Unstructured meetings waste time and energy. Recent articles, like this one in the Wall Street Journal, document the growing popularity of "stand-up" meetings as a way to avoid the wasteful meetings of old. Just standing up, however, isn't the answer. Better meetings require better structure. Stand-up meetings offer some structural innovations that can help improve our workplace interactions. But meeting formats become even more powerful when they are combined with discussion formats that also … [Read more...]
Creating a community of practice
Learning any set of skills requires sharing our experiences, ideally with others who are also using the skills. Precision Q+A teaches sophisticated cognitive skills that grow over time and through practice. We can deliberately enhance our capabilities by participating in communities with others who are practicing as well—what cognitive anthropologists call "communities of practice." These communities help knowledge workers in domains ranging from managers to surgeons and engineers to artists. … [Read more...]
Taking Precision Q+A personally
Vervago recently worked with a young CEO—we'll call her Ramona—whose technology startup company had failed. We suggested that after the standard technology post mortems and business analyses were over, Ramona could benefit from an additional review, this one completely personal. We asked her to work her way through some of the slide decks that had provided foundations for key decisions, asking herself in relation to each: "What questions did I ask?" "What questions didn't I ask?" "Was my style … [Read more...]
Three steps to higher impact questions
Does the following scenario sound familiar? You step into a status meeting and ask for an update: "Any new risks to the schedule?" Rashid, your counterpart in purchasing, responds quickly: "Delay in materials! When I called the supplier this morning…." You quickly realize this issue is uppermost in Rashid's thinking, but his response doesn't represent a thoughtful list of all the new risks to the schedule. What's a precision questioner to do? Before you blame Rashid and move on, consider how you … [Read more...]
Slippery Terms: Do you and I mean the same thing?
In the field of informal logic, "slippery terms" are words that mean one thing to one person and something different to another. They produce a consensus that is often an illusion, and therefore likely to fall apart. With long-time colleagues, the depth of shared context or background is usually enough to keep our meanings aligned. But when we work with people we don't know well, and we add differences in expertise, language, and culture, slippery terms create errors, misunderstandings, and … [Read more...]
The Power of Go/NoGo Questions
When meetings go wrong, the grumbling begins. The leader didn't have an agenda. The goals of the meeting weren't clear. One person monopolized the discussion. Key participants were unprepared. There were too many useless tangents. So whose job is it to fix broken meetings? … [Read more...]