Meetings, Cafes, and Identities, oh my!

Recently I’ve been having a bunch of short thoughts that I don’t think warrant their own posts, so here they all are:

What’s the deal with meetings?

Which isn’t to suggest that all lit up people hate all meetings.

All of my favorite hobbies (sports, music, board/online games) revolve around working with peers in real time toward a common goal. A soccer team has to work together and problem solve in real time to advance the ball down the field (or prevent their opponents from doing so). Players in a band have to be both aware of and immaculately executing their own role while simultaneously actively listening to each other in order to create something that is far greater than the sum of their individual parts.

In its purest and best form, a work meeting is an opportunity for that same kind of dynamic collaboration. Sure, it’s slower than a fast break, and doesn’t provide the instant feedback of a cooperative video game. But the ability to work together dynamically in person with other people is there and it’s really the only time we get that opportunity in a modern work environment.

The fact that so many bright, sociable, high-performing people hate meetings signals a massive failure to use them as the opportunities they are.

(sidenote: I was going to put an image here to break up the text but there are so many “this meeting could have been an email” memes that are really just awful)

It’s not just that they’re necessary

I find that a lot of “in defense of meetings” type posts sort of frame them as a necessary evil. “Well, we have to work together and make sure we’re all on the same page somehow” type arguments that inherently accept the meeting-as-drudgery narrative that’s permeated office cultures everywhere.

But to me, meetings should be energizing. They should be a chance for smart people with different perspectives to come together and share their ideas. They should make work better, not worse.

So what are we getting wrong, how did we get here?

Are we having too many unnecessary meetings? - Yes.

Are we running our meetings effectively? - Mostly not.

Are we forcing employees to sit through long meetings during which they will never speak? - Also yes.

If we stop thinking about meetings as a way to convey information one way and as a forum for dynamic collaboration, we eliminate a lot of the bad ones.

The danger of relying on tools too much

Especially as (marketing) teams are getting leaner and individuals are frequently told to do less with more, it’s easy to lean harder on tools to lighten the cognitive and logistic load of executing tasks. Look no further than the explosion of AI-written content marketing for a currently trending example.

This isn’t an anti Chat GPT (or tool in general) take, but in my own consulting work I’ve run into people (and through extension, teams) who don’t use their own human brains to evaluate the output of a tool. AI-written content cannot be posted without editing or at bare-minimum, fact checking. When a tool like SEMRush tells you what it thinks the search intent for a certain keyword is, it’s still prudent to actually look at the SERP before spending money on clicks from it.

Our ability to analyze and judge is what separates us from AI and algorithms. We can’t let the pressures to produce stop us from using our one advantage, especially as advances in AI technology come more and more rapidly.

If I’m making a hiring decision between a candidate who is a really excellent thinker and one who is more proficient with my team’s full tool stack, I’m picking the thinker every time. Tools can always be learned, but it’s much more difficult to develop good thinking.

Why do people queue at certain cafes?

In Portland, I used to live right by a brunch place called Jam on Hawthorne. I ate there maybe three times total, not because it wasn’t good or because I don’t like brunch, but because for some reason it was one of the few spots in the city that people would line up and wait literal hours for. There were maybe 10 other brunch spots that were of relatively similar quality (some better, imo) in a 1-mile radius, but it was Jam specifically that regularly had a 2+ hour wait. I never understood the phenomenon, but today while reading Phil Gyford’s latest I discovered that this was far from a uniquely Portland experience:

I’m always bemused by the queues that form outside apparently random cafés etc. when there are alternatives that seem much the same only a short walk away. Why queue outside this coffee shop when there are so many decent ones you can just walk straight into?

Are people just that averse to trying new things? Is it a fomo-led pile on?

Somebody please explain this to me.

Identity

Tom Critchlow is one of my favorite people to read on the internet, for reasons that I think are self-evident if you’ve ever been to his website.

In one of his latest emails he introduced himself as, “an increasingly amorphous identity drowning in my own domain names.”

And, uh, I get it. I don’t think I have the experiential (or even current-project breadth) that Tom does, but I definitely have been feeling a bit more amorphous myself lately.

I think a lot about narrative and identity and community and how those things interweave and define each other. I’ve been experiencing a lot of narrative and community changes these last few months, so I suppose it’s only natural to feel some identity shift or tumult when that happens.

It’s a feeling that can be disruptive or scary or consuming (which is why Change Management is a thing), but as I’m settling in to the other side of the big changes, I’m doing my best to view this identity dislodgment as an opportunity for growth and re-definition. It sounds trite when I say it like that, but I wonder if triteness is a symptom of the accessibility of good advice.

And I wonder if sometimes we as individuals (and definitely ‘we’ as a weird third-person way to refer to organizations) just need to be told some trite good advice every now and again.