Flying by the seat of your pants

Few people would disagree that meetings are the most universally despised aspect of business life.

Despite people’s intention of improving efficiency and productivity, meetings typically have the opposite effect. They’re mostly just theaters for people feel good about themselves and make their bosses happy.

Harvard actually conducted a survey of senior managers in a range of industries a few years ago, and more than sixty percent of the participants agreed that meetings keep them from completing their work, come at the expense of deep thinking and forego opportunities to bring teams closer together.

My response to all of this anti meeting rhetoric is, okay, fine. Meetings are completely wasteful and absurd.

But they’re not going away anytime soon. And so, let’s not burn any more calories demonizing meetings, creating any unnecessary psychological fuel around something we don’t even want. Talk about inefficient.

Instead, let’s accept the fact that meetings are a part of doing business, and do whatever we can to give ourselves and our teams the greatest leverage during that time. That way we can keep innovation high on the agenda.

In fact, much of my research on personal creativity management shows that preparing for meetings is the source of people’s fears, not the meeting themselves. Perhaps what they need are better tools to help set themselves up for success once the team as gathered.

Here are few to try.

Do you have a big meeting or presentation coming up, and you really want to knock it out of the park? Try something called over preparation. Create twenty percent more content than necessary so it’s easier to adjust on the fly.

In my career as a public speaker, this tool gave me a huge advantage every time I stepped onto the stage. Over preparation made me feel safe, confident and relaxed in my performance. And it made it easy to go an improvisational tangents to serve the needs of the audience in the moment.

Other team members in the meeting may no notice that you’re over prepared, and you may not even get a chance to fire all of your creative weapons. But one thing’s for sure, your energy will be calmer and more confident. You may not be able to influence the outcome, but you can certainly elevate the experience.

Here’s one more tool.

Say your team has a brainstorming session coming up, and you want to be a key contributor to the idea bank. Try walking into that conference room with an innovation frame. This tool is a system for pursuing invention systematically rather than sporadically.

The founder at my old ad agency taught us how to do this. Each copywriter had to present their ideas for campaigns in the structure of five questions.

*What is the problem?
*What’s the insight?
*What is the innovative idea?
*How does it work?
*What is it called?

That’s an innovation frame. You avoid the stress of starting from scratch, make it easy to arrange a large amount of information quickly, and allow your team to brainstorm the ideas in an organized way.

Some of the team found it to be too structured, but personally, this frame was game changer for my ability to consistently generate innovative ideas. Because in my experience, flying by the seat of your pants can be fun and useful, but it shouldn’t be your primary ideation strategy.

Remember, meetings might suck, but they’re not going away. Spending two hours in a conference room thinking up a hashtag absolutely nobody on the planet will ever use is an absurd waste of time.

But as long as you’re there, you may as well contribute.

What do you bring into the room intellectually, energetically and interpersonally that helps your team innovate?