Over the last 20 years, organizations have witnessed a dramatic rise in collaboration tools, accompanied by a steady decrease in productivity. Dr. Mark Smith doesn't think that's a coincidence.
"If you are taking up three-quarters of my available time by talking at me in lengthy meetings, that is going to have a significant impact on productivity," he explains. The founder of Meeting Canary has spent his career watching this paradox unfold: the tools designed to help us collaborate have systematically destroyed our time and ability to think.
In this episode of the Whole Brain® at Work podcast, Mark explores why your meeting culture systematically excludes breakthrough thinking, and what happens when you give people their time back.
Setting up a meeting used to require real effort. You had to book a room, coordinate schedules and prepare agendas. There was friction, but it served as a helpful filter for determining whether a meeting was worth the extra effort.
Today, you can simply follow a link and you're transported to a productivity-killing meeting. The transaction costs that once created natural boundaries have completely disappeared. Organizations lose $37 billion annually from these meetings, and knowledge workers spend roughly half their week in meetings that are deemed unproductive.
"It is a form of theft, because it's so easy to do and the consequences are so slight," Mark argues.
The financial numbers fail to capture the true extent of the damage, though. With only four hours of daily deep work capacity, filling someone's calendar with hours of meetings has made breakthrough thinking and innovation mathematically impossible.
Mark has a colleague named Matt who rarely speaks in meetings. Matt listens, absorbs, then drops a single insight at the end that reshapes everything. "Whatever he says, do that," Mark learned over time.
Matt represents deliberate processors. These are thinkers who require time to synthesize their thoughts before contributing. Rapid-fire video calls with constant interruptions shut them out of the conversation entirely.
From a Whole Brain® Thinking perspective, your meetings likely favor certain thinking preferences over others: verbal processors over visual thinkers, quick analytical minds over interpersonal voices. The cognitive diversity that should drive breakthroughs becomes a liability when your meeting culture can't accommodate different thinking preferences.
"Innovation happens at the extremes, not average," Mark argues. Android started with two people. Google Maps with four. Small teams with extreme cognitive diversity and protected thinking time create what matters. That can’t happen in today’s meeting culture.
Mark's prescription for meeting malpractice is blunt: "Just stop it."
Need a place to start? Begin by measuring what's happening. Track who speaks, who gets interrupted, whose ideas get attributed to someone else. Most organizations are horrified when they see the data. That horror drives change.
Then redesign for how our brains actually work. Use multiple modalities, such as visual boards for visual thinkers, verbal discussion for verbal processors, and hands-on elements for experiential minds. Give people explicit permission to decline meetings that don't match how they contribute best.
"We are an extraordinary species that can do extraordinary things," Mark concludes, "but not if we're sitting in front of a computer hours on end doing nothing other than meeting."
There is so much creativity in everybody's mind, you have to release it, and you will not release it if you have hour after hour of meetings, particularly at certain points in your life as well. If you have children, or grandchildren, in my case as well, you haven't even got the breathing space in the evenings or at weekends to think, it disappears. And you need that in work, you need time, and that's the thing we're losing.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Whole Brain At Work Podcast. I'm Karim Morgan Nehdi. I'm a CEO, entrepreneur, investor, and cognitive scientist focused on how thinking impacts management and organizations. In my work leading Herrmann and building a new AI startup, Ned.ai, and in working with thousands of leaders and teams around the world, I've become deeply invested in understanding the interplay between how we think, how we work together, and how emerging technologies are reshaping both. So that's what this podcast is all about
And I'm Ann Herrmann-Nehdi. Today, we're diving into a topic that I think triggers instant PTSD for most knowledge workers today, and that is the topic of meetings.
That's right, we're talking about the $37 billion productivity crisis that's hiding in your everyday calendar.
Dr. Mark Smith is the founder of Meeting Canary, an AI-powered tool that tracks participation patterns, calculates real-time meeting costs, and nudges teams towards better collaboration. Mark, welcome to Whole Brain At Work.
Thank you, Ann. Thank you, Karim.
So Mark, tell us a little bit about Meeting Canary. What is it?
Meeting Canary is an app you can download from the Teams App Store. It provides physical presence inside your meetings in the form of a canary. The canary displays various animations depending on what it's seeing and hearing in a meeting, and we also provide a sidebar as well, which shows who's contributing, who isn't, how much a meeting is costing, and measures such as focus, energy, inclusion and respect, and those sorts of things. After the meeting's closed, we produce summarizations and action points, which end up in the chat of the Teams Tenant, so nice and secure, and a very comprehensive report about what happened in that meeting and who said what to whom, and there's various things which help make your meetings better.
And tell us, how did you come up with the idea for Meeting Canary?
It has all sorts of advantages with it, but it's basically a career's worth of irritation about the increase in the amount of meetings that have occurred and the impact that's had on creativity, innovation, and progress. So it's a reaction to declining productivity, that's what it truly is.
Let's start with the big picture, Mark. You've built a technology that holds up a mirror to our meeting culture. When you see organizations seeing that data about how much time and money they're spending in meetings, 23 hours a week in meetings, 70% rating them as unproductive, $8 million lost per 1,000 employees, what's their reaction? Do they laugh? Do they cry? Do they go into denial?
I think mostly they're horrified. People often arrive horrified, having worked out the size and scale of the problem they face. I think what we can do is also quantify that problem for them as well. All of us experience the same problem with online meetings. Everyone feels the problem is huge, but unlike so many other parts of business, no one knows exactly how big that problem is. The analytics are not there. Initially, it's either horror at what we show them is the problem, or recovering from the horror they already know, and then want something that can solve that problem. And that's where we come in, because you can't manage what you don't measure. This world has been in an unmeasurable context for many years, and what we're trying to do is simply analyze and present. We're the messenger, if you like, of the problem.
Oh, I love that analytical, very precise response to such a visceral problem, Mark. From a whole-brain perspective, though, I imagine different people react differently to that data, so if you're more analytical, it's like, "Oh, finally somebody's got some numbers to explain what I've known to be true," right? Have you noticed any patterns in how different types of leaders or team members you've talked to about this respond to that data?
I think the most quantitative individuals I work with, and bear in mind I've been running software firms most of my life, they tend to be, broadly speaking, in that area. They are relieved to recognize what the problem is, and then sometimes jump a little bit further forwards than one might hope they would. I'll give you a very specific example. One of the things we try to do with Meeting Canary is have a whole bunch of metrics that we group together in things like focus, energy, respect, inclusion, and those sorts of words. There are all sorts of different measures that we put together and weight accordingly to give scores.
Now, one of the things we noticed early on, it's not fair to start measuring focus until such time as a meeting has started. Small talk occurs at the start of meetings, so we make this very human attempt to learn something about each other in order to have a better or happier experience. Now, you can get different types of answers to what you should do with that information. At the extreme end, you'll get the brilliant, "Let's never do small talk ever again, because they can save us 10% of all meeting time." That's not great. But equally, you have people at the other end thinking that it's perfectly okay to have small talk and then perhaps return to those subjects at the end. The types of thinkers affects the interpretation of the data, which is itself fascinating.
I want to dig into a little bit of how we got here. I've heard you talk about work from home, and many have mentioned that work from home is the inevitable way forward, but that's created some unique challenges for meeting culture. Pre-pandemic, we had natural friction. We had to book a room, and there was travel time between meetings and physical movement that created some sort of a boundary. How has the shift to click a link and you're in another meeting change things?
I think there is a challenge with the working from home culture. I, however, think that it's not a coincidence that in many advanced economies there has been a steady decline in productivity over the last 20 years or so. I don't think it's coincidental during that period, there has been a dramatic rise in the availability of collaboration tools. I don't think you can absolutely prove it, but instinct says if you are taking up three-quarters of my available time by talking at me in lengthy meetings, that is going to have a significant impact on productivity. My personal motive is to give people their time back so that they can think.
I was likening my career to a week, so measured between Monday and Friday. Now, bear in mind I'm about Friday morning. That's where I am in my career if a week is an entire career. So what I've noticed back on Tuesday or so, there was quite a lot more time in business. And work is not just about the grind, it's about the pause and the thinking and the talking to individuals. And I think working from home is brilliant. I've done it all my life, I love it. But not if the working from home is filled with unnecessary meetings. Excessive meetings are reducing productivity and kiboshing innovation, in my opinion.
So what you're describing in economic terms is effectively a transaction cost for meetings that has risen dramatically post-pandemic.
Absolutely. It's crazy. As I look back on last Tuesday when I was early career, to set up a meeting was a proper pain. I mean, you had to speak to a chairperson, you had to get agendas together, you had to get notes before a meeting, you had to write to people. Now that's gone.
This concept of transaction costs is really fascinating. Let's take away the natural barriers. Have you seen differences in meeting patterns between startups versus large corporations? I'm imagining that startups might typically have totally chaotic, everyone and everything kind of meetings that work great for those experimental thinkers that we know about, but that absolutely torture the more practical, processor types who need some structure. What have you seen?
I think there is a massive cultural difference in the way people engage in startups, and I find that the most exhilarating part of business. When you have so many unknowns, you have so many challenges to overcome, it's just exciting and your mind fizzes with all the possibilities, but also all the hurdles that you have to overcome. So I think it is a little bit more chaotic. I think in larger organizations, you get a lot more rules and regulations, and a lot more unionization as well. So we're working with companies in Europe where the attitude towards the workers' council or the union may stop us from being able to do what we're doing, because, "Hold on, you are monitoring us."
I still think in both cases, too many meetings happen, and that reduces the amount of time you have to literally think. There is so much creativity in everybody's mind. You have to release it. And you will not release it if you have hour after hour of meetings, particularly at certain eight points in your life as well. If you have children, or grandchildren in my case as well, you haven't even got the breathing space in the evenings or at weekends to think. It disappears. And you need that in work, you need time, and that's the thing we're losing.
So you've observed, as have I, that many organizations have consciously or not, optimized their meeting culture for actually less-effective thinking. I remember reading some research from Microsoft that shows there are interruptions every two minutes or so. I feel it myself, the urge to jump in with an idea or contribute a thought, sometimes to the point where it interrupts my ability to actually process what's being said. And Stanford says that it takes 25 minutes to recover from each interruption.
Yep.
How do you think this constant cognitive fragmentation is impacting our brains?
The very fact that you are advised now to get your ideas across in under 10 seconds on certain social media platforms troubles me. On a serious note, I started work quite a while ago, so burnout wasn't a phrase that was used very much. I don't doubt that it existed, but it didn't seem to exist in any way near the levels it does today. And I do put that down to the constant bombardment. Just remembering the channel through which someone communicated with you these days is a challenge, right? I don't believe that's an age thing. It's become very complicated and it's not doing us any good. I don't think we are having the breakthroughs that we would have if we weren't doing this nonsense.
I think it'd be interesting to dive into what Meeting Canary actually reveals, that your technology tracks speaking patterns, interruptions, interaction dynamics. I've seen Karen Snyder's research from her original 2014 study showing men interrupt women 33% more than other men. I've experienced that myself. And that women speak only 25% of the time in mixed-gendered meetings, yet are perceived as dominating at just 38% of participation. So what patterns have surprised you most in looking at your data?
Patterns that have surprised me? I'll return to small talk. Small talks are interesting, because for the first time, I suspect ever, we can show small talks' duration as impacted on by late arrival. Will have experienced it this week where you are in a meeting. Someone said to me, "Oh, we've just got to wait for Paula to join the meeting." So, small talk goes on. And that's surprising, no. Proving the cost of that really interesting, because you can actually quantify the impact of late arrival. So you can actually say, "The impact of this across a company that employs 10,000 people is X million dollars a year." The surprising outcome may well be to encourage people towards better behavior because it's better for the company. That's one thing that's surprised me.
Video usage puzzles the hell out of me. I cannot understand why people with the wonder of the technology available to us are simply refusing to shut their faces. And there's a deeply cultural things there it seems as well. We have a lot of users in Southeast Asia and the use of video is very rare. That, video off and just listening, well, it's no different from 40 years ago. It was a collaboration. So it was really odd, actually. So, lots of little patterns of data which are intriguing us.
Fascinating.
That's really fascinating, Mark. And you've done some really interesting research on different meeting types as well. I'm curious how you've seen different meeting types impact participation patterns?
There's enormous research into the types of meetings that occur. There was a lovely piece of work done by, I think it's Lucid. He may be of Lucidcharts fame, who've come up with this wonderful matrix. 16 meeting times they've picked out. I think that's too many, it's too complicated. But for us, certainly the measures that we're making are dependent on the type of meeting that's occurring. For example, if you have a brainstorming meeting and you have 10 people in that meeting, you would expect, you would hope, there will be a contribution from everybody. Now, if you had a meeting where someone was presenting, you would hear a lot more of a single voice and very little of other voices. So in the context of measuring things like participation and inclusion, the latter example needs to be weighted differently from the former example, because you would expect to have one person dominant. In the first one, the brainstorming, you shouldn't, perhaps. But in the second one where it's a presentation, you should.
So we are cognizant of the meeting type and can make certain adjustments. If somebody is presenting, we change the way that we make certain calculations because that is a pretty clear indication it's going to be one voice followed up by other voices later. But what we need to do, and we're not there yet, is we should be divining from what's been entered, what meeting type it is to begin with, and that's going to affect the metrics you make. So that's meeting types. Now, hybrid meetings, that is a challenge, and I think your psychology background is going to be a lot more useful than mine. I can only give you a technical reason why that's so difficult. The explosion in the ability for us to do what we do is the consequence of the opening up of APIs and products like Teams and Zoom, which only happened relatively recently. You combine that with the quality of transcription services, and then you have this dream ability to take the individual streams of audio that are coming in from Mark or Ann or what have you.
And you can quite accurately attribute the words said by Mark, the words said by Ann, and you can also see where those words clash. When you have a hybrid meeting where one of the squares is four or five people, you then have the challenge of interpreting who they are, because it might just say Conference Room One. And the sorts of ways of doing that, voice signatures, asking people to say their name, it's possible to do it. We've got quite a lot of work at the moment. Now, where we have nothing to contribute yet is the psychology of those outside the room versus those inside the room. So I can only ever speak on that on a sort of anecdotal basis, where my experience is when you have a group of people in the room and there's a handful elsewhere, you tend to forget them. It's really easy to just ignore unless they're the CEO. It's quite easy to forget those people outside the room.
From a whole brain perspective, I'm curious if you see meetings favoring more verbal processors, for example, over visual thinkers, or quick responders over more deliberate processors, sort of styles over collaborative ones. Are we systematically excluding certain types of cognitive diversity in the way meetings happen? What have you seen so far?
My instinct is yes. I think there are behaviors that happen in online meetings which had pretty much died out in face-to-face meetings. I'm a reasonably big chap and have chaired lots of meetings in the past. A raised eyebrow to a colleague if they're behaving in a way that I think is inappropriate was often all that was necessary to keep people on the straight and narrow. That's an extreme example. But that's gone. Likewise, in face-to-face meetings, someone just starting to type on their computer or pick up their phone and do something, that genuinely does happen in loads and loads of meetings you see online. Would never happen to face-to-face. So I think there's a lot happening online which is creeping back into things that should really have become extinct.
The introvert versus the extrovert is a huge challenge. I have several colleagues that I've worked with over the years. There's one in particular. He's called Matt. And my answer with Matt is always, "Whatever he says, do that." Because I learnt, whatever he says, just do it. His contribution however, is very slight. He listens, he absorbs, he's clearly concentrating, but he says hardly anything and he speaks at the end, and what he often says at the end has normally blown up everything that's said beforehand. But, and this is where technology may help, we can detect energy, so words per minute and a number of other measures that we make, it is possible to see those quiet contributions leading to a rise in the graph on energy.
Again, it's a longitudinal thing. You need more data to be certain it can happen. But my instinct is that there'll be a way of showing those people whose contributions are slight, but whose resulting energy levels in a meeting increase. And I think that should be powerful and insightful to the person that's supposed to be chairing the meeting as well.
Here's what I find fascinating, when people can see these analytics in real-time, does awareness actually change behavior in the same way that that raised eyebrow would in a face-to-face meeting? Your tool and the data it provides is so powerful because it makes the visible visible. If you show someone that they've been speaking for two minutes straight or display the meeting costs ticking up in real-time, what happens? Does it create lasting change or just temporary adjustment?
We're seeing a decline in the length of meetings since we introduced the Canary, our cartoon character that sits in the meeting and has little roller blinds it pulls down every so often telling you how much money you've spent. What's the collective participation time? There's 10 people spoken for an hour and there's 10 hours, that sort of thing. It may be anecdotal and the data will show it, but we are seeing a slight reduction in meeting length, and I wonder whether it's a consequence of those cues.
This brings us to a fascinating concept from Cal Newport's work, attention as currency. He found that knowledge workers have maybe four hours of daily deep work capacity, but if you're in meetings for 5, 6, 8 hours a day, when does innovation happen? How might meetings and even our days evolve, if we measured attention and cognitive load rather than just time and value?
It's got to be better. I can't prove this, but innovation happens at the extremes of the bell curve, right? Innovation is not average. So I keep coming back to the wonders of AI. It's just average. It's always just average. Excitement in innovation is either ends of these. Now, where does that come from? Sometimes it comes from group work, but oftentimes it's that light bulb moment from an individual. So, taking that four hours that you described when you are at your best and freeing up half of that, or three-quarters of that to allow people to do the extraordinary things that our brains can do and AI can't, I can't prove that productivity declines are related to collaboration software enhancements. But I'm fairly sure that I and others are less innovative as a consequence of having our time stolen from us. And it is a form of theft, because it's so easy to do and the consequences are so slight. So yes, it can't not be better.
I'm thinking about leaders who genuinely believe that more meetings equals more collaboration, equals more innovation. But what you're suggesting is there's actually sort of an inverse correlation. So what's your response to those leaders?
Analyze your data, see what's actually happening, work out what's happening across your organization and where the reality is, and then try if you can, to quantify innovation. I think giving people time back instinctively should improve the amount of innovation that's occurring. But I do go back to the additional thinking that so many exciting innovations come from tiny teams. The Android operating system was two people. Google Maps was four people. That's where they came from. I think you have to acknowledge the problem, quantify it first, acknowledge it, and then create measures that show improvements in productivity. You can't manage what you don't measure, so measure it.
All right, Mark, here's an interesting question. If you could rebuild workplace collaboration from scratch, no baggage, no legacy systems, would meetings even exist, or would we default to asynchronous interaction?
It's an interesting one, actually. If I had to describe a workplace that works best for me and most of the people I know, it's probably 75% of time away from an office, and then a collaboration where you are taking the thoughts you've had, which may have been embellished via asynchronous interactions. The meeting together, the human condition, is such that those are the moments where your breakthroughs are enhanced. So I think four days a week away from people and one day with them, because there's nothing that quite beats the pint after work. At the end of the meeting, the conversation that happens where pressure's off, people are thinking about what they've heard, often that's where some of the really interesting come from. It's when you're away from stage, almost.
It's interesting that you say that, because as we've been building a new team for the Ned.ai venture, we've been very intentional in designing our work so that it is around 75% asynchronous work from home and 25% co-located innovation sprints. So we gather from all different parts of the world once a month for a week to really dive deep together. And of course, there are meetings in between where we connect and line up on things, but we keep those pretty limited and really make the most of the time together face-to-face to do some of that in-depth innovation work that really moves the needle in terms of progress, especially for a new venture, a new idea, a new product that's getting built. And one of the things that I've seen in the course of that work and more broadly, is using different formats of meetings or gatherings for different purposes. Stanford showed that walking meetings boost creativity by 60%. So now with each of our leadership team off-sites, we do a walking component. How do we match meeting format, especially with virtual meetings, to purpose and to potentially cognitive or other needs?
If you're going to have a meeting, be respectful of the time that you're taking from other people and make it absolutely clear the purpose in that meeting, and if you can, the role that you expect the person to fulfill. I'm not talking about some kind of fascistic imposition of, "Thou shalt do this," but I think treating meetings with the respect they used to have is absolutely key. And I think there is a definite gap in corporate ability around chairing as well. There's all sorts of societal differences between people that need some proper thinking and proper acceptance. And [inaudible 00:25:46] your comment about men interrupting women more than women interrupt men, it's just true. Hepeating, which was a word invented by, I think it was an American physicist, as I recall, a woman, and hepeating is the notion that a woman says an idea, it's largely ignored, a man repeats it, and everyone goes nuts. "That's a great idea, John." Right?
I've seen that several times in my career and it's an outrage, and you need to have the skills, the person chairing or organizing the meeting needs to be aware that these things happen and try to the metaphorical eyebrow raise when that sort of thing happens, or at least return the origin of the idea back to its owner, that sort of thing. I think we have lost a skill that we had not that long ago and we need to go back to that and be respectful of time. Because if I'm championing the idea of fewer meetings, the ones that are left need to be much better than they are today, and that's all about organizing and being respectful of people.
One of the things that brings to mind for me is building in cognitive inclusion by design. For example, multiple modalities for different kinds of learning styles, visual boards, verbal discussion, hands-on kinds of things that you do, AI facilitators ensuring that there is speaking equity. Is this the future? Do you think that's where we're headed?
I'm not sure. I think whatever we do, I keep on going back to the idea of nudging. I think there is a danger that you might be shoving rather than nudging if you go too quickly. What's disturbed me, the kickback from DE&I in recent times is deeply depressing. And I think we have to not allow the kinds of behaviors that I saw on Tuesday and Wednesday of my career, reappearing on Thursday or Friday of my career. But it's all about progress and change and improvement.
So as Meeting Canary evolves, do you see Meeting Canary being a force for nudging? I guess, thinking about your evolution, what's your north star? What does success look like?
Yes, I hope so. There are a little examples of this in the recent past where, for instance, someone getting medical results speaking to an avatar, an AI, a machine, most people are more comfortable with that than they are speaking to another human being. So I think if we get it right, are gently improving, we can look back over a year or two years or three years and say, "We're now having 10% or 20% fewer leasings. Your inclusion rates are going up. You always say you're an equal opportunities employer, but you used to not listen at all to your Indian developers. Now you are. There is more representation at the board level from these kinds of people." I'd like to fight for that to happen tomorrow.
Aligned with my own vision for meetings, which is that we can reduce the amount of time spent in meetings, but I believe that meetings will be a part of work for the foreseeable future. What I dream of is that people actually want to attend those meetings because they're energizing rather than draining, becoming more pull than push. How do we get there from where we are today?
Well, for me as a scientist, it's evidence, not instinct. So it's data. It's always data, and it's enough data. I don't know yet how Meeting Canary will impact the large companies. We have large companies using Meeting Canary, but we do not have the tens of thousands of pieces of evidence that we need. You have to work on the basis of evidence because that's the only way you can show. That comment I made before about equal opportunities employers, right? Prove it. Prove you're an equal opportunities employer. Just because you've got loads of whatever group of people you decide to say in a certain role in a company, doesn't mean you are equal. And so, Meeting Canary needs to be used by 100,000 companies and then we can say what we've done, and hopefully we've shifted the world a little bit towards being more good.
As you started to understand the different needs and preferences of the people that you're meeting with, how has it changed how you design meetings?
I think that I'm much more aware of those that haven't made contributions, and this comes with time and relationships and knowing people. Also, I'm really interested in drawing people in who have contributions that they might feel less willing to give normally. I think that's something I've always done. I think that the thing that I haven't always done is realize that I can be quite dominant in meetings as well. I've always been a leader in companies. Small companies, so it's always pretentious to say that. So I've had this sort of privilege of being the one that people are almost forced to listen to, but I think that is a privilege you shouldn't take lightly. But I know where the clever people hide, and trying to draw them in is helpful, because collectively you've got a better outcome from that.
Well, I think at its core, and this is, to your point, really what we're focused on in our collaboration with Meeting Canary and Herrmann, is acknowledging that meetings can be different for different cognitive styles. So how do we design meetings where no one spends the whole time suffering or thinking in a quadrant of thinking by themselves? And it starts with the awareness that we are unconsciously designing for our own thinking preferences, right? We're designing for what we prefer.
Yeah, I mean, I'm faced personally with something difficult this weekend. I'm going to the wedding of a friend of mine who's a guy I mentored for many years. He's young. And I'm going to be presented with about 100 people I don't know. This is horrific for me. I absolutely hate it. And fortunately, I have a wife who's at the other end of the EQ spectrum. So, you're right, if I applied that hating that thing, it means that when I set things up, I'm setting up to what I like. I need that. In the same way that you can see that you've spoken too much and you haven't spoken to John, I think some kind of advice and guidance as to how other people might feel, "Mark, it's not just about you," would be terribly helpful, actually.
Yeah, what if our calendars showed us not just agenda topics, but also the cognitive demands associated with them? We're going into a strategic planning meeting. Here's how you need to go into it, and here are the people you need to bring in to have the right conversation. Then people could balance their days, prep appropriately, even decline meetings that don't match their thinking, their strengths or preferences. Teams could ensure the right cognitive diversity. No more engineering meetings with zero representation of what the customer actually wants, and then wondering why adoption fails.
I think making it acceptable to say no to go into meetings is a really useful way forward. I used to just click everything, "I'm invited, oh, I'll go, I'll go." And then actually, it's a bit like going to the theater. If you sit down for 10 minutes at the front row, you can't really just get out and walk out, right? It's a bit rude. So yes, I think giving people the right to say either, "I'm not going," or at the end of the meeting on the stair is saying, "I thought this was pointless, I'm not coming again." And the organizers are not feeling bad about that, but recognizing the fact they shouldn't have invited them in the first place. And these are all deeply challenging psychological things. I've never felt comfortable just refusing point-blank to go to things. Not really.
This could be so liberating. It feels like the future of work, designing collaboration around how brains actually function, rather than forcing brains to adapt to some systems that are terribly broken. I feel like we've optimized everything except how we think together. What a huge opportunity.
Oh, absolutely. And going back to the mixed team thing, I was always struck, and not for one moment suggesting that I was as good as this. But we used to rent offices, the last company I ran in Bletchley Park, which is not far from here. The code breaking, it's just about 10 miles over there, and there's a building about four houses over there which is a substation for Bletchley Park as well. But the team that was set up to break the Enigma Codes was a combination of DevOps, software engineering, linguists, mechanical engineers, and men and women, and getting together that group of thinkers solved that almost impossible challenge.
That's a lesson that every company should learn. If you are a company in the world of engineering, just employing engineers is not going to push you as far forward as if you had a more diverse way of thinking. It's like a captain choosing a team, isn't it? If you can pluck out the players not based on their qualifications, but based on the way they think, and you know that outcome is going to be more productive and better and you can prove it, then isn't that what we need?
Mark, this has been a delight and very fun as always. Any final thoughts for our listeners who are drowning in meeting culture right now? Where should they start?
Stop it. Just stop it. We all know it's mad. We've all just got to collectively say so. We've got to give ourselves time back to think. We are an extraordinary species that can do extraordinary things, but not if we're sitting in front of a computer hours on end doing nothing other than meeting.
That's great. Well, Dr. Mark Smith, Founder of Meeting Canary, thank you so much for joining us on Whole Brain At Work.
Been an absolute pleasure. Thank you both.
Thanks everyone for listening to Whole Brain At Work. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review. We'll also make sure to link to Meeting Canary in the show notes. I highly encourage you to download it. It's available on the Microsoft Teams App Store and provides immediate value for those who want to find themselves drowning less and enjoying more of the meetings that they have every day. Until next time, I'm Karim Nehdi.
And I'm Ann Herrmann-Nedhi, reminding you that better thinking starts with understanding how you think.