Hey, what's up Toby? We have made it to episode 15 of Process Debt.
Nicely done sir. Congratulations to us.
I know. I mean, here's what I think. I think if we could, if we actually could have made these five minutes, we would be on episode 45.
Yeah, well.
Or 60 or something.
Probably, probably closer to 60.
Yeah, my math is bad.
Yeah, well, and if we would not spend the two and a half hours in the green room before we record these five episodes, that may also factor in, but.
Yeah, that is a problem. We do end up being pretty chatty.
Yeah, it's an adventure. There's a lot of stories to be told and I'm delighted that we're doing it here so that others can also learn and also be grateful that they're not in the green room with us for the two and a half hours before our five minute episodes.
Not wasting time.
No, what do you mean?
Right.
What went on?
The topic of the day is it's easier to forget than it is to commit.
I like this. Did I already commit anything in advance of this episode?
The only thing that you committed to was basically to show up and that's pretty much as good as it's going to get for the two of us, which I've appreciated because it's been a bit of a commitment exercise for myself.
Amen.
Well, and since we committed to not drinking, at least you not drinking Diet Coke this year, we needed to commit to something. Talk to me about, this is an interesting combination of things, commitment and recollection or the intent of this conveniently forgetting.
What crossed your mind that puts those two concepts in the same snuggly little bed here?
I've been thinking, a couple of episodes ago, we talked about just trust being kind of that keeper and we talked about having trustless processes where the community supports the process and supports the people.
And if there's something goes wrong, it's really on the community and the community fixes the system. And so as I kind of noodled on that, I really started to think about just a lack of accountability and how oftentimes there are not clean defined definitions of done or tasks.
Yeah.
And so, you know, everybody loves their meetings and everybody says, well, this could be solved in an email, which I've ranted on, but we won't go there.
But if you think about what a meeting is, oftentimes it's a story.
Yeah.
Right. Oftentimes it's, it's a, it's, it's, you're telling something that will be easily forgotten.
Instead of a list of commitments that need to be tracked.
So that's, that's how I ended up there.
I've been, maybe you've been listening in to some of my meetings. I can't be the only times throughout my career.
I'll be taking notes and I'm like, I have no idea why we just spent this hour together. You know, this tight knit group of 20 people, you know, if there's nothing coming out of it, it's just been a lot of storytellings, then so what?
Right. And which is impressive because I've never met anyone who takes better meeting notes than you.
Yeah. Well, thank you, sir. That is really my superpower.
It is your superpower. And it is, it's, I bet you, you leave most meetings with that, like, huh.
Okay. But, okay. Question. So do you think that meeting could have been solved with an email?
What do you think? Okay. All right. So you take them, you're sitting in a meeting. Yeah. Right. You've gone through this whole hour or two hours.
Oh my God. Right. And you're like, you have written down detailed notes of all of the topics and you think that's a waste of time. But like what, where do you go?
Well, so years ago, a friend of ours, Dylan, you know, that we talk about, he had pointed out that the victors write the history. He was a history mate back in college, my roommate.
And therefore, you know, in the modern era, the equivalency of being a victor or winning is if you take the notes in the meeting, you are the one that has the official record of what transpired.
And so it was a little bit of a protective mechanism. But when I, you know, I can type and filter almost at the same speed as a transcriptionist, like live transcription, then I can shape the outcome.
I can push my notes out. And unless somebody bulks within about 24 hours, that becomes the official history of that conversation.
So should it have been a meeting? Should it have been an email? What it really was, was a lost opportunity for me to give myself a promotion and a raise and some extra vacation time.
Because there was nothing germane that came out of that colossal waste of time. And you figure if everybody was just 75 bucks an hour, we blew a couple thousand dollars.
And so when I saw, you know, as we were thinking about commit versus forget, I often thought, well, yeah, you know, part of it's a strategy because I know if I don't write it down, especially when I'm code switching between tasks, you know, best intentions are quickly forgotten.
And so there are those people that just seem to hold it all in their head. I am not that guy. And if I'm going to commit, I've got to write it down. I've got to communicate it to others.
Yeah. What's so funny about that is I think for me, like I'm on the opposite side where I will intentionally not do something and see if someone follows up with me to see how serious they are.
Is that a real ask? I don't think that's a superpower. I might be a super villain or something. I don't know. Yeah. Like it's for and I think, I don't know. I just think it's super impressive because I and I've been diligent, you know, over the last probably three months, just being like, all right, I'm going to go slow.
You know, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Like that's kind of one of the things that I'm going to attempt this year. But I do think it's interesting because so many meetings and what's in, you know, the other thing that's happened since COVID is we're in so many conference, like video meetings that are being recorded and never listened to.
Right. So it might just as well have not been documented.
Yeah, like, yeah, it's interesting. Like, I wonder if you could actually just skip all of that and get really clear on commitments and actually save a lot of your week. Like, I don't know.
Yeah. I mean, I suppose if you work with those people that never forget, there's a word for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. There is a word. I did look it up. It's hyper, under hyperthymesia. Oh, thymesia.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is like, you know, photo recall the definition according to Wikipedia, our favorite place to go. Individuals with hyperthymesia can extensively recall events of their lives, as well as public events that hold some personal significance to them.
And the interesting thing is that these people, right? Yeah.
They have terrible relationships.
Oh, God, can you imagine?
Remember that time where you said this? You're like, I know exactly what you said. You said that, like, could you imagine how terrible that would be?
Yes.
You only need one of those people in your life to realize that that is not, I'm not going to name names. You'll have to, like everybody else, you'll have to read about it in the tell all autobiography. It's being ghostwritten by AI.
Well, and I do think like the extreme, you can't have hyper commitment. Yeah. Fair. Right. Without the why. Yeah. So it can't go both ways. But I do think in the business world, we swing very much to the story that we can tell with our props.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny in the spirit of that. One of the best things we can do, I think, at least personally in my practice to work towards an actionable commitment and meeting means I publish an agenda.
Oh, yeah. And if the meeting was the result of an email string, I'll put the email string in my meeting invite, just so that we can reference it as needed.
Yeah.
But I've started instead of referring to it as the agenda, I'll refer to it simply as my proposed agenda.
And so what that does is it allows me a chance to say, for those of you with hyperthymesia, the remember
you guys can augment my full direct election. I will show the evidence library chain, which is this email, you know,
but to your point, like the only reason why we're having a meeting most of the time besides shits and giggles, you know, the stuff like this.
But most of the time we're trying to resolve a decision or support some action. Right. Sure.
And I can't tell you how many times I come into meetings and it's like, does nobody else own a notebook?
You know, I'm going to get you all pens for Christmas because none of you apparently are prepared to take notes of any kind.
And so, yeah, what have you been thinking about with, you know, if it's forget or commit?
And I do think once we walk out that door, nine out of 10 people are just going to brain dump all that discussion and walk away from it.
Yeah, I think where the waste comes and where the process debt comes in is because no one's,
there's because there's not an expected accountability. Right. You like you can end up being weaponized.
Right. Where it's like I asked for the thing. Yep. Well, what thing and when?
And then it ends up it ends up being this really weird thing that's just not clear. Yeah.
Chris, it's so so again. So, like, again, it goes down to just meetings being mostly stories. Yeah.
Like and again, like meetings, meetings do have a purpose of like relational.
Like that's building the community is super important. Sure.
But we're not you know, it's not we don't go to work because it's a hobby or at least I don't.
I mean, you might. But, you know, it depends on who you work with. Yeah.
You know, surround yourself with fun, love and goofballs and again, it's not a very lavish lifestyle, but it is entertaining.
Yeah. So somewhere in the middle, though. Yeah.
You know, what if to that extent of commit, wouldn't it be interesting if the cost of a meeting to the convener was show us an equivalency in terms of value coming out of your meeting?
If you've got 10 people that are worth 100 bucks an hour to the company, you know, their headcount, that's a thousand dollar meeting.
Yeah. Right. So show us what the business gets in return for a thousand bucks.
I think you can expect better commitments. You know, if we're good stewards, it seems very legitimate to me. Yeah.
Well, and just I think for me, it's not necessarily about it's it's not an all or none. Right.
Like, yeah, obviously won't work. But like, just considering like what like what value is there in a story?
And the value in a story is simplifying complexity. Yeah.
It's communicating complex topics. Sure.
And oftentimes in business, it can just be a overly repetition, repetitive, the repetitive story being told over and over again with with, you know, and I think some of this is like commitment.
You could also probably replace that with alignment in orgs, right, where it's like, that's fair. If you if you have, you know, if you have stories, if you have stories that align, then oftentimes you'll get commitment.
But if you have stories that like if you know, miss signals where you're getting a signal over here and a signal over there and they're contradictory. Yeah.
And then they're like, well, why aren't people doing it's like, well, because I'm getting mixed messages here and I don't know what to do.
Yeah. Which I think is a pretty universal situation. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
You know, if our listener up in northern Canada were to weigh in on this, I'm imagining that they would probably have the same question kind of aligned as I do, which is, you know, what is the evidence?
Is there commitment if there's no follow up action?
Oh, yeah. Action that's commitment in your mind or alignment in your mind.
Yeah. I wrote a podcast or I wrote a blog one time if if the process falls down in the woods, would anybody notice?
You can just include the hyperlink to make everybody go read it.
It's not I don't know if it's that good. Well, we've squandered another, you know, 15 minutes. Gosh, we're getting longer. But, you know, it's all good.
Well, if we just read it out for under 14 minutes, we still got 10 seconds to waste. We got this. We got this. Well, it's always always great catching up.
Really good. You know, I'm excited about this year just talking about, you know, more process really digging into, you know, more details and then just, you know, having having just a prompt for people to think about fixing their stuff on Fridays.
Like we are aligned, sir. Good stuff, man. And if I forget, you're going to have to remind me, but I am in you now. All right. Recorded evidence. Sounds good. Thanks, man.