ConveRel quadrants

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The ConveRel quadrants

The ConveRel quadrants are a way for you to triage your meetings and figure out which ones can immediately or eventually be async. A classic 2x2 matrix, the two axes are as follows.

The “Conve” axis

At a high level, you can break communication down into two parts.

1. Conveyance. As you may expect, this is mostly unidirectional information transfer. For example, a status update.

2. Convergence. This happens when two or more people need low latency, high bandwidth exchange of ideas to come to a shared understanding. For example, using available information to make a collective decision.

The “Rel” axis

This axis quantifies the strength of the relationship across a wide spectrum.

1. A weak relationship. This is often the case between people who haven’t worked with each other for very long or even if they have, they haven’t had the chance to lay down ways of working together.

2. A strong relationship. Such relationships often exist between high-performing teams and individuals inside and across organisations who’ve built a strong camaraderie working together.

Now that you have visualised the matrix, let’s use it to decide which meetings are necessary and which ones you can do without. 

Quadrant	Strategy
1. Conveyance - strong relationship	Default to async This is as straightforward as it gets. If the information is unidirectional, remember that people can read faster than they listen. Moreover an asynchronous artefact is persistent, editable, and allows for more in-depth, inline interactions - e.g. questions about the content.
2. Conveyance - weak relationship	Build the relationship with the aim to move async While nothing changes with the information between quadrant 1 and 2, sharing information in a meeting is a contrivance to build a working relationship. As the relationship gets stronger, you shouldn’t need these meetings any more.
3. Convergence - weak relationship	Default to sync Without established ways of working it’s tough to enforce a diligent culture where people prepare for a meeting and make the most of synchronous time. Many work relationships will start here, and trying to rush through this stage may be counter productive. So it’s ok to default to meetings here, as long as you also commit to improving the relationship as you go.
4. Convergence - strong relationship	Prepare async; synthesise inputs and then go sync While it’s likely that these interactions will need a meeting, it’s crucial that everyone does some legwork to make that meeting effective. This means that everyone who attends needs to study the relevant information. You may need conveyance leading up to the point of convergence. Sweat those details. One way of ensuring that people consume all the necessary information before getting into a decision is to adopt the 6-page memo pattern from Amazon. More on this shortly.