Begin the Business Meeting...in Silence?

The traditional way to begin a business meeting is to recap the agenda and perhaps review the minutes of the previous meeting. Then, as often happens, discussion points are verbally presented and debated.

Suppose that the next business meeting begins with total silence… a full 30 minutes of it?

A different approach is to have everyone convene and read papers composed by each for his or her topic at the meeting. They then sit silently studying and notating the prepared memorandums. Only when all have finished reading, do they discuss the content. This approach is used by none other than Jeff Bezos.

Typically, few really read memorandums properly before a meeting, preferring to skim over it while the author is presenting his case. In the read-first approach, time is created for all to focus only on the meeting proposals in written form. Thereafter the discussions begin.

The magic here is really what happens before the meeting- when the author is writing the memo. Doing this strengthens clarity of thought. “Full sentences are harder to write, they have verbs and paragraphs have topic sentences. There is no way to write a narratively structured memorandum and not have clear thinking” says Bezos.

Writing disciplines the mind to think through issues, formulate clearly the problem and pose a possible solution all the while reasoning through the logic of what is being put to paper.

These narratives, with a prescribed length of a few pages, have four main elements: 1) The question to be answered, or problem to be solved, 2) Approaches to answering the question; previous and proposed, 3) How is your attempt at answering the question or solving the problem novel? 4) Now what? How will what you propose be implemented?

Writing up what will be proposed at meeting forces the author to be more precise than what he normally would have been if only speaking about the topic. In this sense writing is more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information.

Psychologically we know that we are more committed to what we write down than to what we merely think or voice. Penning a proposal down and having colleagues read it in in your presence -  now that is putting yourself on the line (as it were).

The usual sequence of business meetings is to discuss, put to paper and read after the meeting (maybe). Here the process is reversed; put to paper, read in the meeting and discuss.

It works for Bezos. It may well also work for us.

(Source: W Chen, idonethis.com)