Dennis Deery

Thanks to the COVID outbreak of 2020, companies around the world accelerated the shift of allowing or encouraging office workers to do more of their work from home or other remote locations. While this has led some companies to adapt their cultures, I’ve been very surprised that one major cultural shift doesn’t seem to have taken root widely: the majority of companies still seem to have a meeting-first culture rather than a written-first culture.

With everyone in a company working in a shared office, it makes sense to gather people together in one room, at the same time, to discuss issues and ideas and agree on work plans. It’s hard to beat the speed of such discussions, and given the support of a solid facilitator, in-person meetings can be very productive. The challenges of realtime meetings are pretty well understood: not everyone is comfortable jumping into the discussion, the attendees may submit to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HIPPO), people play constant Jenga with their calendar to fit in meetings where everyone is needed at the same time. We’ve now largely adapted that same approach, but cut down the bandwidth of exchange by meeting online, asking everyone to log in and think at the same time. It’s the way we’ve always done it, so it persists.

However, today, even the employees of many small companies are no longer all co-located. Larger companies are likely to be spread across multiple timezones, even spanning the world. Almost anyone in the office of a multi-national company has experienced meetings with poor colleagues on the other side of the world struggling to participate in the middle of their night rather than during standard business hours. Why do we persist with such an approach when it has such a negative impact not only on the employee’s life outside work, but also hampers their ability to perform at their best?

Amazon, from its earliest days, has taken a slightly different approach, though they have not done away with realtime meetings. PowerPoint presentations are not allowed. Rather, an employee organizing a meeting must generate a written narrative memo that describes the purpose of the meeting and provides the critical details needed to generate a successful discussion during the meeting. Rather than sending this memo out as a pre-read to attendees, the first half-hour of the meeting is allocated for each attendee to read the memo, take notes, and prepare for the following discussion. By imposing this standardized approach, Amazon believes they maximize meeting effectiveness because the meeting organizer must consider their idea in more detail than would be required by a PowerPoint full of bullet points.

With the current state of artificial intelligence tools, there’s another great reason to encourage more of a written culture. The quality of output of all the major AI models is directly related to the quality of data they have access to, and the amount of context they can assemble around a query. Does your company have a storehouse of written information about the business? Not just financial data, or production data, or supplier data, but information about what decisions have been made in the past and why they were made? When your employees prompt your chosen AI today, does that AI model know anything specific about your company, or is it working entirely from information gleaned from the internet? More detailed written documents that prepare employees for a meeting can begin to build a record of how decisions are made in a company, what data is considered and how the discussion proceeds. This allows AI to assemble a much better understanding of the company’s history and processes.

More and more companies today are getting in the habit of recording meetings, and then using AI to transcribe and summarize the meeting. It’s easy to think those recordings can be an input to an AI model and that will provide better context about your company. However, such recordings are still lacking huge amounts of context. Are final decisions recorded correctly? Were they actually final decisions, or just a decision to recommend an action up the chain of command, which may be overridden in another meeting (which may or may not be recorded)? Does the recording from a meeting amongst front-line staff carry the same weight as the recording of a meeting amongst the executive leadership team? Are statements within the summary or transcription vetted to ensure accuracy? Does the meeting transcription link to supporting documents that were discussed in the meeting? Such links and weighting of importance provide context that will help your AI model to provide much better feedback.

Once you’ve adopted a written pre-cursor to a meeting, you’ve taken the first step towards cutting down on meetings completely. As employees build their muscles around thinking more deeply and writing, you may want to look for opportunities to move more discussions into written forums. This approach has the advantage that people can join the discussion as their schedule allows (or as their time-zone allows). An asynchronous approach like this also allows more room for people to think, hopefully leading to better quality participation.

Is it time for a written-first culture in your organization?

P.S. As I was thinking about this post over the past few days, I stumbled upon an article (the last one linked below) suggesting that perhaps AI is going to be the death of Amazon’s written culture. People are now using AI to write their narrative, taking away some of the critical thinking previously required to write them. On the other side of the meeting, attendees are giving less consideration to documents that are clearly AI-generated. This isn’t a problem exclusive to a written-first culture - I’m sure most of us have sat through a meeting with a fully AI-generated PowerPoint presentation. Whether your culture is written-first or meeting-first, are you making room for your people to spend time thinking? And are you demanding that they do, even with the support of AI?

How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon’s Competitive Advantage
https://slab.com/blog/jeff-bezos-writing-management-strategy/

Startups: How to Use Amazon’s Narrative Process to Set Goals and Think Clearly
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/startups/startup-advice-how-to-write-a-narrative/

On the Death of Amazon’s Writing Culture
https://alifeengineered.substack.com/p/on-the-death-of-amazons-writing-culture