Tag / meetings

by Nathan Coumbe

DON’T let AI write the doc!

(This is a follow-up post to “Let Them Review the Doc“)

If you’re typing up a document for your meeting attendees to review…

Or God forbid you’re responding to the meeting doc with AI…

You will get nothing out of the meeting, and no one will be any better off for having spent one of their precious hours talking to you.

I know for many people, this is akin to me asking you not to breathe, but it’s so important.1

The meeting doesn’t need to know what Claude thinks. It needs your brain’s input, your imperfectly formed ideas, your sloppy wording.

Meetings need your humanity.

If you’re going to have AI write your pre-meeting doc or your response to said doc, you might as well just have AI bots hold meetings without you.

  1. I’ve been pushing for this in my work, and every single document I’ve looked at before a meeting was very obviously written and formatted by Claude.

    Why is this a problem? Because when I go into the meeting, the person holding it has no idea what’s written on the document, and it’s obvious. It completely defeats the purpose. ↩︎
by Nathan Coumbe

Let them review the doc

Here’s a tip for your next meeting:

Type up everything you need to cover, share the document with your team, and let them process the content and their thoughts before you meet.

Not everyone absorbs information immediately when it’s presented verbally or shown through screen-sharing. And even fewer people can crystallize their thoughts into something worth sharing with you live without first digesting the information.

The secret to great meetings is not to have them in the first place.

But if you need to have one anyway, make it a place for prepared discussion, not information delivery and on-the-spot improvisational responses.

by Nathan Coumbe

A break with the Industrial Age

The COVID-19 pandemic has created rapid change in all areas of work. For those employees who showed up to an office location day after day, the lines between work and home have been blurred completely: work is now being done at home. School is now being done at home. And the amazing thing is that companies (and many schools) are realizing it works. Not only does it work, but it might also be better.

The Internet has made all this possible. Without it, this pandemic would have ground the world to a screeching halt rather than a frustrating slow-down. I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of the final straws in breaking the world out of the Industrial Age mindset and unleashing human potential by fully adopting the Knowledge Worker/Information Age mindset.

These changes – the ability to work from home; meetings that are now (and should have always been) emails; genuine collaboration (because it’s the only way to get things done now); dictating results and trusting employees with the methods – will last long after this crisis is over. Companies will realize that their people are more productive than ever when given freedom and flexibility. More importantly, those that feel like their companies cared about them as people during the crisis will come out the other side more loyal and productive than ever before.

Those companies that are trapped in the Industrial Age – where people are things and less important than the machines they operate and the numbers they generate – will fail. Command-and-control, micromanagement, treating people as things – none of this works anymore. The failures may not happen immediately, but it will happen. Employees who feel their companies have failed to treat them with dignity and care, who have felt their health and wellbeing was seen as unimportant, will leave.

The coronavirus is terrible: people are dying; people are losing their income and their livelihood. But as with all great challenges in history, forward thinking, adaptable, flexible, and generous individuals, groups, and companies will learn from it, survive, and thrive in the new world.

Say goodbye to the last vestiges of the old world. I hope you are working for and with people who care.

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