We're Awareness. Good morning everybody and welcome to this OnPoint webinar. Today we're going to talk about faster meetings and better decisions, how we practically approach inclusive decision making and still keep up the momentum and the pace of doing so. My name is Jacob. I'm an occupational psychologist and a senior consultant at Implement. And in a show of great diversity, I'm also a psychologist here in Implement where I've also specialized in the relational side of our organizational life, which also of course includes when we collaborate in our meetings and how we both include and we act for speed and haste. Cool. And the first thing we want to do is to do a kind of a little smaller survey. So we're going to invite you to join us in a Mentimeter where we'll have five questions. There'll be one and then four following. It's going to take a little time, so please be patient to swap between. And we want to show the results on the screen. So please bear with us and fill out the form. We would like to see how much time that people spend on meetings. Cool. We have a nice response. I think most people have done that. And this is actually a very common answer because what we see from studies is that if you look at an average employee, they spend around 30 to 35% a week on their meetings and on leaders, it's around 60% actually. So that's the typical time spent. So let's go to the four next questions and see how they look. So four questions. How efficient would you assess your meetings? How often do you participate in meetings with an unclear purpose and agenda? How often do you have experienced a meeting where some people spoke all the time and others were almost quiet? And how often have you left a meeting uncertain if you made a decision and what the decision was? Thank you very much. So we have like these, you know, we have these medium things and especially what is a typical pitfall is where you have lots of individuals in many of those meetings actually taking off too much space and too much time. Sometimes it's contextual and it's required and sometimes it's just something that is ruining the process. So we do have a lot of meetings that are known to be inefficient. So what we're going to address here is trying to give you some methodologies, give you some ideas, some approaches where you actually can resolve some of these typical pitfalls of doing meetings at the same time keeping momentum and creating clear decisions. So let's move on to the content. Cool. So what's wrong with our meetings? And of course, some of it you've just answered to and there's a little element of preaching to the choir here because you've logged into a webinar about making better meetings and faster meetings and more inclusive. But there are some general things that we'd really like to do. really like to try and do something about if we are spending 60% all the way up to 80% of our work lives in these things in our meetings. And of course, we'd like to point to that sometimes part of the problem is that the point of the meeting is unclear to the participants or sometimes maybe we have a meeting where the point is not really relevant at all or it's not communicated that the point of this meeting is just to inform you. You need to know that there's something here that will happen at some point but the rest of us would actually like to get to the work and move forward. Or in all other kinds of ways, we can have a meeting where we're not quite sure why we've actually gathered. Or maybe, and I think worst of all, we can have meetings where when we leave there, we're not sure what we actually generated. And we're supposed to gather and meet in our workplaces to generate some kind of output where we feel more workable clarity to move on with our work or we meet the success criteria of actually having made a decision that we can move forward and try something new with. Or maybe we have a meeting that is a lecture and we're a little bit forced in this webinar format to have some lecture. But we really shouldn't if we're stuck with our colleagues in a meeting room. Why would we want to have a lecture where everyone is just sat listening to the one person who has the information, the project, the status update? Maybe you could even be so bold to say as the one who is speaking is the one who is learning. So we need to have more of us speak and learn at the same time. Or maybe if it's not a lecture, it's just the one or two of us kind of dominating the meeting, debating and discussing with quite a few people who are not so much participants anymore, but just spectators to the dual, to the discussion that we have across the table, two of us. Of course, not very constructive. Or our discussion gets off track. And even though we've actually been quite clear about the format and the purpose of this meeting is to answer these three questions, still we wind up just in the age old discussion of our organizational silos or something that is an old horse getting back into our meeting. Or we just have information on repeat. And we know that it's a good idea to repeat some important communication and especially in management communication. But we still can get a lot of tiring meeting time spent if we have 60, 80, 50% of our entire work life spent in meetings if I'm just being repeated the same information when not really moving forward. Or even though we haven't made a decision, we haven't made clarity on the next steps. We have a meeting that we all know where we leave the meeting and we start getting bilateral phone calls from all our colleagues to really figure out what are we going to do from here. Or we don't have accountabilities that are clear enough for us to actually make sure that something happens. Or our focus is on discussion rather than making decisions. That a focus is placed on maybe just repeating some of the same arguments that we've had a lot of times. Or we spend too much of our time in our meetings actually arguing for the same thing. We're more here who are ready to try and do this activity, but we still spend a substantial amount of our time arguing why it's a good idea. Let's move on. So there's a call to action here and we can also see that in your answers and just in our generic knowledge of our meetings that we should try and do something about it. And we'll do our attempt here. Furthermore, one of the challenges also that way that we make decisions that we have this tendency to build many of our decision as past experiences. So a lot of decisions also needs to be moving in a direction where we experiment acting our way into new knowledge, especially when we're living in a world that is so unpredictable as it has appeared to be. So last five years, we've seen acceleration of change and transformation in many different areas of our society and acting upon that as an organization in the meetings. Past experience actually sometimes can be get in the way of making good decisions. And also what we see is that analyzing past decisions or past experiences also end up having a lot of debate and discussions of positioning who knows best about the future. So this balancing, shifting this balance towards acting in a more experimenting, trying out kind of approach to making decisions. Let's try this. Let's see what happens. Let's evaluate. Means that we have to make decisions in a different way. That is also one of the topics that we're going to address. So we don't end up creating meetings that comes and becomes an organizational anger of, you know, India and just tied to old experiences. So what happens and one of the things that really goes wrong in many meetings is that we have the content we want to address. We have the agenda. We have the points that we want to address. We have the different themes we want to talk about in that. And the process gets in the way. The process has a tendency to get in the way. So what we're going to propose and what we're going to talk is a little bit about subjecting yourself to a certain level of structure. We believe there is a better way. But you have to ask this question to yourself. How willing are you to subordinate yourself to structures and processes that restrict many of your habits, preferences, behaviors, and autonomy to serve the purpose? What we also experience is saying yes is one thing and doing this in real life is a completely other thing, which is much more challenging because we have this, you know, limited frontal lobes resource, which means that we have to put some of this into the structure of the meeting process. So looking at this, what we want to do is we want to propose a number of structures that can actually support the process and the content by putting the process into a framework that actually can help you make a decision, create progression, and work with that. But it will require a change of behavior from each and every participant in that meeting. So to summarize, these are some of the principles of the inclusive meetings that addresses some of this. It's an inclusive agenda. That's the first point. An inclusive agenda is by actually being able to everybody has equal access to build the agenda. So everybody who is participating in the room owns the agenda and the individual points of the agenda. So everybody can add stuff to the agenda. Nobody is excluded. Nobody is excluded. The moment you begin to exclude access to the agenda, you will have people in the meeting who is not included in what the purpose of the meeting is. Secondly, inclusive rounds. Inclusive rounds mean that we basically take turn-taking around the table, making sure that everybody is heard. You have to actively be invited into the conversation and you have to actively step out of the conversation to not be a part of that conversation. So we are reversing the logic when it comes to normal meetings. Last but not least is we do inclusive decisions. Inclusive decisions is a way of making decisions where decisions, if you have a problem with the decision we're making, we don't say you can say that or we don't want to include your concerns in those decisions, but we actually want to listen to your concern and see how we can modify the decision we're making to make sure that your concern is included. in the way that we move forward with this decision. The moment somebody is making decision on your behalf that you do not feel your concern is included with, you do not feel ownership to that decision and you end up going out of that meeting doing something different in most cases. So that's it. And there can be a pretty big paradox with our meetings being that even though we can have some animosity towards why don't they work better? If we ask ourselves what's part of my favorite work life memories? A lot of the time it is actually also in a meeting, at an offsite, in a seminar where we really felt we got something done and we progressed and we felt the cohesion with our group. So even though they can be huge time waste and time sinks, when we're lucky and when we actually are generous to each other, they can also be our best work life experiences. And productive at the same time. And part of that might be, and that's something I'll argue for here, that we do work with this invitation. That I am invited into the conversation and not just me, but all my colleagues as well. And sometimes we're lucky that we have a meeting leader or just a leader in general that is good at doing this, that is good at inviting us. And maybe we're lucky that we have a meeting leader or just a leader in general that is good at inviting us. And maybe we'd like to answer Jacob's question from maybe we should subordinate ourselves to a little bit of structure to just force us to work with this invitation. One way to do that would be to be pretty insistent on speaking in rounds. And when we're so lucky that we have great meetings, it's also a lot of the time because we're actually discussing ideas. That instead of using our meeting time debating and discussing abstracts or rhetorical questions, there's some of us who are saying, I actually have found something. I believe we could do a way better R&D strategy if we leverage financing in a different way like this. What do you think about it? And then we have something concrete to the table that feels burning and important. We have an idea that we need to figure out. Are we going to do this? So maybe we want to do this? So maybe we want to do this? So maybe we want to be pretty insistent on to force us into having more meetings about concrete ideas that we start with concrete proposals anytime it is possible in our meetings. I propose that we do like this going forward. And if we are to propose concrete ideas and show them, it can be a little bit vulnerable. And all of us know that if I give out an idea in the room to my colleagues to my colleagues and they just immediately tell me, we've tried this before, it didn't work, or I am completely sure it won't work, I know from a fact that our colleagues over here won't do it. We need to do something different. We need to make sure that we meet all ideas from our colleagues with interest at the very least. And when we're lucky, we do do that. But maybe we'd like to force us to meet everything with questions before we get started. So we jump to evaluation. Before I tell you whether I like it or not, I should do clarifying questions to make sure that I understand what you're telling me. And when we're lucky, we can also feel we've actually progressed. We've moved forward. We've made an impact. I can see the output of the meeting because it's these four decisions and it's these two things that we have decided to really do differently. So we want to have an impact when we spend our time in our meetings. And maybe we can force ourselves to make sure that we earlier than feels comfortable ask ourselves, are we ready to make a decision? And if the answer is yes, we should write it down. We should do it. We should make sure that we follow up. So when we're really lucky, this is part of what I expect our best meetings to look like. They are really characterized by invitations, ideas, by showing interest, and by having impact and output afterwards. And maybe we'd like to force ourselves to have our meetings characterized by this. And one reason to do that is to talk in rounds, systematically invite each other, every member of the meeting to participate, to separate questions from input. And this can be pretty difficult, actually. And allow only for questions before we move on to input, before we move on to say, what do we actually think about this. Understanding before input. And then also, as Jakob alluded to a little bit, that we want to do something about our decision process. That we want to make sure that in our team we can decide without agreement. And even though it's not my favorite solution, I can let reality be our guide and test. I can decide that I do not agree, but I consent, I accept, I feel that this is worth trying out when you tell me so. So we can use this zone of tolerance, which is a key concept of this meeting format. Yes. And the key concept of zone of tolerance is probably one of the areas where there is much psychology interaction. because everybody of us in this room, because everybody of us in this room, because everybody of us in this room, has like a personal preference. And our personal preference is when we can get exactly how we would like it to be. So this is where I have my own personal preference of that. Beside that, I have a zone of tolerance. A zone of tolerance is basically defined by, I can live with it, I can accept it, it's okay. But it's not what I would prefer if I could decide for myself. you only object to a decision. And this is where we really happen with this, is if you think that we're making decisions directly is harmful towards what we're trying to achieve here. So that's the three layers that we want to address. What we discovered over and over in time working with this is that everybody has to take their own little stance on, where's my zone of tolerance? Where does the limit go? Where does it challenge me? And it's not like a stable fixed point for each of us. It can actually be vary from different agenda points and so on. This one I can accept. This one is actually harmful. And this one is actually very close to my own personal preference. So having that kind of conversation with yourself, we've seen this over and over again in many meetings where we've done this, is actually that this will challenge your decision process, that I can disagree with the decision, but I can't see it's harmful. So we accept it. I don't object to it. So that's one of the areas that we are working with when we do these meetings. Furthermore, we also have the role of a facilitator. So every meeting should have an appointed facilitator. And normally what we also recommend is that the facilitator does not be the one who owns the purpose of the meeting or the agenda or the leader of the team. What we want to hear is the facilitator is someone else who only has the focus of making sure that the team is the team. So that the process of making sure that the process of making sure that the process of making sure that the process of making sure that everybody is aligned and everybody follows the process as we agreed upon. Safeguard that every voice in the room has a space. Safeguard that everybody is heard. They can equally share their point of view. Safeguard that also means stop disruptive behavior either that's disrupt the behavior, the process or disrupt the individual voice and then make sure that there is a turn taking all around. So everybody is invited in to the conversation. So what we're going to do is we're going to give you a small example in a moment. So we go to the video, but and what you're going to see here is we're going to see how we create the inclusive agenda. We're going to be inclusive agenda. We're going to see how we do a check in and then we're going to see how we propose a prioritization of the agenda. And the prioritization can be quite important because actually we have a limited amount of time. So make sure that we have the right topics on the agenda. And that's one of the roles of the facilitators. So enjoy the video. Okay. Welcome team to our team meeting. So today I will be the facilitator and Nikolaj will be the decision dogger. So let's start out with our check in round. So I suggest we start over here. Ida. Yeah. Well, I'm checking in with good energy. I just had a meeting with our Christmas party committee. So yeah, I'm in a good mood because we have a lot of good things planned. I'm checking in with good energy, even though the traffic was really jammed as I got here, but all good. Check. I'm checking in with a sick child at home. So maybe I won't be here tomorrow, but I'll let you know. I'm checking in with great energy, but I also just want to inform that I have to leave five-ish minutes before. Yeah. I'm checking in with good energy as well. Happy to be here with all of you. And yeah, good vibes from here. So we have nothing in our backlog. So we will build the agenda together now. So let's start out over here. Astrid, do you have anything for the agenda? Yes, I have an exploration point. Well, I would like to explore the wellbeing role in the team with you. And Nikolaj? Yeah, I have a decision point on vegan lunches. Yeah. And I have a decision on cancel meeting less than 80% participation. I have an information about being back from maternity leave. Yes. And I have an information about alcohol-free Christmas parties. Right. So I suggest that we prioritize the agenda like this. Can you all consent? I consent. Consent. Consent. Consent. Thank you. So let's get started. So that was you from the past, Jakob, just in the initial stages of a meeting in a studio. So a setting where we try to do just the agenda. Yes. So, and I think part of what is also good to notice here that we actually pretty insistently say we should do a check-in and not to disrupt all of our meeting and to spend too long. And in this case, it only took just about two minutes to both check-in but also do the agenda. And part of that reason is to make sure we don't all scramble five minutes before the meeting ends where we haven't made a decision, we don't have the clear next steps, and suddenly we discover someone has to go early to make their next meeting or suddenly we figure out that someone needs to keep an eye on their phone because they have a sick child at home. We'd like to just get that out of the way in the beginning to have everyone just mention something in the meeting so we're ready to speak together, but also so we can get any practical things out of the way. And then we need to have everyone be able to say this is something that's important for me. Maybe this is something that's blocking my work. And part of that is also so we don't have one person, one leader who is decision logger, meeting facilitator, and strategic tactical leader in one who has to make sure that we are speaking about the right things in the right way at the right time. It's a little bit of a big task. So if we can distribute that a little bit, so we actually, all of us say, this is what I have for the agenda, and then we decide, is it this priority? Let's get started. It doesn't have to take a long time. And furthermore also, when doing the check-in, we know from studies that the chances that people will speak up later on in a meeting if they've done the check-in, said a few words in the beginning, especially in a virtual context, that is actually more, it just promotes that. So the chances will heighten that people will speak up on a later date. So that's one of the reasons why we do the check-in, just to whatever you need to leave outside, whatever you need to be present here, and make sure that everybody's participating. So that's one of the things. One of those things, and to create some clarity on what is coming next and speaking around and doing the invitation. And it can feel a little bit weird, but there are several good reasons. One of those being, just as you say, Jakob, you're more likely to speak up later if you've spoken up early on. And other reasons that are just like some good old classics that you might want to speak to is, if we have unstructured meetings, we're fighting for the meeting time. It's kind of an illusion of free space. And part of the reasons why we might want to say that is, you've probably seen, a lot of you, this very famous old psychology experiment with Solomon Asch, where they have people join a room and they are supposed to measure, is the length of this line equal to line A, B, or C? And there's a really obvious answer. Anyone in their right mind is able to see that the line matches only line A, but then you're in a room full of actors who come, and all of them repeat the wrong answer. And a pretty substantial amount of people, they show conformity and they say the same answer as the group, even though they know it's wrong. So we want some structure and some help to make sure we don't just end up in conforming to what the group is saying. And maybe we need to hold a little bit of space of turn taking for that. And secondly, we also have a lot of studies and Stasser and Titus is one of those who indicates that we have this tendency to leave out information that is perceived or self-perceived as different or alien to the team. So we have this subconscious self -censorship that is growing over time, where we leave perspectives out of the room and leave perspectives out of the meeting and not making sure that that is involved into the decision process. And it's something that really will diminish the decision and actually cast on the quality of the decision that comes out of it. So that's one of the typical psychological pitfalls also. And then just as the third point that we're mentioning here is this idea in research of the Babel hypothesis. And what we're citing here is a larger meta -study because the Babel hypothesis idea is that people who emerge as leaders in our organizations are the people who speak the most. And there are some research backing that up. And in this case, a pretty large amount of data showing that actually it is a pretty good strategy for emerging as a leader to just speak a lot, even though never mind the quality of what you're saying or whether it's directed at what we're doing. Just taking up a lot of air time can help you and actually emerge as a leader. So how do we avoid that? We want to avoid that. We want to avoid that. And we want to avoid that maybe. And this is the golden trick that we're showing you now. Now we are finally opening this chest of gold that we've been promising you. What are the structures and process that you want to subordinate yourself to? Of course, still the turn taking, but also a really structured process that once we've done the inclusive agenda and we've decided that this is the way we're going to do it, we will process all of our agenda points by always starting by asking the person who has the agenda point, what do you need. And this is a really important question. And the question is important also because if we don't want meetings or agenda points with unclear aims, we need the person who's put it up to just explain to us. Do you need us to understand something? Do you need for us to explore and discuss and give perspectives on something? Do you need for us to understand? Do you need for us to understand? Do you need a decision to actually move on? What do you need from this agenda item? And then we also always say that we start with inform and understand. So that's coming back to we want to meet ideas and everything else with interest. So first off, we have a round where we do each of us and we say this round is about the other person, the one person in our team who has something to the agenda. The round is about you. And the desired result is we want to make sure that everyone understands what is going on here. And you saw in the video that someone has an agenda point about vegan lunches. And if you have such an agenda point, we expect that everyone has an opinion. And if we can just hold that back a little bit to make sure, have we understood what is going on here? Have you already talked to suppliers? Or in your proposal, from when would this actually start? Would it be all our locations? We want to understand what is going on. So we will do this process of insisting. The facilitator will insist only clarifying questions, no input, no evaluation. And if I had started off by saying, I just need for you to understand and be informed about we have this change that we can do nothing about, we would stop right there. We would say, once we've gone around and there are no more questions, this agenda point is over. Because our purpose was to inform and understand. We've asked questions. That's it. It can be a really, really big time saver in keeping our meetings efficient. And on the other hand, perhaps one of our team members tells us, I actually want to discuss and explore something. Then we would still start at this first step of the staircase. We would still think that it's important to do a round about you, the other person. So we'll still do clarifying questions. But then, once we've actually done the clarifying questions, once we've understood it, we would do a round that's about me or about each one of us who are members of this team and of this meeting, just stating, I would wish for it to be like this. Or maybe I have an idea to adjust it a little bit like this. Or maybe I'm just excited and I really hope that we can get started on this. But I get time for my input. I get the opportunity to tell the group that this is my preference. But a round about you with clarifying questions first. A round about me and each one of us with our input following that. And if we're just to discuss and explore, we'll stop here. We'll ask whoever put something on the agenda. Did you get what you need? They can say yes or no. If they say no, maybe we'll just do one more round with a new question. But we'll always start at the bottom. We'll always start by informing and understanding by asking questions, no matter what we have on the agenda. And Jakob and our colleagues in their very cozy meeting in the studio in the past, they also went through this. So let's take a look back in time. So, Nikolaj, what do you need? Well, I need for us as a group to make a decision on if we should have vegan lunches in the cafeteria instead of what we have now. That's basically it. Thank you. So let's make a clarifying questions. So let's start over here. Thank you. Have you received any feedback from that idea? On that idea? This is the first time I'm mentioning it. Have you thought about how it will affect our budget? I'm unsure as to what implications that will have on our budget. Have you checked for specific suppliers to deliver this? Yeah, there are three suppliers that I'm talking to right now. I'll pass. When will it start? I don't know. Will it be every day? That was my suggestion, yes. I'll pass. So any more questions? No. No. Then let's move on to reactions. And I think we start over here, Ila. Yeah, I kind of like the idea. I think I would prefer vegetarian. That's my reaction. Yeah, I also like the idea. I also like the idea, but I would just, I think kind of the main menu could be vegan or vegetarian even, but like a small bar with some meat or extra protein, I would prefer that. I would prefer that we start out with just maybe two days and then the rest will be normal days. I think that we start out with just maybe two days. I think vegan. I think vegan is a big step and I think it's good to take it stepwise. So we just, because it's a lot of food that you have to pull out of the present state. So that's it. Yeah. I'll pass. Yeah. Pass. Pass. I think generally it's a good idea. Check. So any more reactions? Otherwise, I think we'll move on to the decision. What you've seen here is just a little simulation of where you've seen the two first kind of rounds that we take. So we divide the rounds also in different areas. So we have these kind of, you know, questions, reactions. So everybody has like kind of a safe space where it's okay to ask questions. It's okay to come up with your reactions. When you share your reactions. When you share your reaction, what we do is we move on to decision process. The decision process is of course a little bit more challenging. So it's about creating the next step. And what we do here is that we actually make this decision based on consent. The consent decision process is about working with your zone of tolerance. You can also get your personal preference, but it's first and foremost making sure that it's your zone of tolerance. So the owner of the proposal, the way that you work with the proposal, and we do like to work with proposals in this process because it moves us forward, is actually to adjust the proposal as it is. So you can adjust it through the input and the clarifying questions that you received from your colleagues. And then you make a decision. So you amend, you adjust if you feel a need for that, and then you move up. And that step is about creating a proposal that you're going to be a proposal that actually aims for consent, not agreement. And that is normally a challenge. And what you can see here in the video is like two things that are really highlighting some of this process is that you are allowed to ask questions that cannot be answered. And you're allowed to share all of your reactions, agree, disagree, and whatnot. There is like very, very wide room for your reactions. So when we do this, what we do here is we work with a different set of decisions criteria. And that's the way that we approach this. So any objection is basically a gift because it's a concern whether what we're doing right now is harmful and getting in the way of us moving forward. But what we want to do is moving that into the criteria. Can we create a solution to the criteria? So we're going to create a solution that is good enough for the criteria. So we're going to create a solution that is good enough for now, safe enough to try, and can it be changed on later date when we get more insight. So the concern here is basically that it is not good enough for now, it is not safe enough to try, and it cannot be changed on later date. So that would be one of the things that would trigger an objection. What we normally would say is that people actually allow to do an objection based on a personal preference because if we can amend or adjust the proposal based on your personal preference, and it's not in the way of the way of the way of the way of the way of getting things done, let's try it out. So it's not a problem to have an objection. It's about having like that kind of eye into the decision process that actually makes this forward. So we don't want to make this into a, you know, democratic decision because it's not a democratic decision. It's about amending and adjusting the proposal until we have consent. So what we do here is start by integrating the objections. And we do it like this. Because in this third phase, in this decision phase, we are trying to do a phase about us, all of us. We've had the questions to you to discover and understand. We've had the input, mine and my preference, in the hopes that maybe we can actually do it that way. But then in the third phase, where we're making a decision, we're doing something radically different. We're trying to see what can we accept together. How can we make this decision actually come into the zone of tolerance for all of us so we can try something out? And we just always have the playing field ready of trying to integrate objections by either making the size of the proposal a little bit smaller. Can we do an experiment? I cannot accept to us doing it in all of the business. But I can accept that you try it out in your team and let's talk about it in two months and figure out if it's a good idea. Maybe we just issue a time limit. I'm afraid of doing this decision because I'm not quite sure that we'll actually make sure to adjust it if it doesn't work. So let's just make sure that part of the decision is we will revisit 3rd of April. Maybe I can accept something if we measure it. the impact if we decide what's an impact measure. And then once we have that, we can decide whether we should prolong or not. Maybe I can consent to this decision in a way that we actually make a plan to get some more information because we're not quite ready yet. But I still want to keep the wheels running. I still want to keep the wheels moving and get closer to a decision. We can make some kind of other process to get some more information. There's some risk here in just making too many decision committees that we don't need. Or maybe if we actually invest the time to just entertain the idea that there is a creative both and solution here. That there is something where both of us can get our way. We should spend just the five or six uncomfortable minutes in our meetings to entertain the idea that we might create something that's good for both of us. And the way to do that is if someone has an objection, we always need them to identify on what grounds, what is your worry here? What's the problem we're solving for? And then we also want that person to give the first piece of reasoning for a way forward. This is my specific worry. And if I have that worry, I could maybe see this decision come to life if we integrate it in this way. And let's see if my colleagues and if you, Jakob, managed to do that in the past. We have one more video. All right. Thank you for the input. Nikolaj, would you like to adjust or withdraw or keep the proposal? I'd like to just keep it as is, five days a week, vegan, in a month from now, and I'll make it happen. Yeah. Great. So let's do a round whether we consent or object. Object. I consent. I consent. And I consent. So, Jakob, you object. Can you put some words on that? Yeah. I think it's a big step moving forward. So my concern is that we might not get people along or that you get a lot of negative reaction. And that's not very good. So I would propose that we find a kind of modified version of that. All right. And do you have any ideas on how we can move on with the proposal, with your adjustments? I think that we could keep the vegan lunch and start out as opposed to this, but start out by doing it two days a week as a starting point. I think that would be good. Then people can try it out and see that it's not so dangerous because the idea of vegan lunch might be more dangerous than what it really looks like in real life. So that's my suggestion. So your suggestion is that we do it twice a week and the rest of the days we keep as it is for now. All right. So let's do a round on that, whether we can consent or object to that. So let's start over here. Nikolai? I consent. Yes. Yeah. I consent. I consent. I consent. I consent. Yeah. And I consent as well. Great. We have a new decision then. Twice a week there will be vegan lunch. And what we saw here was actually an objection and an integration of an objection in a proposal by making the proposal a bit smaller. So let's experiment, do that, and try it also with the time limit. So how do we work with integration of objections in a meeting? So first and foremost, we work from a proposal. So that the foundation is always having a proposal. And then you do first objection. So what is your concrete concern? In what ways is harmful for our task and purpose? So the person who has a concern or has an objection actually have time to elaborate and also share some of that. And then the question is, how can we modify and address your concern? And how can we modify the proposal and bring it forward? So that would always be the question. And you always raise that to the person who has the objection. If that person do not have any idea or any suggestions, you can ask the whole team as a facilitator. So you ask everybody taking turn, take a round where everybody's invited to come up with suggestions and ideas to modify the proposal and bring it forward. Especially, I think, the key of using the sentence, bring it forward, is you cannot use an objection to do a rollback of the proposal. The process is there. Let's find a way to bring it forward in a safe way. So this is actually basically some of the basic process. And you can do it with one objection, but you can also do it with many objections. So this is just one example in that. So what we do here is then you move it on to the next proposal, A, and then you ask the proposal giver, do you object or consent? And if the proposal is object is objected again, or the modified proposal is, then you do it one more time. The same process over and over again. So consent, objection, modification, object, consent, modification, until you have a proposal that you have the consent. Many teams that we work with have the pitfall of falling into this idea that this should be working with getting an agreement. And it's not about getting an agreement. It's about creating a proposal that is not a proposal that is not harmful and can make consent. If you have more people in the same room who has these kinds of objections to the same, you take them one at a time. And what you will often discover is that some of the other objections in the room will just dissipate when you've handled one of the objections because they are actually dealt with in that. So, and Jaap, you were a little bit easy with amending this proposal. In this little video we saw. And sometimes that happens also in real life. And yeah, I cannot really consent to this, but if we just amend it, we experiment, we make it smaller, I can. And we can let reality actually do its work, make us smarter. But also, I do get that this process seems a little bit uncomfortable to many people and many teams. But it's not that much of a long process. It's more so that it can be a little bit uncomfortable. And I think we should ask ourselves, should we not invest just a little bit of time to figure out, is there a creative both-and solution here? Is there some way that we can just get this running? And also, this is also a pretty important thing to ask because if we ask this question early on and there are no objections, then we know to not spend more time discussing this. Then we can just move on. And I think that's a pretty important point also from all the real life teams. where we're spending our time in our meetings in this way. A lot of the time someone got an idea, they proposed something, and we achieve consent or we amended it beforehand from the input round. And then we just made a really quick decision where all of us was involved. And no matter what, we do want to just encourage you to have these four ideas of our great meetings in mind. that we want our meetings to be characterized by invitation, by ideas, by interest, by actual impact and output once we're done. And we can get there by doing these three phases. The first phase about you, where we ask just clarifying questions, preferably in rounds and in this format, always in rounds. And then one round that's about me, where I get to disclose my personal preference. This is what I'd really like to see happen. Maybe I just say I like it. And then this third phase, is it's about us trying to come to a decision, trying to explore, is there a way to move this decision into the zone of tolerance for all of us? Maybe by making it smaller. Maybe by making it something that is a little bit different from what it was initially. What can we get out in the real world to try? And we'll do that by talking in rounds, systematically inviting everyone in, by separating questions from input and being pretty insistent that this is just clarifying questions. Input comes later. And then importantly, to decide without agreement, to ask ourselves, are there any objections? Is it good enough for now? Safe enough to try? And can we change it later at another date? And if it is good enough for now, safe enough to try, and my colleague thinks it's a good idea, let's try it out, even though it's not my favorite. So very simple. Just to give you some summary of advice from this input. And then we'll have time for some questions. Meeting structures that support complex decisions. So make sure you have a meeting structure that supports what you want to do. Make sure you uphold it and have someone who functions as a facilitator and referee. Also, when you are a proposer, you come up with ideas or solutions, lean in and listen to the feedback and input. Don't be rejective. Don't be rejective, but actually do that. Because the idea is basically to make sure that you have the team with you. And you only do that by getting consent to the decision. So everybody has a say in the decision that comes out of the meeting. And always meet proposal with a yes until it's harmful. Make sure that when people come up with ideas, don't get in the way of people good ideas if you don't think it's harmful. If it's harmful, then raise your concern and let's see if we can address it and address it. And then remember, and I think that is one thing that is really important in many organizations, is all decisions are temporal. They have an expiring date where this decision is no longer valid or is needed or is good. So these are some of the things that we want to say about creating faster meetings and better decisions. It will require training to do so. It's not something that is just done by saying, let's do it. It actually requires training. It actually requires training. And everybody who's gone through this will be trained and have tried this out many times before it actually becomes good. But try it out in small steps. So any questions from the chat? And if you have any questions that you really want to raise, then please put them down there. We had one that has been raised over and over again, the size of the team that we can address in these meetings. And what we've learned is that we have different ways of doing that. ways of tweaking this meeting. But there is a kind of a limit to that. And what we do in most cases when we have like a long, a big physical meeting is break it down in smaller teams to make both the check-in, but also making some of the decision processes in that. And then you made a joint process. And then we also have another process that is more asynchronous. Yes. Yes. So maybe you'd want to also, if you have a large group, you can do some of this process asynchronous by saying, we'll make a decision with consent this Tuesday. Until then, in this online document, this is my proposal. You can write questions in this column and input in this column. And then I will update it on Wednesday before a meeting. Sometimes that can be a good idea if we're really large groups. And we also, we had a little bit of downtime when we saw the past you, Jakob, fiddling with this vegan lunch. And I noticed this one question, which I think is an interesting one as well, about what if we in our meeting are all in the same role or we've only gathered the same department. So we have kind of the same perspective on this. And there's one practical thing that I'd just like to share because we had one organization that had this same thing. And using this meeting process, one person proposed, why don't we, for some of our meetings, invite someone else in a challenger role to join our meetings, who comes from a different place in the organization. And they're not part of our decisions, but they're part of our first two rounds. So they get to ask questions and they get to give input before we make our decisions. That's one pretty low bar practical thing you can do. But I will also want to just, from my point of view, highlight that I think that this clarifying questions round is also pretty interesting to just peak our ability to try and think, what would someone else say? And I do think that pretty often when we have this clarifying questions round first, even though it's from my own perspective, from my team's perspective, maybe I do get to ask, have you asked some of our stakeholders? Or maybe in the input, when I'm invited to, it's a little bit easier for me to say, I can be a little bit worried about how this will be impacting our clients of small size, because this and this and this. I do think it can help us a little bit, not solve our problem entirely. And maybe we'd want to invite someone to help us with that. We also have a question about, what about in, how does this model work in environment with organization, politics and power and games? And that's a very good choice. So, these are a challenge and very valid questions. What we see over time and time again is that, that the whole power game and positioning in many of these organizations we work with is slowly fades away because you cannot, in a consent decision process, you cannot really use power to get your way. It slowly is actually diminished in that way of working. But we do actually work with that. And we also talk about how those power plays can actually influence a meeting process. But it's something that we see that this way of working, because it is so structured, it is so also, for some people, quite rigid, is actually it makes sure that everybody has a voice in the room. So even those who are holding back their voices or afraid of their voices is actually a challenge. Of course, there are organizations who are functioning really bad. We've had a few, but I think we count them on one hand, very few examples of really bad behavior in organizations. And at the same time, of course, we cannot remove power from the equation in our organizational collaboration. But part of what this meeting structure is also trying to help us with is mitigate it a little bit by having invitations and also by being quite clear on, clear on, if you want to stop this decision, you need to amend it and you need to tell us a specific worry. And also, some kind of power imbalance can be okay if we can reach consent. It can be totally fine to say, shouldn't we give Matthias this specific decision power in our workshops? And if everyone can consent to, we're going to try out to give Matthias this decision power, it can be totally okay, as long as we still have this meeting structure to make sure that it's possible to make it different. It's still possible to adjust if it doesn't work. But we can give power during this consent process as well to make sure we don't need to have all our things come up in meetings. We don't want small little practical things. We want to decide that if you see anything like this again, you just make the call. We have something about cross-cultural context here, which is a question, and that's going to be the last one we're going to take today. In cross-cultural context, we've seen this work out in different areas, stuff like that. But the moment that you actively are invited into the conversation, people slowly learn that it's okay to share their opinion. But you can never force people to have an opinion or an idea or suggestion or proposal that is not ready for doing so. But learning slowly and building a safe environment, sharing both your questions and your thoughts actually promote that kind of honesty. But it's something that is trained over time by slowly knowing that this is going to happen over and over again. So it's something that can be trained. It's a muscle that needs to be exercised, basically. So that's what we say to that. And I think we should wish you a very big thank you from both of us for joining us this morning. And hopefully we've given you a little bit of an call to action for training this exact muscle of getting some faster and better decision meetings and just meetings in general. And you can try some of these steps out in small doses. Just do a round. Just say we insist on questions before input. Maybe just try to do the decision round. at the end or maybe the whole thing. Yeah. And you'll receive a follow up email with some of the content that we shared. And hope to see you out there and have both faster meetings and better decisions. So enjoy your morning.