My friend Allan Chochinov, Chair at MFA Products of Design, wrote an interesting article about getting rid of meetings and replacing them with reviews. “As you may know,” he told me, “I’m super-committed around the importance of prototyping ideas, and have encouraged an ethos of “No prototype, No meeting” in our design department at SVA since its start in 2012. Well, we’ve taken things to the next level, and I wrote an article about it on the department the blog. Here’s a taste:
There are a ton of books out there on how to have more productive, more meaningful meetings, but the fact of the matter is, you’re not going to read these books,” he says. “You haven’t yet, and you probably won’t. So the problem is that everyone agrees that meetings are completely broken, but nobody will take the time or the trouble to learn how to fix them. I have an alternative solution, and it’s made by changing one single word. No books, no seminars, no videos, no list of rules to post on the conference room wall. Just one word.
At the end of the article are two pieces of software that Bill Cromie offered to write to accompany the piece — a Chrome Extension and a SlackBot — both really amazing, and should help every organization stop having so many meetings and instead have much more productive reviews.”