So what if you took out all of the stupid, wasteful stuff and left only the useful parts?

Enter the 22 minute meeting. This is an idea from Nicole Steinbok, and she presented the idea at Seattle Ignite 9.� When I saw her present this concept at Microsoft a few months ago, she gave one of the best short talks I’ve ever seen.

Here’s the poster from her talk:

I couldn’t find a write up of the core points, so here’s my take on her ideas from what I remember from her talk. All credit should go her way:

1. Schedule a 22 minute meeting - Who decided meetings should be 30 or 60 minutes?� What data is this based on? None. 30 and 60 minute meetings leave no time to get between meetings, and assumes, on average, people need an hour to sort things out. Certainly not all meetings can be run in 22 minutes, but many can, so we’d all be better off if the default time were small, not large.
2. Have a goal based agenda – Having an agenda at all would be a plus in most meetings. Writing it on the whiteboard, earns double pluses, since then everyone has a constant reminder of what the meeting is supposed to achieve.
3. Send required readings 3 days beforehand – The burden is on the organizer to make this small enough that people actually do it. Never ever allow a meeting to be “lets all read the documents together and penalize anyone diligent enough to do their homework”. (note: I think 24 hours is plenty).
4. Start on time – How often does this happen? Almost never. Part of the problem is Outlook and all schedule programs don’t have space between meetings. By 2pm there is a day’s worth of meeting time debt. 22 minutes ensures plenty of travel/buffer time between meetings.
5. Stand up – Reminds everyone the goal isn’t to elaborate or be supplemental (See Scrum standing meetings). Make your point, make your requests, or keep quiet. If there is a disagreement, say so, but handle resolving it outside of the meeting.
6. No laptops, but presenters and note takes. If you’re promised 22 minutes, and it’s all good stuff, you don’t need a secondary thing to be doing while you pretend to be listening. One person taking notes, and one person presenting if necessary.
7. No phones, no exceptions – see above.
8. Focus! Note off topic comments.� If you have an agenda, someone has to police it and this burden is on whoever called the meeting. Tangents are ok, provided they are short. The meeting organizer has to table tangents and arguments that go too far from the agenda.
9. Send notes ASAP – With 22 minutes, there should be time, post meeting, for the organizer to send out notes and action items before the next meeting begins.

What do you think?

If you like the idea, help it spread. Nicole started a facebook group and a poster you can download (PDF).� Pass it on.

When/If they post her ignite talk online, I’ll post it here.

HiPPO – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion Wins:

“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site.”

This is part of a longer post on how to overcome this for marketers, called Experiment or Go Home.

It’s a common thing among high level managers to poke at visual design issues – it’s an easy way to give the pretense they’re involved, or to remind people they still have power, without doing much work.

(via Bhooshan, via Dan)

At the UI14 conference last year I caught an excellent talk by Leah Buley, an experience designer at Adaptive Path, called UX Team of One. The core idea is in many, but not all cases, one person can effectively do both analysis (usability engineering) and synthesis (design and prototyping of new ideas) if they have the right attitude, experience and perspective, which she described in detail in her talk (slides here).

This is not to suggest singular expertise in usability or interaction design is useless.  Not at all. My point is in many cases the usability and design problems are relatively simple and the reason why things are bad is not a lack of expertise, but a lack of willingness among ‘experts’ to step out of their safe expert box and fight to effect change, or a failure to succeed at it. Someone with fewer pedigrees tends to see fewer boundaries, and that’s often what a team or culture or company needs for change to happen. Many projects need basic first aid, not brain surgery, and I suspect medics, who are generalists, do better first-aid than neurosurgeons, who are specialists. Of course if I have a brain tumor, I’ll wait for Mr. Neurosurgery, but otherwise he’s not my best bet.

There are many people with PhDs in cognitive psychology, or Masters degrees in design, working on projects with abysmal usability or interaction design. The problem isn’t lack of expertise, it’s a lack of awareness for how to convert that expertise into action. Their deep expertise can be a liability if it gets in the way of getting their hands dirty.

The intellectual exercise of trying to do a project alone, where you have to play the role of product planner, project manager, designer, engineer, tester, marketer (or whatever the list of roles is in your world), even if just for a day, forces you to rethink the assumptions about each and every contribution on a project. Maybe it’s harder than you think, or maybe it’s easier, who knows? You likely have no idea since you’ve never done any of those things. If you have clients, what do you really know about their world? Project and Middle Managers are notorious for having no real sense for how all the contributions by others that they get credit for, are actually done. This is an easy disease to cure: invest some time standing in other people’s shoes.

I believe there is a core set of skills, orthogonal to traditional ideas of expertise, that defines who is effective at work or not. Call it savvy, self-awareness, organizational agility, or just plain common sense, but it’s the real factor at play at why some experts have an impact and others don’t. Playing Team of One for a day is one easy way to start getting at those skills. It gives you a language and sensibility for thinking about the people you depend on, the absence of which contributes to why they’re ignoring or frustrating you.

Related Posts:

• Strategies of Influence for Interaction Designers