Improve your meetings with the Six Thinking Hats
Let’s face it: most people don’t love meetings. If you start a Google search with "meetings are," the autocomplete prediction will return "waste of time," at the top of the list, with other options such as "toxic" or "useless" appearing in the Top 10 suggestions.
According to a HBR pre-pandemic study of 182 senior managers from various industries:
62% meetings miss the opportunity to bring the team closer together
64% meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
65% respondents feel meetings keep them from completing their work
71% respondents said meetings are unproductive and inefficient
Reclaim AI also published (more recently) meeting statistics and productivity trends, estimating that a white-collar professional will spend between 21.5 and 32.9 hours per week in meetings. Given how people feel about meetings, that is a staggeringly long amount of time.
So, what are the most common reasons why people dislike meetings? Surprisingly, it's the absence of decision-making and conclusions, in addition to the usual suspects (such as poor time management, a lack of an agenda, and rabbit holes). So, if we’re in meetings so frequently and they are such an important part of our lives, why aren't we better at them?
This week, I have a suggestion that could reduce the amount of time you spend in meetings while also making them more productive and improving decision-making quality.
Try using the Six Thinking Hats, by Edward de Bono.
It is a process that encourages parallel thinking rather than argumentation and encourages people to evaluate situations and opportunities from perspectives other than the ones they may naturally default to.
You can use the cards below to better understand the functions that the various hats can play and how you and your colleagues can use them for better, more productive meetings. Try it out!
