Debbie Foster (00:03):
Welcome back to The Powerful Leaders No Apologies podcast where we celebrate fierce, fabulous females making waves in the legal world. I’m Debbie Foster and I’m excited to introduce you to these women who are leading the charge with their bold leadership and influential journeys ready to be inspired by their powerful stories. Here’s the show.
(00:27):
Welcome back to another episode of Powerful Leaders. No apologies. Today is a bonus episode and this is our third bonus episode. The first two that we had were super fun, Michael Cohen and Ari Kaplan, who are two very well-known legal industry people, and I enjoyed having them on the show and I’m excited today to have my good friend Matt Homann on the show. Hi Matt, thanks for joining me.
Matthew Homann (00:55):
Hi, Debbie.
Debbie Foster (00:55):
So Matt and I, we were just reminiscing of how we met a tech show, which is really kind of the source of a lot of my legal technology, relationships and friendships when you really think about it, because I started going to a tech show in, no, 1999 I think was my first year, and I was on the tech show board, I was chair of tech show in 2010, and then again I was co-chairs with our good friend Tom Mile, and I’m actually on the tech show board again, glutton for Punishment, third time’s a charm for Tech Show 2025.
(01:34):
It’s crazy. But that’s where Matt and I met a long, long time ago. And then we crossed paths many times. And then I was in St. Louis for an a BA meeting and you invited me to come and see Filament and my mind was blown. We’re going to talk more about Filament. I was like, there are Legos, there are tic-tac toe boards, there are games, there are whiteboards everywhere. This is the most amazing place I’ve ever been. I don’t know if it was on this trip or it was another trip where you invited me to your house where I got to meet your lovely wife, Jessica, because there’s no way we can do a podcast episode without talking about Jessica and the Cats. Harlow and what’s the other thing?
Matthew Homann (02:17):
Hazel
Debbie Foster (02:17):
My memory. Oh my gosh. Don’t tell Jessica that I forgot about Hazel’s name.
Matthew Homann (02:20):
She never listens to any podcasts. I’m on anyway, so we’re safe.
Debbie Foster (02:23):
Okay, perfect. And then you guys made this bread, which I think we’re going to get the recipe for that bread because it’s the best bread I’ve ever eaten in my life. You guys made this homemade bread, it was so good. That was an amazing dinner, had such a great time, and we’ve just become good friends and we’ve worked together on some projects and you’ve done some work for Affinity. And when people ask me about you or when I talk about you, I always talk about the fact that you are done with regular meetings and are re-imagining how to have impactful meaningful meetings. And so I know we’re going to talk a lot about that, but you probably want to talk a little bit about your intro and because you’re a lawyer too, you got a lot going on over there, so why don’t you give your introduction to yourself.
Matthew Homann (03:13):
So thank you, Debbie. I’m recovering as a lawyer. I haven’t practiced for, gosh, 20 years or so now. Some days it feels like 50 years ago and some days it feels like a year and a half. But I was early in the legal blogging space, so I was writing about innovation, creativity, client service, alternative fees, all of those in a blog I had called the Non-Billable Hour. And that was really my entree into this entire world is relatively early. As a younger lawyer, I was speaking and writing in ways that even five years earlier before social media and blogging would’ve taken me 20 years of the rubber chicken circuits to get a stage. And it was tech show of all places. It was really my first official kind of paid gig as a speaker. And I use paid in air quotes as Debbie knows because I was at least reimbursed for my travel there.
(04:04):
But it felt so amazing because the community of people, there were the community of early adopters. Tech shows a little different now, but at the time if you were a lawyer who was thinking about technology, you were almost by definition innovative, creative ahead of the curve. And there were so many people there who just became our tribe and out of tech show. And it is I credit tech show with this every time someone asks the story is in my career and what I become as completely because of tech show or in spite of tech show perhaps might be the way to put it. 20 years ago or so, there’s a handful of us sitting around the bar at the Sheridan when it was still at that hotel three in the morning, the bar had been closed for an hour and a half. We were having this amazing conversation about the future of law practice and that conversation was about everything.
(04:51):
It wasn’t called social media at the time, but it was social media, it was rethinking pricing. It was all of these things that were on the edge. And we lamented that these conversations, no matter how amazing it was, was never going to be on the agenda next year at Tech Show because when you build a conference, you can’t have stuff that’s on the edge. You’ve got to have stuff that can fill a room of two or 300 people. And so I said along with Dennis Kennedy was in that conversation, he and I were driving back the next day to St. Louis. I said, why can’t this be the conference? And then I asked everyone at the group, the eight or nine or 10 of us who would stay an extra day next year if we could have this conversation while it was light outside and we found a cool space in Chicago the next year, everyone we invited among that small group said yes, we put it out on our blogs, but we made it invitation only.
(05:38):
And we had people asking for invitations. We would’ve never had the courage to invite people who flew in just for the day. We banned PowerPoint, we used open space to facilitate. It was just this creative engagement. And out of that day, the following year, people started asking me, and I was a practicing lawyer in my hometown in southern Illinois, Hey Matt, can you do this for my technology company, do this for my law firm? And I all of a sudden realized that there was a whole different business around thinking differently about meetings. And there’s still a plate of spaghetti in the middle from the story I’m telling to where I am today. But fundamentally, this idea that the way we’ve always done it is not necessarily the best way. There’s lots of reasons we keep doing things because of inertia, because we have a grid to fill in for a conference because we have whatever. And I think by the virtue of the fact that I’d never been trained to facilitate, I’d been trained as a lawyer and I did trial work and I facilitated in mediations and so on and so forth that my approach was different enough. And I’d gotten just enough validation with that early session to realize I might’ve been onto something. And so fast forward 20 ish years and here we are.
Debbie Foster (06:51):
When I came to Filament the first time, remember you picked me up at a hotel, I think we were at a Hilton. You picked me up at a hotel and we were there for an a b meeting. And I walked around that space. And at first it was really hard for me to imagine how anyone would ever have a meeting in a place like that, right? There’s couches, there’s little places where eight people could sit and six people could sit and 10 people could sit. And you did have a big room there with a big whiteboard in the front, but it
Matthew Homann (07:20):
Was, and no screens.
Debbie Foster (07:21):
No screens, but no screens. I’m looking up at the ceiling. There’s no where you’d pull down a screen. I’m thinking, how would you do that? And I think that as I kind of go back and think about that experience, and then fast forward to years later when we brought a group of people from our company to filament to do retreat with you, and kind of the way that you got us thinking differently about how we collaborated and how we came up with ideas has been so impactful in my work, in our work at Affinity, at how we run our meetings here. And we’re not perfect. You probably would still attend half of our meetings and say, cancel that one, never have that again. You definitely never need to have that meeting again. But it has also a combination of my experience with you and running meetings and us implementing EOS at our company like 11 or 12 years ago where we started being much more structured about how we have a meeting that if I have to go to someone else’s meeting where it is not creatively facilitated or at least bound by an agenda, I can barely sit still.
(08:37):
A bad meeting is just so evident to me. And I credit a lot of that to you and your style and how you got me thinking differently about meetings.
Matthew Homann (08:47):
Well, I appreciate that. One thing about filament, and for those of you who haven’t clicked through the links in the website, et cetera, we sell meetings and we sell meetings. No matter how boring that sounds, we sell it on purpose because everybody has them and everybody hates the ones that they have. And so fundamentally though, we’re selling something that people have never bought. It’s disguised as something they buy all the time. But when people come to us or when we go on the road, we design the meeting, we facilitate it when you’re here, we host it, we ban PowerPoint, we draw in every meeting. We have an artist who draws. But fundamentally, the core for us, and I think this should be true of every meeting, is you want to do together and in person things. You need to be together in person to do.
(09:27):
And information delivery is not one of those things. If the pandemic taught us anything, we can be terrible in front of slides on Zoom just like we can in person. But when you are together, when you think about that expenditure of time and effort and energy of being together, we should be focused on insight, discovery. What are the things we can learn together? How do we solve problems together? How do we engage? And so that has been fundamentally something that has guided our meeting since we started Filament and even before when I was doing this work under a couple other banners, is that when you are together, there’s an amazing gift that you have to give one another of presence, of attention, of idea sharing, of listening. And we tend to build most of our meetings that don’t require any of those. And so there’s lots of meetings you might need to stand and present something, but it’s not the meetings we want to do. And when you think about the cost of a meeting and not paying someone like us, but that one hour meeting with 20 people is a 20 hour meeting, right? And 20 hours is a massive expenditure of potential energy that you could be spending elsewhere if the meeting were shorter or more effective or the right people were in the room.
Debbie Foster (10:37):
I think that is such a great point. And I was just on a call yesterday talking to a firm about their firm retreat. They have 27 people that they are flying to another city, and I’m going to facilitate their meeting. They first called it a meeting and then they told me yesterday what they were going to do for the three days. And I said, if you’re going to do that, what you need is an mc, someone who’s just going to introduce the next person who’s taking the stage that’s going to convey information. And if you’re going to spend all of that money to send 27 people to another city and spend two and a half days all day Thursday, all day Friday, half a day Saturday, and you’ve basically given all of them a speaking slot where they’re going to throw up a PowerPoint that does not seem to me like the best use of the time. And the managing partner looked at me and she said, well, what would you suggest that we do as if there was no other consideration for what could have possibly happened during those three days than 14 to 16 presentations done by one of the attendees?
Matthew Homann (11:49):
And that’s fundamentally the problem is that you talk about how now you have better appreciation for terrible meetings, most people don’t know what the options are, right? The quote that Henry Ford probably didn’t say, but everyone says, he said, is that if I’d have asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said faster horses. When you ask people who plan events, oftentimes what they want, they want better coffee, they want CRISPR presentations. They never think to take down the screens, they never think to make the tables round. They think that all of the reason we go to these events is to hear people tell us stuff. And that used to be true. Even when I started going to tech show probably 25, 30 years ago as an attendee, it was the only place to find curated fresh information from people before their book came out. And people who weren’t writing the book, you would never hear from them.
(12:37):
But now with God, I can’t call it X, with Twitter, with all the social media, I know what you had for lunch. I know the ideas as they pop in your head, I can watch your YouTube channel. I could see talking. The whole purpose of us being together to learn stuff I think is completely passed. And instead, and I think about this as conferences, and I go back to tech show one last time. It’s the people there who are the most like me, the people who will have the most impact upon me as peers, as friends, as a shoulder to cry on as a idea partner. And yet we leave the connection to chance. And those of us who are extroverts are good at it. We can be in the hallway, we can meet people, we can connect with folks and trade business cards, but to the introverts, they don’t get that.
(13:26):
It’s a much more of an energy expenditure for them. It’s not something that introverts can’t do. And then you also think that, well then we’re going to connect in these social events. These social events are fueled by alcohol. They often have loud music. And so you go to a conference and you find the people who are most like you, and yet there’s no really good way to connect with them. What we say at Filament all the time is people connect better when they think together, not just when they drink together. In that day. You’re problem solving, you’re engaging, you’re talking with one another. We’ve done a thousand person retreat and it’s me a couple artists, but no one even pays attention to me most of the time because they’re engaging with their peers, talking about problems, thinking about ways to deliver more value to their clients or customers thinking about ways to be more innovative or to build better cultures.
(14:14):
And everyone loves that in the moment, but they never think it’s possible until they experience it once. And as much as I, and Debbie, I know you’ve experienced this with us, as much as I want people to love the work we do for them, I just want them to hate their next meeting they didn’t have with filament even more. And that’s our measure, right? Because we’ve figured some stuff out, but it’s not rocket science, but it seems like it’s a different planet for people because they’ve never been in a meeting that doesn’t start with a screen,
Debbie Foster (14:43):
Right? So something just came into my mind while you were talking about that, and so I didn’t prepare you in advance, but I know that you’ll just be able to take this right off the cuff. One of my most favorite things that I have done in a meeting with you, which I think has happened multiple times, and we’ve actually used this to start some of our strategy meetings, is the, I wish I wonder, I worry exercise. So walk me through that. I think that is incredibly powerful.
Matthew Homann (15:16):
So I’ll actually give a little bit of deeper dive and I’ll talk about the exercise itself. Whenever we have people in a room, lots of times when we have them in small groups, we use these canvases. They’re 11 by 17 inches, we make them use markers so they can’t write too small. It becomes a collective conversation exercise versus someone writing on a clipboard and fine point pen on an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. But when we ask people to do something individually, we give them a half page card. And we found people’s compulsion to follow directions, overcomes their reluctance to share, wait,
Debbie Foster (15:46):
Wait, hold on. Say that again. Say that again.
Matthew Homann (15:48):
People’s compulsion to follow directions overcomes their reluctance to share. And so when you ask a room blankly, Hey everybody, what do you wish and wonder and worrying about today? It’s crickets. But you give them a sheet of paper that has three prompts thinking about our strategy or thinking about our time together or our next five years, whatever the prompt is, I wish we would. I wonder if we could and I worry that we won’t. And in three to four minutes they fill it out because they now have an assignment. And rarely are people in the room who are not overachievers, who did not get to be overachievers by not doing their homework. So they fill it out. And then what we do is we want to give them a little bit of agency. So as a facilitator standpoint, I hate being the bad guy who’s calling on people.
(16:31):
So all I have to do is find someone to volunteer. They volunteer either to go first or to go last. And I put the option out to the room and whoever goes first, I say, Debbie, thank you for volunteering. Read the one of those three answers that is most meaningful to you. They have a little bit more agency, they pick the one versus reading them all three, I now know that they’re not going to talk for 20 minutes when called on, which happens. It’s almost always dudes by the way, and I wish that weren’t true. And if they start to blather on and on, I’m like, Hey, did you fit all of that on that card? And of course they didn’t. And appropriately chastised, we move on, but they share the one. And then I say, as a facilitator, I might say, tell me more about that.
(17:08):
But if we have a lot of people in the room, and we use this for introductions as well, Hey, I’m at home and I run filament and I worry that, but then they pick the person to go next. And what happens in that dynamic is that they’ll pick someone that you might not have thought to pick. They’ll pick someone whose ideas they’re really excited to hear. They’ll pick an introvert who might not volunteer, but that I wish, I wonder, I worry framework. It used to be I like I wish I wonder, which is a framework around appreciating art originally that came out of the A plus school project at Harvard or something like that. But when we change it to worry, we allow people to be a little pessimistic without worrying about being pessimistic. But I can do an eight hour day with just that exercise if we have to because it pulls out from the room so many things. And then as we collect the cards, you get a chance to read what everyone else thought even though they didn’t share. And so you want to talk about a better way to do a SWOT analysis or to think about the culture of your team, ask that question, give them that prompt and then just read through and process all the information because it’s unbelievably powerful.
Debbie Foster (18:10):
So one of the other things, especially as the intro exercise when you bring a group of people together is they’re already wishing, wondering and worrying. They already have it. They showed up, wishing, wondering and worrying. So what you’re really doing is you’re saying like, Hey, let’s not just pretend like we aren’t worried about what’s going to happen and let’s not pretend that we aren’t sitting there wishing for an outcome. Let’s just get it out there,
Matthew Homann (18:38):
Right? Oh, it’s a hundred percent true, Debbie. And the other thing that we found is that the language you give people helps to de-stigmatize things they otherwise might not share. And so another one of the frameworks that I love as we talk about elephants, zombies, squirrels and porcupines. And so we know that when any, anytime a group gathers in that room, there are at least four creatures. The elephant in the room is a phrase we’ve heard before. It’s a thing that we know is impacting our conversations. But no, we dare not call its name or it tramples us to death. The zombies are the issues that keep on coming back again and again and again. We never seem able to kill. The squirrels are the things that distract us. And leaders let loose more squirrels than anybody else. And the porcupines are the things that are prickly.
(19:20):
And sometimes they’re interpersonal and almost by definition, none of those things would be raised in a room. But the moment you give them names, people will start to say, oh, I think I’ve got an elephant, or here’s a porcupine. And again, some people say, I think this is a combination creature that’s a prickly elephant with a squirrel tail that’s come back from the day. It doesn’t matter what they do and the names don’t even matter. The silliness of the names helps people fundamentally talk about things that they otherwise couldn’t name in a way that felt comfortable to them.
Debbie Foster (19:53):
It creates a much safer space for bringing up the things that probably everyone else is also thinking about.
Matthew Homann (20:00):
That’s right. That’s right. And we tend to not share things at two ends of the spectrum. We oftentimes don’t share, and this seems obvious, we don’t share the things that we think are so crazy that we’ll get judged by sharing. And this feels like a dumb idea, crazy idea, stupid idea, whatever. And no matter how crazy it is, it is almost always adjacent to someone’s else’s good idea that it’s worth sharing. But oddly enough, the other thing that we don’t share is we don’t share the ideas that are obvious to us because we assume they must be obvious to absolutely everyone. And they’re not the only person who’s had the day on this planet and its history that you’ve had is you. And just because it’s obvious to you doesn’t mean it’s obvious to everyone. And Debbie, I think I’ve told you this story when we had you all in, but the real thing, we were facilitating a law firm retreat about a thousand Lawyerist in the room.
(20:46):
We were down at the Ritz Carlton in Orlando, and the whole day was set aside for thinking about growing their business. And I’d asked three questions for the first hour, and again, a thousand people at this gigantic around 10 person tables. And the first three questions were, what are you doing to grow your business that works for you that everybody knows about? What are your greatest hits? The second one is, what are your best kept secrets? What are you doing that no one probably knows about? And the third question is, what are you afraid to try? And I was so excited about this third question. Ooh, that’s where the meat of this exercise is going to be. I’m walking around this gigantic room and no one is getting past sharing the first of the second question. And I finally get to the front of the room as a managing partner who’s been my primary contact as we’ve been working on this retreat and all of his peers, the head of the Chicago office, the head of the New York office, and so on and so forth.
(21:35):
And they point me out to this man who was the head of the Atlanta office at the time, who looked like Wilford Brimley and sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. And God, I hope he doesn’t know who he is, and here’s this podcast, but the southern gentleman, the draw everything you can imagine. And the managing partner says, tell him what you just told us. And so he says, well, I just told them you don’t know your clients unless you know the name of their dog. I’m like, what do you mean? He says, well, my wife and I raised dogs on our farm outside of Atlanta. We have treats made for us because we go through so many. And so I just have a bunch of treats made. He says, I can’t give my clients anything because they’ve got to report it, right? It’s a pain in the butt to give my clients a gift.
(22:14):
Think about chief legal officers or general counsels of publicly traded companies, it so on and so forth. But he says, there’s not a damn thing that says I can’t give their dog something. So what he does is whenever he goes to visit a general counsel of Coca-Cola as an example, he takes a scoop of treats in this trash can. I’m picturing next to his gany desk with a top floor of the skyscraper, puts it in a brown paper lunch sack, and writes the dog’s name on it. And he’ll do that for their admin, their chief of staff, et cetera. And so whenever he then is hanging out with his clients, they’ll say to their other friends, does your lawyer know your dog’s name? And I hear that. I’m like, that is the best marketing tip I’ve ever heard, and I’ve told this story a thousand times and every time it’s still so good, it’s cheap, it’s unique, it’s memorable, it’s all of those things.
(23:01):
And I asked him, I’m like, so Wilford, was that your best kept secret? He says, oh, no, no, no. That was my answer to the first one. That’s what I do that everybody knows about. And so I asked at this table, how many of you knew that he did it? And none of them did. That’s why they were still talking about it and buzzing about this idea. And these are his peers of the management committee and so on and so forth. But to be fair, they are not all in the same office. So I then get up on stage, we count a much shorter version of the story and ask how many of he does this? And there might’ve been a hundred people in the room who were in his office and maybe two or three hands go up. And so many things that when you build the process to uncover the what are the easy things you’re doing, the hard things, the safe things, the crazy things, whatever framework people will share.
(23:45):
And it’s oftentimes things that they thought everyone knew. So they’ve never took the time to share. And so Debbie, in your work, think about all the processes, the hacks, the duct tape, the things people have figured out how to solve for in their law firm. They assume that everyone is doing it too because it was so obvious to them. And yet they never take time to share. And in our kind of work when we’re engaging, we’re able to pull those kinds of things out because like, oh, of course everyone else is doing this, but I do this. And then other eyes get as big as saucers. You’re like, what? That’s a great idea. And in a traditional thing where you have one expert telling you what to do from the stage, that kind of interaction and learning just doesn’t happen.
Debbie Foster (24:25):
It’s such a great point. And it’s so true. And I feel like some of the challenges that I hear, first of all, the busy challenge, there’s the, one of my least favorite word in the dictionary, I think is the word busy. But why don’t people spend enough time together doing this really important work about what’s working and what’s not working? Well, everyone is too busy, yet they find time to get together for the things that aren’t as impactful, whether that’s just a regular meeting that everybody goes to because it’s on your calendar, and that’s just what you do at that time, on that day during the week. But if we repurposed the non impactful time into impactful time, and we started talking about that one thing that’s working for you or that one thing that’s letting you really think differently about your work or that one thing that is helping you manage client relationships better, those are multipliers. Those are things that people could latch onto. And like you said, it might seem super obvious to the person who has just built a habit around it, but it isn’t to everyone else. And how do we get people? How do we start talking to people about ways to spend more impactful time with each other?
Matthew Homann (25:43):
I think there’s so many answers to the question, but one thing I would talk about is that it is not always spending the time to talk about it. It is then exercising all of the demons that become the ready excuses for not acting upon those ideas. And Lawyerist and law firms are better at this than anybody else. Because when I was practicing, I didn’t see the 99 handshake deals that went amazing. I saw the one out of a hundred that went straight into the toilet, and I saw that three or four times a week. And so guess what? Every time I see someone talking about a handshake deal, I’m like, oh my God, it’s going to ruin your business.
(26:19):
It’s probably not most of the time. And so it’s easy to say no. It’s either very easy to say no, because there’s always reasons to not do things, or it is unbelievably easy to just assume that we need to have another meeting about it because there was someone in the room whose input we couldn’t to get to. And so there’s a couple pieces here. The one is that you want to make the action item as small possible, so the permission necessary for it resides in the room you’re in. And so it’s trying experiments. We’ve done that with you. What are some experiments we can try And experiments are bigger than an idea, but smaller than a pilot, A pilot is smaller than a project. A project is smaller than an initiative. And so let’s just try it. Let’s see what some simple things are, and now we have some proof points.
(27:05):
The other thing to do is to say, Hey, after this meeting, there’s decisions we made. Let’s be clear on what they are. But there’s also decisions we need. Let’s assign someone to go get them because if we don’t capture the decisions we need, we get in this never ending doom loop of meetings where then the CFO is finally in the room, but the chief legal officer is not or what have you. And so if I say, Debbie, you’ve got to go get this decision at least half the time, the person to whom you have to get it from will say, I don’t care what you do, just keep it under a million dollars and don’t put us out of business. And so there’s that piece. I think the other chunk though, on why so much of this doesn’t happen is that we have this metric that this perceived metric that comes out of meetings that is just imaginary and that is alignment.
(27:49):
How oftentimes is a leader said to a room, which you want to be aligned, or we all aligned any objections that leader believes that in fact the room is a hundred percent aligned in however they define it, but after that meeting, what happens, right? The meetings after the meetings happen. And so ways to deal with that, and this is relatively simple. It’s an Amazon practice, but assume a number one, that’s silence means no. So we go around the room and go, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And if Debbie’s the person is like, I’m not so sure, then we have that conversation. Say, okay, I know you still cereba, will you commit? Because you’ve got to leave the room with that one story versus everyone saying, oh, I did my best for you team. But the leaders, the rest of them ran you over, backed you over, backed over you with the truck.
(28:32):
I think one of the things that I would add to that, and there’s so many bits around decision making and best practices and meeting that we’re not brilliant about them. We’ve learned them from our customers. We’re in rooms of super smart people solving their versions of the exact same problems again and again and again and again. But we’re never clear on even who the decision maker is most of the time. And there’s this perception, oh, well, the room will decide. The room cannot decide, right? You leave the room, the room’s not doing anything in your absence, the people are deciding, and you have to be clear for this decision, this is how we’re going to decide it is majority rules or it is advice and consent to our leader, or 66 point whatever percent. You’ve got to be clear first on the decision you’re gathering to make, why it’s important to make now who the ultimate decider is and the process you’re going to use for that decision.
(29:21):
And something that we’ve learned at Filament, and this was a personal lesson that was very hard for us to learn, me to learn personally, is that the leader is oftentimes in a different conversation than the team is even in the same meeting. And Debbie, how many times have you unwittingly put your finger on the scale by saying something and thinking you are just dreaming about it. And now someone says, oh my goodness, the boss now expects us to change and make an 85 degree turn from where we were going because she said something. In the meantime, you’re just like, oh, what about this? And so we’ve done this, and this is another quick takeaway tactic, is that in every conversation, are we having a dreaming conversation, a debating conversation, a deciding conversation or a doing conversation?
(30:08):
And now my team will come to me and say, Matt, are we dreaming here or are we deciding? Because when we’re in meetings, we think it’s all one meeting, but people are at different levels and different parts. And so as a boss, what about this sounds a lot like a decision to someone whose tactical and whose responsibility would be to execute on that and being clear about which one is unbelievably powerful. Wow, I can ramble on and on about this, but there’s so many different little nuggets of this that help you make your meetings better.
Debbie Foster (30:38):
Well, and I think that is really when I’m thinking about all of the takeaways from everything that you’ve just talked about, there are some really amazing takeaways. And I’m going to ask you, we talked about this a little bit ahead of time. I’d love to do a part two to this because I’d think we’re just scratching the surface and really digging in to give people some tactical takeaways. How can we make our meetings better? I would love to do in a round two. One other comment I want to make though about everything that you just said, one of the things that drives me crazy is when we get to, we’ve talked about 80 or 90% of it and the time is up and everybody’s like, all right, we’re going to pick this back up. And you’re just like, no, that’s like flushing the last one hour down the toilet.
(31:21):
You can’t just pick up where you left off a week from Thursday. One of the other things I’d love to talk about is how do you make sure that the intent of your meeting is very specific and that you stop doing the talk about it until we’re 80 or 90% done. Don’t make a decision. Think you’re going to pick it back up later and instead, four months from now, someone brings something up and you’re like, wait a minute. We talk about that in a meeting several months ago, and we never made a decision that is on repeat. I feel like 10% of the meetings that I go to with our clients, that same thing happens.
Matthew Homann (32:00):
So there are three pieces of this. One is make clear the purpose of the meeting. And so instead of sending an agenda, because an agenda is just your most optimistic guess of what might happen when in a meeting, your invite to say, we are gathering to do this. It’s important for us to gather together and do it in person because, and by the end of this meeting, we will. And to the extent you’re building time in the agenda, your agenda needs to, whatever you’re doing, you need to leave 10 minutes to the end to button it up,
Debbie Foster (32:28):
Right?
Matthew Homann (32:29):
Here’s the story we’re telling. Here’s the decisions we’ve made. Here’s the decisions we need. Here’s the action items, because that falls by the wayside. And we assume that magically everyone will remember exactly something they may have committed to randomly by nodding their head when you were looking at them,
Debbie Foster (32:43):
Right?
Matthew Homann (32:44):
The other piece though is that you need to separate the discussion meetings from the deciding meetings. They’re not the same or the debating meetings, right? However you want to frame it. There’s a tool we use that is a discussion tool, not a decision tool that has become unbelievably powerful. We call it our confidence compass. And it has three prompts. Everyone fills it out, and three prompts are this. The decision I would make under these circumstances is and why? The next prompt is I’m blank percent certain this is the right decision to make. Now because, and the third prompt is something that might cause me to change my mind is people fill it out. And again, this is a discussion tool, not a decision tool. And you learn a couple things. One, well, oh, there’s one other secret hack is that everyone switches them around and reads someone else’s
(33:29):
Because it gets the power out of the equation because there’s lots of people who wait for certain folks to tip their hand and then share. So everyone reads it, and you find a couple things. We did this yesterday with a really cool group we had in, and the fake decision we were playing with was we’re in St. Louis. We assumed everyone had to be in Chicago in a week. Planes, trains, or automobiles. But the percentage is really important because people aren’t a hundred percent committed to the decisions, even though you perceive that as such, when they say, I think we should do this, and there’s lots of decisions leaders make that they’re 60% certain of just like in poker, no one goes all in knowing with a hundred percent certainty they’re going to win because otherwise everyone would’ve folded before they got to that point.
(34:10):
And so knowing the percentage is important, but the other piece is knowing what might cause people to change their mind and getting them to think about what might cause them to change their mind. Is the secret sauce on, oh my goodness, the thing that might cause me to change my mind to take planes is the thing that might cause you to change your mind to take automobiles. Let’s figure that one out first. Why are we going to Chicago? Is it for us to do an offsite? Is it us to do a meeting? Are our families involved? Should we be on the train so we can talk the whole time? It doesn’t matter that someone’s like, oh, we got to play. Cars are faster. Maybe speed isn’t the option. But oftentimes when we make decisions, none of that conversation happens because we’re so worried about saying something that might be opposite of what someone who might be a leader to us or a peer might think. It takes the politics out of the mix, which is pretty cool.
Debbie Foster (35:04):
Yeah, I love that. Okay, we’re going to come back for part two of this episode. Thank you so much for, I mean, some just amazing information here. And I do not want to forget. I want Chelsea to put this in our show notes and we’ll talk more about this on our part two is your newsletter Idea surplus Disorder, one of my favorite newsletters that I get every Monday morning and read it from the top to the bottom. I click on almost all of the links. Super powerful, super helpful, and we’ll dig in a little bit more to that on the next episode. But thank you, Matt. I can’t wait for part two.
Matthew Homann (35:36):
I can’t either. Thank you.
Debbie Foster (35:40):
And that’s a wrap. Are you feeling inspired? Take that energy and go make a difference today. And don’t forget to subscribe to Keep up with our latest episodes, and if today’s show really resonated with you, share this episode with your friends and colleagues. You’ll also find some resources and ways to connect in the show notes. So until our next episode, get out there and change the world.
