
I hear it everywhere: People have too many meetings, with too little planning... The old refrain, "Why couldn't this have been an email?" just makes the problem worse by clogging up our inboxes and fragmenting our work habits.
If you're a fan of NPR's Hidden Brain Podcast, you might have heard of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a new book by Cal Newport. His premise?
"The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive."
--Cal Newport
The book itself has lots of proposals for changing how we work--especially how we access and filter social media, messaging, and email--so we can reclaim our time for immersive work.
He's arguing about email the way I argue about meetings. Groups need time to work deeply, just as we do as individuals. All those unstructured meetings with long lists of ephemera... Do we really need them? Or are they robbing us of time to collaborate deeply while building social capital in less formal settings with our teams?
I've been playing around with several frameworks to guide groups in defining when formal meetings are really necessary. During a recent trip to my virtual sandbox, I wondered if Dave Snowden's Cynefin Framework might offer some clues...

Disorder--Realm of Unfocused or Purposeless Action
Leaders must intervene and break down tasks into other four domains
Obvious--Realm of Best Practice
Basic job tasks, bounded by...
Face-to-face interventions and clarifications
Memos
Phone check-ins
Texts
Skills trainings
Deference to research in best practice
Complicated--Realm of Good Practice
Thoughtful, topical conversations, governed by...
Single-topic email threads with carefully selected recipients with relevant expertise
Small-group focused conversations that gather available expertise to analyze for appropriate actions to take within the system
Specialized trainings that promote a variety of current expertise in the field Deference to well-established expertise
Complex--Realm of Emergent Practice
Meetings structured to maximize participation, power equity, and productive dissent, enabled by...
Experimentation in response to real-time feedback from the system
Establishment of limits within which experiments must creatively conform
Diverse representation from multiple perspectives
Continuous feedback and readjustment to conditions as they shift
Celebrations for learning--both from failures and successes
Deference to creative thinking and dissent
Chaotic--Realm of Novel Practice
Situation-driven, high-level meetings, characterized by...
Pragmatic narrowly focused immediate action
Close and sustained proximity, virtual or real
Shortening the loop between action and fact-finding
High stakes clarified in the face of inaction
Disbanding as soon as the situation returns to a complex or complicated realm
Deference to hierarchy, chain-of-command
Could something like this work for your teams? Where have you seen more developed frameworks for communication and decision-making? I'd love your feedback.
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