How to have a productive meeting in complete silence
I have memories—now vague—of team meetings we had in the early days of SharpestMinds that lasted 3+ hours. What a colossal waste of time.
We’ve experimented and learned a lot since. I’m quite proud of how our meeting process has evolved.
Every meeting we hold—be it mission-oriented or process-oriented—starts with a Google Doc. The doc is shared with all the attendees well ahead of the scheduled time.
Each attendee is responsible for writing their thoughts and discussion items in advance. If there is something you want to discuss, it better be in the doc before meeting time.
We start every meeting in silence. Everyone opens the meeting doc, reads it, and adds comments. This can take anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes. The comments turn into threads between relevant participants and the meeting continues in silence until each thread has reached a natural end-point—like a decision, delegation, or resolution.
Sometimes these threads will get too lengthy, or some nuance will get lost and we'll need to “go verbal” on a few points. We have a breakpoint (usually 30 minutes), where we’ll go verbal no matter what and address these, along with any other threads that are still unresolved. But quite often we’ll have resolved everything in writing by then.
It’s incredible how much can be settled during 30 minutes of silent reading and commenting. The meeting is effectively parallelized into several threads. It’s particularly useful when there are many decisions to be made that don’t require everyone’s input. You only have to participate in the threads that are relevant to you, instead of (im)patiently listening while others in the meeting discuss them.
In an all-verbal meeting, tangents in which a subset of attendees are involved are very wasteful. They are best handled by stopping them in their tracks and “taking them offline”—a euphemism for “go have your own separate meeting for this”. A meeting done in writing can avoid the need for that extra meeting by containing the tangent in a thread—unblocking the rest of the attendees. This lets us have weekly meetings with our entire team (right now, 5 people) and give space for everyone to have a voice.
Having our discussions in writing also creates a permanent record of our thought processes and increases transparency. Instead of taking that tangent offline—where the discussion will be invisible to the rest of the team—anyone in the meeting can read through the written discussion. If we can’t remember why we made a particular decision, we can look back at the thread in the meeting doc.
Having discussions in writing also reduces emotional reactions. Having to write out your response forces you to take some time to think and craft your reply. That can be enough to recognize your reaction and cool down. When talking synchronously, the implicit expectation is to reply immediately, leaving less room for introspection.
Remember that this is not advice for what you should do. It should be read as what works for us. We’re able to get away with written meetings with the entire company because we are still small. These written meetings have scaled well from 2 to 5 people, but it’s not clear it would scale past that.
We’ve also been fostering a culture of writing at SharpestMinds for 4+ years. It took a while to build the habits required and we are still learning what works best. When to switch a thread from async to sync, for example, takes a certain amount of learned intuition.