Hey Chris, glad to be back.
Hey, what's up?
We made it.
We made it to the next one.
The next one, which is good job team.
Processed at number seven.
Oh my god.
I'm sure by now we have ones of listeners.
Ones.
Yeah.
Not 10s, but ones.
One of our, one of our imaginary fans up in the, up in the lost territories of northern
Canada was thinking about listening and asking about this.
We're at about so many post COVID meetings and ironically that question touches on something
that I've been stewing on since our lost, our lost pet, the lost podcast.
No, since our last podcast, which was, uh, what the hell's going on with all these meetings,
Chris?
Yeah.
Last time you were saying post COVID, I just feel like I'm death by a thousand cuts with
all these meetings.
And that feels really related to process that can you draw a little bit of a crosswalk between
healthy process and communications?
How should communications look in a healthy process versus a burdened process, a poorly
managed process?
Like how, how did these pieces play out?
That's interesting, right?
Cause meetings are killing many people.
And I, and what's funny is I was telling someone today, uh, my brother, my brother said, you
know, bad process kills good people.
I have no idea where he got that quote, but that's probably why I've, why I've kicked
off this podcast is because that just didn't never left.
And you know what, you know what you get a lot after meetings and I love that meeting
that was a good, oh, wait a sec.
That doesn't happen.
That's right.
Said no one ever, ever maybe.
Um, I think it's interesting because COVID got us in a habit of connection over meetings
and team building is definitely something that is very important to know in that, in
a work environment.
But there's also other things that need to be done.
And so besides sitting around and petting our cats and coming off on Zoom, what else
possibly be required to run an effective business besides?
I think it's interesting, right?
Like how would we have done this?
How would this have gotten done?
Yeah.
30 years ago.
Yeah.
Right.
Like maybe 80s or well, or just, just even like meetings pre-internet.
Yeah.
Like, like there would have, there would have been a level of, of expectation that went
into it.
And I think, I think it's very hard to hold people to the, I think it's very, very hard.
I, and I'm, you know, I'm saying this for the first time, but I think it's really hard
to hold people accountable to something that's so easy to interrupt someone's day.
And so because the ease of interruption is so simple, you don't have to put that much
thought into it.
And because you don't have to put that much thought into it, then, then it undervalues
what you're actually doing.
So even the smallest squirrely behavior in a team is going to disrupt the entire group
because that's all it takes.
One text message, one Slack, one meeting thrown up calendars.
Yeah.
Well, remember, remember when the COVID, well, I don't know if you remember, but I
remember one of the fun games that you would play was, was send a text message to your
buddy in a meeting and just watch their face and then it became this fun game of like,
you know, can I get them to lose their mind?
I remember whiskey out of their coffee cup.
I'm in a meeting doing a training.
Like I'm leading the training.
There's like 20 people, 20 people.
My office isn't in my front room.
I'm being really loud and obnoxious.
And my daughter comes up right beside me, probably where she could like, she can barely
be seen in the camera.
And she's like, can you be quieter?
It's so bad.
Who's so terrible?
And I think, I think some of it is like, I think some of it is like, if, if we had a
typewriter.
Yeah.
And that was the only way to communicate and you didn't have whiteout.
Yeah.
And the barrier to entry met the value of what you got was more valuable.
Like even today, when I talked to my dad, who literally lives like an hour away, but
growing up, it would have been a long distance call.
Like I feel like his goal on the phone is to get off the call.
Amen.
That is because he's, because he's, because he's of that generation, right?
Because it was that, that communication was expensive.
Right.
And now it's not.
And so you've got our teenagers rolling around looking at their camera.
You know, they're, they're in the, in the store, FaceTiming people.
And you're like, what is this?
And you and I grew up with, well, you accept a collect call from, everything's okay.
I'll talk to you soon.
Yeah.
Our kids don't know that world, you know?
No, no.
What's, what's interesting though, what you, what you touch on there with this idea of
the simplicity of communication, the simplicity of convening a meeting, regardless of where
people are at geographically.
Yeah.
That's, I think that there can be too much engagement because it's not about the quality.
I think we are, we're, we're latching onto quantity.
And so more meetings surely suggest that we're doing more.
Instead, I think oftentimes we're swirling.
And now when I think about AI coming in, the ability of not just typing out a memo without
whiteout, not just typing an electronic typewriter, but now having machines creating messaging
that may or may not matter.
Yeah.
That's a, that's going to be a slippery one to manage.
So well, the other thing was interesting is when you started being able to record meetings,
gosh.
Yeah.
I was like, can you record this?
But do that?
Does it ever get listened?
Does it ever get watched?
Like, like if we, I just wonder like, just in general, like, and I, you know, I have
no data here, but like, I just wonder if, if whatever we did had to be transferred to
someone else.
Yeah.
And like, whether that's a meeting or whether that's an email and it had to be consumed.
Like there was basically like this checkoff process.
Yeah.
Like I'm going to send data.
It has to be received and read and like confirmed.
Right.
Like, first of all, people would lose their minds.
There's no way people would agree to that.
Yeah.
But would that actually force us to focus on the most important work?
And you know, that, that whole saying around smooth is, slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Right.
Like, I think we would get there because I don't think we all, we all are, I don't know,
lazy is probably too strong of a word, but like, I feel like a lot of times we just want
the technology or the people to actually solve the problems.
And you're like, the simple problems are gone.
People.
That's a hundred percent.
You know, it's, it struck me just then was the idea that we are now capturing and storing
all of the con trails of interaction.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and that has a literal financial cost.
Yeah.
But so does the fact that just because you're missing the meeting doesn't mean that you
don't get to opine.
You know, it wasn't that long ago where if you're not present, then you don't have a
say in it and say, you better be pretty senior.
And today anybody can say, record it for me and I'll weigh in a little bit later.
So change shifts the burden, you know?
And so in the world of process that I think one of those ways we do see it is decision
making.
It now takes longer to get to the decisions we need.
Well, and it takes longer and there's what's the home for the decision.
Well, don't you put it in email?
Sharefluence?
Sharepoint, Sharefluence.
I was talking to someone yesterday.
I was like, the great thing about Sharepoint is it's hard to share and I don't get the
point.
Like, it's like, I mean, it is, it's like, the thing is a Sharepoint could be wonderful,
but it's like most general tools.
Yeah.
And it could just turn into an absolute mess because we don't, you know, one of the other
topics that I wanted to talk about at some point, which we probably well is, is your
work homeless?
Right?
Like I go home and I know where my kitchen is.
I know, like I know where my stuff is, but I go to work and my, my, my work and where
it lives, it does resemble it.
Nothing has a home or at least it feels that way.
Or at least it feels like I'm spending an exorbitant amount of time looking for information.
And so what's, what's interesting is like, we, I think I wrote a study where it's like
basically like 15 to 20% of your time is spent looking for stuff.
Yeah.
I'll tell you my number one repository for important things.
You want to guess?
Word.
Outlook.
Oh yeah.
Oh gosh.
Yeah.
Outlook.
Could you imagine if Outlook didn't have search?
Oh my gosh.
Just lose your mind.
I just saw an article recently and it said, if you don't have time to protect your passwords
and that itself has a pregnant problem in that statement.
Yes.
If you don't have time, protect the passwords on your bank, your phone, your email.
And I thought, boy, any one of those could really screw things up in a good and proper
way.
Yeah.
So we've done the last 10 minutes.
Boom.
Bonus round.
Successful again.
I think we're going to have to hang on.
We're going to call it, we're going to call it the 10 to 20 minute podcast.
Well, if you walk to the office is five minutes, take a lap.
Welcome.
You know, enjoy the extra steps.
We're trying to improve cardiovascular health.
I love it.
All right, man.
Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
Peace out.