When we stop to think about it, most company meetings are a bit like speed dating.
They’re designed to be focused, on point, efficient, and over with as quickly as humanly possible.
To facilitate this, some companies make up rules, like everyone having to be standing for the duration, or all meetings must be limited to under twenty minutes (regardless of importance) just to keep things on track. Wham, Bam, thank you Sam.
We get it – time is valuable and nobody wants to waste it.
Yet one day, the team facilitator, Johnnie Moore asked himself an interesting question:
When was the last time you and a friend had a really lovely, memorable, meaningful conversation that was also insanely rushed and agenda-driven?
Your answer is probably “never.” More likely, it was unhurried, meandering, relaxed, maybe over dinner, or perhaps while drinking a fine whisky in front of a warm fire.
Which then begs the question, if improving our corporate cultures are so important (which in our opinion is one of the most pressing business challenges of our time) then why-oh-why do we insist on ramming every human interaction in our companies through the efficiency-obsessed sausage machine?
With these thoughts in mind, Johnie wrote a terrific little book (only 69 pages), called “Unhurried At Work.”
Johnnie’s idea is not to replace getting actual work done with long dinner parties. His idea, and we think it’s a big one, is that if the best conversations are indeed “unhurried,” maybe we should be fitting more of them in our lives, especially in the workplace.
Very hard to do in reality but something worth thinking about.
