Before you let AI summarize your meeting ... cancel it!
We do not become more productive by cramming more meetings into any given day but by being smarter about when to work in sync and when to work async
It happened again: A few weeks ago, Cisco announced a new AI feature for Webex that lets you summarize a video conference – following Microsoft, Zoom and others who also released similar features.
But rather than asking AI to summarize a video call we should ask ourselfes whether it’s worthwhile to convene the meeting in the first place.
Meeting summaries set false incentives
Sure, meeting fatigue is real. But while AI-generated meeting notes sound amazing, they also incentivise us to host more meetings because people think they can simply catch-up async.
Also, meetings are ideally designed to be interactive, but recording and summarising them turns (potentially) active participants into passive consumers.
Finally, meetings often just create the illusion of effectiveness: Got a problem? Let’s jump on a video call. Yet what we probably should do instead is define a problem, collect feedback asynchronously and only then discuss solutions and decide on the way forward.
Yes, this process takes longer. But it probably does a better job in solving the problem.
We need to “undbundle” meetings
At Dropbox, we have the “3D” rule: We only convene a meeting for decisions, debates and discussions. By definition, those activities cannot be done async.
Adobe’s Scott Belsky has another interesting take on “deconstructing” meetings:
New alternatives to traditional meetings will emerge that unbundle the many elements, objectives, and expectations of meetings. If you unbundle a meeting, you’ll see a number of distinct parts like bringing people up to speed, sharing strategy and inspiring the group, getting alignment from colleagues, getting approvals from leaders, framing a problem, and debating a problem. There are also the less quantifiable outcomes like socializing new ideas, building rapport with a team, and spontaneous fun. Instead of trying to accomplish all of this in a room, where are the point solutions that make parts of this 10x better.
Rather than mindlessly scheduling a meeting whenever we run into an issue, we need to be more concious on what we want to achieve when convening a meeting and consider asynchronous alternatives.
Making the most of new technology
That does not mean that the automatically summarising a meeting is a useless feature. To the contrary, I would think that those summaries will be used for every meeting in the not too distant feature.
But this technology should not be an excuse for us to convene even more meetings. Rarely have more meetings made a team more productive or innovative.
Innovation is a function of matching new technology with new behaviour. We have got the new tech. Now it’s up to us to find out how best to use it.