number of inefficient meetings that I would sit through and probably endure, I guess, as a number of your listeners probably do because they're normally round with very boring, sounding agenda points that maybe don't have any bearing on your job responsibilities. It's also the same few team members unfortunately who tend to sort of dominate discussions and they rarely keep to time and even more rarely end in any sort of progress or a decision being made. I guess from my memory anyway, and from the businesses that I work with, the organisations that I support now, what's even more concerning is that their business is run via those meetings.

(01:52):
I'm sure I read somewhere recently that on average a colleague in a sort of corporate organisation can spend up to maybe 25 to nearly 30 hours a week in meetings and I guess that sort of begs the question, when do they actually have the time to do their job if they're sitting in inefficient meetings for such a large proportion of their working week?

Kiran Kapur, Host (02:14):
Okay. So why do you think companies have meetings? I mean, there's lots of reasons. I know I sit in meetings that I actually just need to have minuted for regulation purposes because I need to prove that I have discussed or done something, but there are other reasons for having meetings. So why do people feel they have to have meetings?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (02:34):
I think a large proportion of it is it's habit so that they have say a weekly sales meeting or they have a diarized meeting to sort of catch up and ensure that information is cascaded. So they tend to happen for that reason more than anything else. That tends to be the ... If you ask the question, why are you holding this meeting? The question tends to be, well, because we always have, that's just the way that we do things around here, so to speak. So it's one of the main questions you should ask yourself is what's the purpose of the meeting? What are we hoping to gain from bringing the team together? Because there's a cost involved in doing that, bringing the team together. So if you're going to bring a team together and spend money essentially, then there has to be a return on that investment.

(03:28):
So first question, why are we holding this meeting? What are we aiming to gain from it? And as you say, if there's a particular reason, a reason around compliance, et cetera, then great, hold the meeting, but don't do it if it's purely out of habit that you hold the weekly meeting because it's the weekly meeting.

Kiran Kapur, Host (03:49):
Okay. So the other thing you said was the same people tend to dominate. So doesn't that mean that's actually a problem of chairing the meeting rather than having a meeting?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (04:00):
Oh yeah, certainly. Yeah. I mean the premise from time to think Nancy Klein's work around the thinking environment is that the 10 components of a thinking environment and one of those 10 components is equality. If you treat one another within the meeting as a thinking equal, then you should split the time within the meeting and within each agenda point. You should split the time equally so that everybody has at least the opportunity to contribute within the meeting. That way you get everybody's attention and you get everybody's contribution. And if you're invited to the meeting, you should be there because your views and your opinions and your experience is welcomed and will contribute to the overall decision making process within the meeting. So organisations unfortunately run whether we like it or not on hierarchies and that hierarchy can unfortunately affect the efficiency of meetings. So that component of equality is absolutely crucial amongst all the other nine as well clearly, but is absolutely crucial to ensuring that you get a contribution from everybody and that everyone is treated as a thinking equal.

Kiran Kapur, Host (05:33):
So how do you make people feel comfortable in that? I mean, I'm thinking of my own office staff where you've got people that are actually want to listen here mull over and then come out with an idea, which may in fact be after the meeting because they need time to think. Whereas you've got others that are very quick thinking and meetings, they're very comfortable with that. You've got people that may not want to be comfortable talking up in front of other people. They may have a bright idea and you can see it perhaps, but they don't want to say it in front of other people. So how do you get over that?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (06:03):
That's a great question. The first consideration is that everybody is beautifully individual and unique, aren't they? So clearly not everyone is going to feel comfortable with raising their ideas or concerns in front of the group. You can become more comfortable with that if you start to build in routines and rules is too strong a word, but essentially a way of operating that ensures that people are given first the opportunity to contribute and then over time given a greater degree of comfort that their views are going to be welcomed and not ridiculed. So on way is to introduce rounds of appreciation and to ensure that rounds, which is essentially giving each person an equal opportunity in turn to give their view on a particular subject, at least given the opportunity anyway, whether they choose to initially or in the first meeting give that point of view because they may be more reflective and they may be concerned about how their point of view would be received by other members of the team, at least giving them the opportunity within the round to raise their voice, find their voice after the round you can then ask for everyone's freshest thinking.

(07:38):
It gives those that require more time just to reflect and think and let things permeate the opportunity to come in at the end with their thoughts on what's being discussed once everyone else has spoken. But rounds are a really great way, structured rounds of equal time are a really great way to ensure that everybody at least is given the opportunity to contribute.

Kiran Kapur, Host (08:03):
So that's literally going round the table.

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (08:06):
Yep, quite literally. Going round the table in order with a commitment that nobody else will speak again until everybody else has had an opportunity to speak.

Kiran Kapur, Host (08:18):
And does that work even for the people that want to think something over who often come up with the greatest and most thought provoking ideas, but may just need more time?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (08:31):
It does once they become those individuals and everyone else becomes more comfortable with the way of operating. It's like anything else, it's a new habit that you need to, a new routine that you need to build and whenever there's a new routine or a new habit, you need to be comfortable with not being very good at it to start with before you build up your capability. So it can feel clunky to kick off with and it is a regular challenge in the organisations that I support and work with that they say, "Well, that will take too much time." Well, the complete reverse is true that actually it takes less time because what you end up with is less repetition. You end up with less single individual or groups of people dominating the conversation and carrying on talking for ages and eating into the precious agenda time and you then end up with everybody contributing.

(09:34):
And as I say, if you have a round of freshest thinking allows those members of the team who need more time to think it through, then you capture everybody's best thinking.

Kiran Kapur, Host (09:47):
Okay. So the other thing you said was agenda items tend to be quite repetitive. And I think in fact you used the word boring. So are there ways of structuring an agenda so you structure the meeting better?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (09:57):
Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, you need to be absolutely ruthless with your agenda. And when I mean ruthless, you need to look through your agenda items and be absolutely clear that that agenda item is going to add value to the discussion. If it's a simple download, so an agenda item might be as a suggestion, last year's performance figures, then that should just be sent out as an email and there should be sufficient trust within the organisation and team that if something is sent out that needs to be pre-read in advance of the meeting as a download, there should be sufficient trust that every single member of the team will do that, will read through what they need to read through, or it might be a new set of procedures that need to be implemented. Again, there needs to be sufficient trust that that can be sent out as a download.

(10:56):
There's no discussion required. It's a new way of operating that the board have agreed to perhaps and no discussion required. It's a simply, this is how we are now going to operate, send it out as an email because no discussion is required within the meeting. And the second thing to do, so after you've been ruthless and cut out maybe 20, 30, 40% of your agenda items, all remaining agenda items need to be framed as a question.

(11:33):
We work so much better in the presence of a question. The brain works better in the presence of a question. So if you frame your agenda items as questions and circulate that agenda in advance, even subliminally you will get people thinking about their response and their thoughts about that agenda item before they attend the meeting and that is another way of giving those that are more reflective the opportunity to think in advance of what their thoughts or response might be to that agenda item. And if you can't raise it, if you can't raise the agenda item as a question, you can't frame it as a question. You probably need to question whether it's a download or whether it's the discussion point and if it's a download, it really shouldn't be on the agenda.

Kiran Kapur, Host (12:20):
So is there an optimum length of time for a meeting?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (12:23):
I think that there's lots of suggestions that anything over three hours, then you'll start to lose the audience. But I guess it depends on what the agenda points and what the overall objective of the meeting is. In organisations that I've worked with previously, they have some rules that suggest that meetings should only take an hour because you only have three agenda points and any presentations should be three slides or fewer and they work really well in fast moving organisations that are constantly looking to move forward. Other businesses I've worked in and businesses that I support have whole day meetings when they're maybe bringing a team that's spread across the country, they're bringing them together on a monthly or quarterly basis and there's a perceived lot that they need to go through. You can still clearly obviously find time to save within those meetings. One thing I have found is that the move across to this hybrid working has prompted a lot of companies to ask the question, are our meetings effective?

(13:37):
Are there better ways of operating it? And online meetings tend and need to be shorter because of the challenges of operating to a screen when you're not in the same room physically so to speak. But I would suggest keeping your meetings short, sharp with really clearly focused objectives and agendas mean you'll always get better outcomes.

Kiran Kapur, Host (14:06):
Because there was a big movement about making meetings sort of 50 minutes rather than an hour, wasn't there? That's supposed to give people more downtime between meetings

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (14:15):
Comes back to the original question, I guess, of the amount of time that people spend in meetings, up to nearly 30 hours a week out of a supposed 37 and a quarter or 40 hour working week. That's an awful lot of time spent between meetings. I go back to the time is probably unimportant. It's the way that you operate within the meeting and what you're gaining from it. So if you're gaining lots of return on investment for bringing that team together for three hours, four hours or a whole day, then continue doing that. If you're not getting value and return on investment, you probably need to look to change and that's whether you're currently doing a 50 hour, a 50 minute meeting or whether you're doing a whole day meeting, what are you aiming to gain from it and do you feel that you're getting value return on investment from that time together as a team?

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:14):
So purpose rather than worrying about the sort of practicalities. If you've started with a purpose and you'll understand why you're having the meeting, the rest of it will fall out. Would that be fair?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (15:25):
Oh yeah, certainly. That's always the first question to ask why

Kiran Kapur, Host (15:28):
Okay I have to ask about generative listener. You describe yourself as a generative listener. What does that mean?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (15:35):
I probably need to give some context in that I was a, like many, I think I was a competitive listener previously in that I would serially interrupt people. I found myself interrupting my children, my partner or wife and people that I work with because we operate in a very hierarchical society and we're taught from a very early age that almost he who shouts loudest gets the best service or that why bother listening to the end of someone's sentence when you know what they're going to say and through my reading of Nancy Klein's work a number of years ago, it taught me to recognise that that's the last thing that you need to be particularly as a parent and when you're working in a team, your job is to help the person in front of you think clearly for themselves and interrupting is a blight on that.

(16:40):
So I pride myself now on my promise to myself, which I don't always keep, it's fair to say, but my promise to myself that I won't interrupt people, that I will listen to what it is that they're saying and I will reflect on that before responding and it's led to huge improvements in my relationships with everybody that I know and love and it's, I wish I'd learned it years ago I would suggest I might have even better relationships particularly with my children if I interrupted them less when they were younger.

Kiran Kapur, Host (17:20):
It's quite interesting than non-interruption because one of the things you can do is you can drain yourself not to interrupt, but actually your brain is sitting there going, and when you've stopped talking, I can say my bit. So there is definitely there's two steps to that, isn't there? There's not interrupting and there is what you said, which is listening to the end of the sentence.

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (17:37):
Yeah, certainly Nancy suggests that there are three things at play, three levels of attention. The first thing is you're as you say, you're listening to the content of what they're saying. You're listening and considering your response to that, how it makes you feel, how it potentially triggers you, what you're going to say next. And then there's the third level, which is where you are considering how you're supporting the other person's thinking and that's your attention, that's the generative attention that you are genuinely intrigued by where the person is going to go next. And in the coaching that I do, my coaching practise with clients, I found that where I'm operating equally across those three considerations, the client's thinking takes huge leaps forward in terms of them feeling supported that they can come to their own conclusions without my interaction, without my interruption. Nancy describes it as a paradox and I can't think of a better way of describing it really.

(18:52):
It's a paradox that when you're working with somebody, even as a thinking partner or in a thinking partnership or as a client and coach relationship, it suggests that your presence actually isn't required because people can think for themselves, but actually it's the being listened to that ignites the person's abilities to be able to think. So that paradox is that you're completely surplus to requirements, but that person couldn't think clearly if you weren't there listening to them.

(19:34):
I find that intriguing. I found it a wonderful experience to discover that and continue to enjoy watching that paradox in action, working with and listening to the organisations and the clients that I work with.

Kiran Kapur, Host (19:50):
So how can you take that back to a meeting situation? So presumably is it useful to be a generative listener in a meeting or do you need to have different hats on?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (20:02):
I think first and foremost in any team, in any team environment, whether it's one-to-ones group activities or team meetings, the ability to be able to generatively listen and encourage the other person to keep thinking for themselves is absolutely crucial. It's a foundation of good team working because ultimately we organisations, unfortunately, they don't get the best from their people because they don't listen to them. Companies recruit and then indoctrinate and people lose their individuality because they feel that they need to conform to the way that that organisation operates. And it was once said a number of years ago too, and it always stuck with me that when two people in an organisation agree on something, one of them is surplus to requirements, which sounds quite harsh, but actually at its base level, that's absolutely true. We should be as organisations, human endeavour takes and human achievement takes huge leaps forward when people disagree because you need to listen to other points of view in order to step out from your, this is going to sound like a cliche, but step out from your comfort zone and way of thinking and consider another option and then during that debate and discussion, not disagreement, but debate and discussion, you potentially and quite frequently find a third way forward that's even better than the two polarised views where you started from.

Kiran Kapur, Host (21:50):
So is that something one should be managing within a meeting that you can allow that sort of debate and discussion or do you have that outside the meeting and issue it as your downloader or email? I mean, where does this fit in within a meeting structure?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (22:05):
Well, essentially I've sat in many meetings and been told or heard suggested to other attendees that when they raise a concern that that issue should be taken offline and taken outside of the meeting. And what that tends to be nine times out of 10 is code for, I don't want to have this disagreement in public and that's the complete reverse of what should happen. What should happen is that disagreement should be encouraged and that difference of opinion needs to be out in the open for the team to be healthy and to move forward. So yes, there are ways of managing that more effectively, but the first thing is to encourage the disagreement, but do it in a way that's respectful without interruption and to allow everybody to have their point of view heard within the boundaries of the time that you've set out. And there are different strategies that you can adopt on that round is one to ensure that everyone's point of view is taken on board, but also there are thinking partnerships, which is another intervention that you can use where you break the team down into pairs and they think about as a pair, they think about a particular question and then bring that back to the group.

(23:29):
So there are different and other strategies that you can adopt in order to give the team faith that their true opinions won't be disregarded or held against them, which is even worse.

Kiran Kapur, Host (23:44):
Yes, you can see how that would sort of cut down debate. Thank you, Stuart, for those insights. If Sunday listening thinks, "Right, I really want to start making my meetings more productive." Have you any sort of hints and tips that they could start with?

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (23:58):
Oh yeah, okay. Yeah. So I'd probably think about, I mean, my top five, if you like. So I would say always ask that question, "Do you need the meeting?" Which we've spoken about previously. So just because it always takes place on the first Tuesday of the month doesn't mean that you necessarily need to have it every single time. I've said this previously as well, be absolutely ruthless with your agenda. If it's a download or directive, just trust your colleagues to read the email and it saves real time for the 3Ds, the debate, the disagreement, and the decision making process within the meetings. Frame your agenda points as questions, circulate that in advance. It gets all of your attendees thinking about that well in advance of the meeting.

(24:50):
My problem in my top one of these top five advice or observation for organisations is get better at disagreeing. Organisations who are really comfortable with disagreeing unearth so much more information and points of view. And when you hear from everybody, regardless of their position in the organisation, businesses take a huge leap forward. And my final one, which I don't think we've spoken about anyway, but ban AOB. If a subject commands time on the agenda, then it really should have its own time allotted to it. I could suggest quite a few more, a point and a timekeeper, instigate rounds, which we've spoken about and we have spoken about a little bit about appreciation. Starting and ending with appreciation raises the overall thinking of the group, focuses more on the positives that are going on currently and that can be a very simple question at the start of the meeting.

(25:52):
So that might be what's one thing that's bringing joy to your life currently and just take a quick round without questions or interruptions from each person just to say one thing that's going really well and that lifts the general mood and perhaps certainly helps the attendees forget the meeting they've just been to and allows them to refocus and be more mindful about what they're about to step into. So that works really well. So they would be my-

Kiran Kapur, Host (26:23):
Yeah, we've all done that to come out of a sort of distressing or a difficult meeting or one that's just posed some interesting questions and then you've got to switch into something else. Yes.

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (26:32):
Yeah, absolutely. It's a great mindfulness exercise that I would encourage everyone to do, quite frankly, focus on the positives in your life, the things that you're appreciative of lifts your mood generally anyway.

Kiran Kapur, Host (26:43):
Stuart Gillis, thank you of Seventh Wave. Thank you very much indeed for your time and for those hints and tips and general views on how to make meetings more productive. Thank you.

Stuart Gillis, Seventh Wave (26:53):
Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Announcer (26:55):
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