5 forcing functions for better meetings in 2024
Summary
Forcing functions are constraints that nudge people towards desirable behaviours. In this article, I discuss five forcing functions to promote effective meetings.
Block your first half and Fridays for deep work. This’ll reduce the amount of time available for meetings and promote thoughtful scheduling.
Encourage each other to decline meetings without agendas. That way, meeting organisers will sweat the details of their meetings.
Don’t start meetings without identifying facilitators and notetakers. This’ll help you drive meeting better and to document your outcomes.
Practice creating 6-page memos to help everyone prepare for a meeting. That way everyone has context before they enter a real-time discussion.
End all meetings five minutes before the designated end time. Use the last five minutes to record decisions and next steps.
In his landmark book, “The Design of Everyday Things”, Don Norman introduces the idea of a forcing function. Forcing functions are constraints that drive behaviour: failure to meet the constraints blocks the next step you wish to take. For example, you can’t open your microwave door without turning off the power. You either do this manually or in a newer oven, the device cuts off power the moment you open the door. Similarly, hotels use card keys to turn on the lights in rooms. Since you’ll take your key with you when you head out, you also force the lights to go off; lowering the hotel’s electricity bill. Thaler and Sunstein’s work on “nudging” also includes many examples of such forcing functions.
Forcing functions are a design concept and they’re important for leaders to understand since you must also “design” your team’s ways of working. So in today’s post, I want to share with you five forcing functions to nudge your team to have more effective meetings.
Focus chosen, meetings frozen
Many years back, when we all worked in the office, my teams and the others I observed, followed the practice of “core pairing hours”. These hours were for undistracted, heads-down work. The only interaction we encouraged was pair programming. When the pandemic induced a remote work revolution, pairing got harder because most people hadn’t discovered tools like Tuple or Pop. As pairing fell by the wayside, so did the idea of core hours. This meant that our entire day was available for meetings. It’s not surprising that ever since many people have complained of Zoom fatigue and meeting overload. We’d lost the forcing function of core pairing hours and we hadn’t adapted our ways of working to the new medium of remote work.
Fast forward to present-day, “hybrid” teams, where someone is always distributed in relation to you, it doesn’t help to reach for meetings as our first option. But how will you nudge each other towards a different way of working, if your entire week is always open for meetings? As a first step, we must reduce the hours available for meetings.
In previous articles on this site, I’ve made two recommendations.
On your team calendar, block four hours each day for focused work. There should be no meetings during this time. The only permissible interactions should be pair programming/ paired work. The only exception? A full-blown emergency! And even that shouldn’t affect the entire team.
Practise “Fridays for focus”. You can choose any other day and find another alliteration that appeals to you, but I’ve noticed that ending the week with a spell of deep work creates a sense of accomplishment among people.
Of course, blocking this “meeting-free” time on the team calendar doesn’t help if we riddle our own calendars with appointments. So the hidden third step is for everyone to sync their personal calendars to follow this predictable rhythm.
Make deep work a team priority by making 24 hours a week, meeting-free
Now here’s what you’ll realise, the moment you move to this kind of calendar. You only have 16 hours each week to schedule meetings. That places an automatic limit on how many meetings you can have. Everyone must be thoughtful about the meetings they set up. To be clear, 16 hours for meetings is plenty! That’s 40% of the hours available for work each week. Chase Warrington of Doist reports that on elite, distributed teams:
85% of people report spending less than five hours a week in meetings;
and 50% of people report spending less than two hours each week in meetings.
By reducing the number of hours available for meetings, you’ll apply the most impactful forcing function in favour of effective meetings. But that won’t be enough. You must also nudge people to conduct these interactions effectively.
No agenda, no attenda
I’m willing to wager that many people who read this post have a few meetings on their calendars, which only have a vague title and no agenda. If the organiser of a meeting hasn’t bothered to write up an agenda, it should warn you of a few possibilities.
The invitees don’t know what value they’ll get from a meeting or what value they’ll bring to it.
Most people, apart from the organiser, will come to the meeting unprepared. This will often lead to shallow, off-the-cuff, unfocussed and unproductive discussions.
You may spend a substantial amount of time in the meeting, “winging it” - because no one knows what the meeting is about, or how to spend your time together.
You won’t know when to call the meeting “done”. After all, if you don’t start with a goal, the end can’t be clear.
The larger the meeting, the more wasteful it’ll be. A one-hour meeting between five people is not a one-hour meeting. It’s a five-hour meeting! And if it’s useful, that’s great, but without an agenda, it’s far less likely to be worthwhile.
In 2024, I shouldn’t have to explain the value of an agenda, and yet you have those agenda-devoid meetings on your calendar, don’t you? I suggest that all meetings that your team has in 2024 and beyond, follow a simple rule - “No agenda, no attenda”. The name is self-explanatory. Everyone on the team should have the safety to decline a meeting without an agenda. Once this happens a few times, it’ll nudge team members to think through their agendas and who they need to achieve their meetings’ outcomes. It’ll also help invitees determine if they’ll add to or derive value from the interaction. “No agenda, no attenda” won’t just focus the discussion, it’ll also help you limit the number of people in each meeting.
No designated duties, no meeting beauties
Moving on, I’m sure you’ve been in meetings where people ramble, without an identified facilitator or a note-taker. This leads to unstructured discussions and unclear outcomes. But isn’t the fix a straightforward one? Once you have everyone you need on the call, the meeting organiser should announce who is facilitating and who is taking notes. By default, the meeting organiser should be the facilitator, but regardless, it’s worth making it explicit.
When you get into the discipline of using your first couple of minutes to designate roles, you also get yourself in an excellent position to leverage AI assistants. If you have access to Otter or Zoom’s AI companion, you can seek everyone’s permission to let these bots take part in the conversation. That way, you can also save someone most of the effort of note-taking.
6-page memos
My next forcing function is hardly original. Jeff Bezos banned presentations from meetings at Amazon, in favour of what he called 6-page memos. The idea is straightforward. Every meeting must have a corresponding document (six pages or shorter) that every attendee must read. It literally gets everyone “on the same page” with the problem they’re trying to solve in the meeting. It also forces the meeting organiser to articulate the problem and its background information in a concise format.
I find this method of context setting far more effective than the slideuments that people “present” in meetings. Slideuments are the bane of corporate boardrooms and conference calls. They’re neither suitable for visual storytelling, nor are they complete enough for reading. People spend too much effort trying to fit the 3:2, 4:3 or 16:9 form factor of slides. They compel themselves to add unnecessary visuals - as if they must infantilize their audience into paying attention to the message. Presentation tools don't have writing tools like spelling and grammar checkers either. In an age when good writing has become the casualty of an instant messaging and over sharing culture, slideuments promote poor writing and incoherent artefacts.
Of course, writing a concise document is also a skill. But I argue it’s a skill most of us are already familiar with. Modern tools like Hemmingway, Grammarly, Duet AI and Notion AI, all facilitate effective writing. I’ve also put together a short guide for you to learn how you can write engaging and effective documents. I’m sure you’ll find it useful.
6-page memos go well with the forcing function of silent meetings. Ideally, you’d like people to consume the document before they come to a meeting. But if your team’s not familiar with asynchronous work, then it’ll be awhile before they build the discipline to prepare for their meetings. I suggest you set aside a few minutes at the start of each meeting for everyone to read the corresponding document. In silence! They can use this time to drop their comments and make their notes as well. It should take less than 15 minutes to complete this activity, but it’ll be 15 well-spent minutes. In due course, the team will recognise that they can complete this reading asynchronously and you’ll be able to make your meetings shorter.
Final five, make actions alive
My last forcing function is for the way we end meetings. It’s unfortunate when a vigorous, energising discussion ends with a whimper. People leave the meeting without agreeing on outcomes or next steps. If the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of a meeting is in its outcomes and next steps. And we need a forcing function to make that proof come alive!
The easiest way to implement this forcing function is to end all meeting discussions five minutes before the end of time. Use the last five minutes to document at least two things.
What do we agree on?
What are our next steps? i.e. Who does what and by when?
Use inbuilt timers to stop ahead of time, so you can make notes (image credit: Zoom)
You can even delegate the responsibility of stopping early, to the tool you’re using. For example, Zoom offers an app timer that’s visible to everyone in the meeting. Set it up to a countdown and it’ll alert everyone when it’s time to stop and summarise the discussion. Nifty, ain't it?
By the time you read this post, it’ll be a new year. If you are leading a team in some capacity, I bet you’d like to help your team embrace a calmer, more satisfying way of working. I suggest using the positivity of the new year to ring in some changes. Implementing forcing functions to make your meetings more effective could be a great way to kick things off.
Becky from Doist recently wrote that “Asynchronous communication isn’t exactly the sexiest sounding of topics”. Daphnée Laforest alluded to this some time back as well. And yet, it’s ironic that most people want to work remotely most of the time and remote work can be quite ineffective with constant back-and-forth communication and a trigger-happy, meeting-centric way of working.
Effective meetings are one of the by-products of an async-first way of working. But who knows - for some teams; optimising their meetings, could be a way to usher in more asynchronous ways to collaborate. In 2024, I look forward to exploring such nudges and forcing functions, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride!