Meetings vs Reviews

Everybody loves to complain about meetings, and at Brand New Box we are very intentional about NOT having any more than needed. A quick chat will almost always accomplish something that a ‘meeting’ might. But this recent article from Allan Chochinov at SVA totally had me convinced to try a different tactic: ‘Change Everything You Hate About Meetings with this ONE SINGLE WORD..’

I’ll #saveyouaclick here - I do think the whole article is interesting though - but the trick is: call it a Review, not a Meeting. A meeting is where people sit and talk and don’t get work done, a Review is where people bring a product of work to the table and we figure out how to improve it. Maybe that product is a prototype, or a wireframe, or even just a document or proposal. But that product gives the meeting focus and direction.

At Chochinov’s SVA program, this manifested as “NO PROTOTYPE NO MEETING”, where you’ve got to bring something to every meeting. But he recommends now just calling every meeting a Review from now on, and that linguistic trick will do the work for you. Because who would show up to a Review without something to review?

I’m totally going to adopt this at BNB and test it out. I took a small shortcut here by kicking off this week with our quarterly employee reviews… but I’m excited to try it on our next ‘meetings.’