Twenty twenty two is well underway, and yeah, we're still doing a lot of virtual meetings, and despite the fact that we have all by now participated in literally hundreds, if not thousands of them, they are still pretty average. But let's not blame Zoom straightaway. Meetings as a work practice have gone unexamined for far longer than they've been online. At Lassian's head of research and development, Dom Price, saw this and thought that perhaps there might be a better way.
He and his team did a deep dive into what a meeting is for and what's holding it back, and maybe not surprisingly, they found that almost nothing about the meeting as we know it was worth keeping, so they didn't keep it and they replaced some of their regular meetings with something else entirely. My name is doctor Amantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. And this is how I work, a show
about how to help you do your best work. On today is my Favorite Tip episode. We go back to an interview from the past and I pick out my favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak with Dom Price about what led him to do a ritual reset, and how he specifically focused on meetings.
I found myself in this kind of cycle of insanity at work where things were getting bigger, longer, more, but there didn't seem to be a break point. And similar to you, I was looking for the breakpoint. One of the things I did for myself and then with my team was the ritual reset. And it's just been great to kind of go, like, we have all these interventions where we kind of think about doing a sprinklean, right, you think about like seasons and you change your wardrobe
and you do a sprinkling. It's like, what's the spring clean for my life? And specifically, what's the spring clean for meetings? You know, because if you think news kills your mojo, amant nothing kills my vibal mojo like lack a meeting. And so I'm like, I know they're necessary, evil, but how can I make them better? So the ritual reset was like, how do we, like, if you assume the world's changed, because it has, like my working environment is completely different than it was, So how do I
reset my rituals? And so what we said was, let's list all of our rituals, which ones do we want to keep, but tweak, right, so they stay that. The purpose is the ritual still makes sense, but the way we're going to do it's different because we might be able to do it asynchronous, or might be able to do it online, or we're going to do it in a different form because the world has changed. Which ones do we want to keep? And they stay the same, I'll be honest, very few fell into that category. And
then which ones? Which ones do we want to kill? Which ones just aren't required, we don't need them anymore? Whatever, and maybe we use to We use the space to time and the freedom to experiment, then try something else. And it has been like the most refreshing thing, just to go. Meetings don't own me anymore. I own them.
Oh wow, that's cool.
I think it was always true. Humans booked the meetings, so humans have always owned them, but we just let them dominators and that reset I've done with myself, but then with my team, and then what we've done is is we're genuinely using the free time it's given us, either to invest in ourselves, which is crucial, or to go, how do we experiment with new stuff? Because you know what the world's changed, and I don't know the answer.
There isn't. I mean, you can google best practice Hybrid distributed teams and you'll get a hold of and BS articles. So don't do that. I do. Let's experiment our way out of it, and that in itself has been quite fun.
Give me an example of a ritual law to that you've killed. Maybe in relation to meetings.
There's a whole swath that got killed. So I status updates. There's so many where we just gathered in the office and it was just this an archaic ritual where we just gathered and in certain days we gathered and never want to go through the updates. And I'm like, it was soul destroying in the office. At least we had tea coffee beer on each other. But when you're doing that from you, from wherever everyone's doing it from now,
you're like, wow, this is really sold destroying. So we're like, hang on, Not only is it sold destroying, we're trying to do this synchronously and we're using people's like live time, which should be used for something more spontaneous or higher value. So how can we make all our data subdates asynchronous and how can we make them consumable? All around the world, so you don't have to physically be in the same place at the same time, because I have colleagues literally all over the world.
So how did you do that? Was what was the solution.
Well, we actually started doing it first of all using just some of our existing tools, and then realized that none of them worked for that purpose. So we built one. It's what we do it last year and we're like, ah, SoLIT let's just build one, and a team just kind of came together and like, let's solve this problem for the whole of it last yon, how do we get the network of teams to communicate with each other asynchronously? And we're like, oh, this this sounds like a fun experiment.
And so what you get is there two hundred and forty character limits. So it's like Twitter and you do your update on a frid and it kind of all gets flunched together over the weekend, and on Monday morning you get a digest of all the projects you're following, and you get the two hundred and forty character update, and if you want to dig in and find out more, you click through and you can read more. But what it means is I now don't have any status meetings,
which I love. Wow. What I really enjoy is on that Monday morning when I get that digest, I'm like, ah, that project's fine, that one's fine, that one's fine. I am not going to talk to you. I'm going to leave you alone to just do your work. That is cool.
Now, is this product available to a Blessian customers or just listeners who might not be customers of Alessian.
Yeah, we've put it out there as a beta. I think out there as an Now for a beta, it's pretty raw because we're still playing with it internally, but it will make it out there eventually because we're seeing more and more people talk about this the network of teams effect and how do this is not about project management, it's about project communication. How do like I'm anthor if me and you're working on discrete pieces of work, but
they're going to connect together. How can we connect in a meaningful so that I know what you're doing, you know what I'm doing, but we don't have to be in each other's pockets. So you're autonomous and free to do your work, but you're connected in the areas where you need to. And it's so far, it's been fascinating experiment. That's cool.
Now, what's the link if people want to go check that out?
If they're just Google Team Central, that's the working name for it right now.
I hope you're feeling all inspired to do a ritual reset in your work life, and if meetings are the bane of your work life, then perhaps those are a good place to start. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way that you work. I write a short fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered that helped me work better, which range from interesting research findings three to gadgets and software that I'm loving. You can sign up for that at Howiwork dot co.
That's how I Work dot co. How I Work is produced by Inventim with production support from dead Set Studios. And thank you to Martin Nimber who does the audio mix for every episode and makes everything sound awesome. See you next time.