A thought experiment:

If every meeting I had were just 5 minutes, it would change things dramatically. Just think of how many different people I could see, talk to, and influence in a given day.  Just think of the time that would be freed up!

Significant Changes:

• Ability to interact with many more people
• Ability to make many more decisions and answer many more questions
• Time to focus on other things, instead of sit and listen to topics irrelevant to me
• Efficiency for my team that also gets back to work
• Conversations that are straight to the point
• More open schedule time to focus on the most important
  • Strategic Thinking
  • Vision Casting
  • Relationship Development
  • People Development
• Focused agendas with less meeting scope creep
• Context; would need more background info in writing ahead of meetings
• Questions would be presented in the form of a recommendation to be evaluated, edited or green lighted instead of an open ended question
• The use of the email update that would fit into the 5 minute category v. being longer in a meeting
• Casual interaction time that wouldn’t feel forced at the beginning of a meeting. I could stop by just to stop by.
• Time for ideas to develop in conversation would occur more naturally over multiple conversations since participants would have more time to digest new information and concepts
• Relationship development time would need to be more purposeful
• My communication style might need to balance out so some of my major points have handouts along with verbal so participants can take time away to contemplate the merits of my ideas instead of work it out through continual conversation.

Converting meetings down sounds very tempting. Meetings would change dramatically if the 30 minute meeting was condensed to 5 and the 60 minute meeting to 15. Reminds me somewhat of the flipped classroom concept where new information is introduced outside the classroom and in class time is used only for discussion and understanding. Expectations of preparation would increase and no longer would we have the luxury of strolling into a conversation and figure it out as we go. Do your homework first!

What an interesting thought experiment…