One person speaks. Everyone else waits. Someone fixates on a minutia and the group burns valuable time ironing out an unimportant detail. Airtime accrues to the loud and confident. The same ground gets retread when not everyone is on the same page at the same time. “Yes, and” papers over incoherence when people don’t realize they’re not actually talking about the same thing.
Before git and svn, software development required taking out a “lock” on a file to make changes; no one else could edit it while that lock was held. We fixed that for code.
The Amazon-style “starting with a doc” pattern was a sensible attempt to address the structural flaws in traditional meetings, but it only solves for the first ten minutes. What might a modern multiplexed, no-locks-held, live collaborative problem-solving session look like?
Imagine if anyone can talk at any point, no waiting.
Better yet, imagine if everyone is talking at the same time, like on an old-school trading floor.
A living central document that forms the shared source of truth that everyone’s eyes are glued to.
A new bullet with a question shwoops in as Jason makes a great point about uncertainties with X that we need to figure out.
An explosion of conversation kicks off as multiple meeting participants chase down various avenues of exploration. Lines of thought are researched and evaluated in parallel, relevant ones added to the document.
Adam raises a point. The central editor deems it out of scope for the current session and earmarks it for next Tuesday’s agenda. The primary document for this meeting remains undisturbed.
Chang posits a potential solution, his bot informs him that this idea was already pondered through and found to be unfeasible five minutes ago. No one else is interrupted by his shame.
Transcription, research, analysis, distillation, live and all at once.