Running the meeting where it gets decided
Unit 1 of 8 · Lesson 3 of 3Index
Wednesday, 10:00. Thirty minutes, six people, and a decision that has drifted for two weeks. Two of them will not have read your memo.
A meeting is a product. Design it.
- 01Decisions drift without a date
Decisions drift without a date
The call has slid from day to day for two weeks. Not because people disagree. Because no meeting was built to end it.
- 02Rule one: the decision goes in the invite
Rule one: the decision goes in the invite
Write it as one sentence with a date in it. If people cannot tell what is being decided, they cannot prepare for it.
- 03Rule two: ten minutes of silence
Rule two: ten minutes of silence
Start with ten minutes of reading. It feels wasteful and saves the other twenty, because now everyone has actually read it.
- 04Rule three: a name and a date
Rule three: a name and a date
End with one owner and one date, written where everyone can see. Anything else is a postponement dressed as a meeting.
- 05The format shapes the decision
The format shapes the decision
Some companies replaced slides with memos read in silence. Prose makes an argument connect. Bullets let a weak one hide.
How Amazon handled it
Amazon
Amazon banned slide decks in decision meetings.
The proposer writes a six page memo and the meeting starts with twenty minutes of silent reading. “Everyone read the doc” is never true, so they stopped pretending.
Meeting design is product design. The format decides the quality of the decision.
Doing it with AI, and where it breaks
Draft the decision statement and agenda, then ask a model for the three hardest questions, and answer them before the meeting.
It asks generic questions about cost and timeline. Push it: “only ask what someone who read the memo and disagrees with it would ask”.
Here is my decision statement and memo. Ask me the three hardest questions a person who has read this and disagrees with it would ask. No generic questions about timeline or budget.
Build it
A run of show for a real 30 minute decision meeting, plus three hard questions and your answers.
The worked solution
Stuck, or want to compare?
There is a worked solution. Try the build first. Reading it before you have attempted anything is the fastest way to learn nothing.
Checkpoint
If you did the build, these take two minutes. If you cannot answer one of them, that is the part to go back to.
Moving on marks this lesson complete. Finish the build first, it is the part that counts.