Today's episode is another my favorite Tip episode where I go back to interviews from the past and I dig out the thing that was my favorite tip, like the thing that I got out of the interview that really impacted or resonated with me. So today's extract is from my chat with Dom Price. This is my second time having Dom on the show. I loved our first chat so much that I was keen to check back in with him during COVID and see how he was going
and how the way he approaches work had changed. So if you haven't come across DOM before, Dom is the head of Research at Development and also the resident work futurist at Atlasian, one of the world's biggest and fastest growing tech companies. Dom has responsibilities spanning five global R and D scent and is the in house team doctor who helps Alessian scale by being ruthlessly effective, all while keeping one eye on the future. So in this extract from my chat with Dom, we talk all about how
Dom has been making virtual meetings not suck. So there are some really practical strategies in this extract and I hope you enjoy it. So let's head to Dom and I want to know own your leadership meetings, your leadership team meetings, about how you are now solving problems together, like what structure are you using, what software are you using, how are you facilitating that? Like what what would I observe if I was kind of like dialing into one of those meetings.
Yeah, we've had to sort of sharpen our pencil there. You suddenly realize how many informal rituals and mechanisms you have in person, certainly around note taking, actions, decisions, reading bodyline. What are we doing about that? It's way more dynamic because in an in person meeting you can have more than one voice. But if you look at the way most video technology works, it really only enables one voice
at one point in time. Right, And if you're on Zoom or any of these other tools and the three people talk, you get this no, no you go, no, no, you go, don't amout for you go, right, it's we all become overly polite. One of the things we've done is making sure we have clear roles at the start of any meeting. So in our leadership meeting, we have a wonderful a wonderful lady Nikki who's like our operations person.
She keeps us honest. And so when we all start debating something, Nicky is the one who changes and goes, is there a decision here? Is there an action? Do we need to take this offline? Do we need to push this now? Is this a good use of our time? Just to keep us honest. And then what we've found is often if we need to go deep, we will allocate it to one or two people and go cool, you go and take this away next meeting, come back with your update, and we can work on it asynchronously
across the week throughout. But actually we want to say that that synchronous time for complex problem solving and debating discussion, and then what's the stuff we can do asynchronously and that way it's easier for everyone to consume. And then the other thing that we've added into there, and I think we've spoken about this before, but I think we've become more sort of heightened on it is the one
way door, two way door. So the one way door decisions are once you've made that decision, it's done right. They're the decisions you want to measure twice and cut once you want to deliberate, consult and analyze, get all the data, and be relatively confident you're making the right decision. But the vast majority of the decisions that we make on a daily basis are two way doors. All right, If you walk through the door, you find out what's the other side, but if you don't like it, you
pay a toll for coming back through the door. And what we find is is that where there are two way door decisions, we allocate them to the person who we think is to the somebody are our expert, and we're like, come back with the decision you make. They pros the columns the options, but bring back a page. So normally we use confluence or trello, show us the options,
tell us the decision you've made. Cool, let's proceed. So we will discuss and debate for a short period of time to help the person, but we're not going to overly debate those decisions because we learn a lot more by making them and then listening and learning. And I think that's almost more true now than ever before, because there's so much uncertainty around the world right now. The
idea of perfect decision making, it just doesn't exist. So you're like, oh, if you can't make perfect decisions, make quick ones instead, and just make sure you're able to listen and learn from them.
That's so good. I think that's such good advice. Well, like, what else would I say, Like, for example, how are you overcoming the very annoying fact that two people can't talk at the same time and you've got the awkward no you go, you go, like, how are you getting around that?
I think it's one of those things, is kind of we're just getting used to it. I think when it's only kind of if every fifth meeting with video that feels a bit awkward, whereas now we've just got into a little bit more of a routine.
You know.
What we're trying to do is keep our meetings a little bit smaller where we can. There seems to be a tipping point, and I've not I did see some suggested science on this, but I'm not sure I believe it yet that there's a tipping point on this size of meetings where people just can't contribute and they get easily distracted. And then for us, it's about having clear roles and agendas.
And what is that size? Like, what have you found in terms of meeting size, in terms of what's what's the optimal, what's getting a little bit too big, what's definitely too.
Big for me personally? Anything over eight. Right, it's no longer a meeting, it's a broadcast. Right. So I did a session yesterday. Thirty five people dialed in. Right, it's brilliant. It's me doing a presentation to our marketing team on the future of work. The way I structured it was, I'm going to present for twenty thirty minutes. Use the chat function in Zoom to log your questions as you think of them, so you can ask them as you instead of interrupting me. Log them in there as you
think about them, so I've got free flow. And then the second half of the meeting, we'll go through the Q and a, Q and A and the discussion. I already had the list of questions because I could see people's names against them, and that meant that we could have smaller dialogue and conversation and we could keep it to those points. Right, So everyone's still in gauged and
I've got some level of collaboration. It's not the same as doing it in the room, and I wouldn't claim it was, but at least we got some of the richness of the feedback loop. And I mentioned that on purpose because I think a danger that I've seen, or a mistake for a lot of leaders, is they're using this time of COVID and distributed to just broadcast more and they're inadvertently listening less. Right, there's lots of people doing loom videos or zoom videos pushing content out, but
they've forgotten that real communication is using your ears as well. Right, it's not just using your math. And if we lose that sort of message check and understanding how we made people feel and the actions they took, then there's no point in doing the broadcast.
I like that a lot. I like your use of the chat function, like what I've been doing. I've been doing a lot of virtual keynotes now for clients and events, and I love that I can have the chat box open on my screen so I can almost hear people's reactions live because I encourage people to type into the chat box and I kind of react where I But it's funny. I had this experience a couple of days ago where I was doing a virtual keynote to a
biotech company. There are about four hundred people online and as always I encouraged sort of chattered through the chat box and they were so chatting, which is awesome, but then I'm like, hang on, no, this is overwhelming for me. I cannot respond to everyone. So I like what you're doing in terms of having the chat box open so you can kind of see what's going on there, but
then carving out time to respond to all that. So you've got people recording their reactions and questions in real time, but then it's also not interrupting your flow, and I imagine that like one of the benefits to that is that you're also getting responses from more introverted people who perhaps wouldn't normally speak up. Are you finding that?
Yeah, I mean that's what you've hit the nail on the head, right, which is you know again, I think distributed and the technology using now can exacerbate that problem. Right, you can quite easily hide. If there's eight people in a video chat. It's not easy to hide, right, you can just get your phone out and catch upon you to list and just leave the video playing, because if they don't hear from you, they don't know what you've not said. I think it's a lot easier as a facilitator.
For me, it's a lot easier to spot that inner room. But then I think that's the role of a great facilitator still, right. We make sure that, certainly for our larger meetings, when we're doing problem solving, we have someone almost facilitating, like Nikki the operations person, facilitating that conversation to keep us honest, keep us on track as top us going down those those rabbit holes, but also to
make sure we're getting the right level engagement. It's not that all eight people should have us say in all decisions. It's just making sure we tap the right person. So it's like, ahh, dom, I've heard from you. I've heard from you, but amut there, Like, I'd love to hear your opinion on this because I think you might have a view that's important and bringing that person in that's the same in person is on video. I think it's
just more important to do on video. And that's what the second half of that presentation gave me because suddenly, when I stopped sharing my presentation, everyone appears on screen, right, So I've changed from broadcast to consumption, so I can see the people, but also then my job to go, hey, the teacher I love that question, Becky. I'd love to hear your view on that, because I've worked with you
on this thing before, Like, what's your view? So actually, I reckon half the answers came from other people on the call, right, which again is just I think facilitation one on one. But one of the things that I believe to be true in this distributed world is that the things in leadership that we used to call soft skills, and I know me and you share a view on this, they're not soft, They're really hard. But those soft skills
are becoming even more powerful. Meaningful communication, you know, genuine empathy, the ability to deliver a vulnerable, open, honest, authentic message, to be oneself and to be true to oneself, those things are even more valuable than ever before. And so I think what we're going to see is the people that do that not seamlessly, but the people that do that naturally are going to become way stronger and better
leaders as they evolve. And I think that's a skill set that it's not something that we're born with, right, I think it's something that and ethers can go and learn by getting to understand communication or storytelling even more that is.
It for today's show. If you want to listen to the full episode, I link to that in the show notes, so you might want to check that out. And if you are enjoying how I work, I would be so deeply grateful if you just take five seconds out of your date to leave a review in Apple Podcasts. It might be a star rating or a few words, and by doing so, it helps other people find the show and it also brings a huge smile to my face. So thank you to the hundreds of people that have
left reviews. It is so deeply appreciated. So that is it for today's show, and I will see you next time.