1156: How to Make Great Meetings that Stop Wasting Time with Rebecca Hinds

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Rebecca Hinds
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too. Me, too. And I am excited about making meetings fantastic. Could you share with us perhaps one of your most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while you’re putting together Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve long been fascinated by this phenomenon that’s called the Babble Hypothesis. Research shows that, when people talk more, talk more in a meeting, outside of a meeting as well, we perceive them to be a leader more than they are regardless of what they’re saying.

And I think, you know, so much of our meetings are performative, they’re skewed by status dynamics and power dynamics within the organization, and I think this Babble Hypothesis really speaks to the fact that we need to be much more intentional about how we show up to meetings because talking, hogging the airtime isn’t just annoying. It isn’t just frustrating. It actually skews our perception of the people in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so fascinating and, boy, you’re bringing back memories of high school. I remember Robbie Klaver – shoutout to Robbie, wherever he is – told me, I was starting up a Model United Nations chapter at my high school.

And he said, “If you want to win awards, all you have to do is talk a lot.” It was like, “That’s it. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be insightful, it doesn’t have to be helpful. Just get in front of that microphone a lot, and that’s how you get awards.”

And it’s like, “Robbie, surely not.” But, no, it really was exactly what I witnessed. And, whatever that had implications for, I guess, people’s college applications and all that. But this high school Model UN principle rings true decades later in workplaces all over the world.

Rebecca Hinds
As does so many other things, so many aspects of high school, you know, the homogeneous people coming together and sticking together, birds of a feather and, you know, jargon, too. We’re often told to use fancy words.

I talk in the book about how that’s often counterproductive because using jargon, using big words, using technical words, as I often see in meetings, it alienates other people, and we actually trust them less because they’re not speaking our language and they’re less relatable.

And I think that the science behind all of this is incredibly fascinating, in part, because it’s incredibly human. And probably what happened in high school is still showing up in some way, shape, or form in our meetings as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thinking about high school jargon, if I may attempt, as I’m 41 years old, jargon-maxing is not good, but talk-maxing is good from your perception as being a leader, and wise, and all those things, but it’s not great from the meeting experience or the outcomes.

Rebecca Hinds
And I think maxing is such an interesting word. We’re seeing it everywhere now, certainly with token-maxing and more is better. My colleague and mentor at Stanford, Bob Sutton, will call this addition sickness, right?

We are hardwired as humans to solve problems through addition. We have a problem, we throw more money at it, we throw more people at it, we throw more meetings at it, we throw more people in the meetings, more meeting minutes, and it’s very dangerous because, often, we don’t take time to subtract.

And there’s also a great research from my colleague, Leidy Klotz at University of Virginia that shows, “If you do prime people to subtract, it dislodges that addition sickness and they start to adopt a subtraction mindset.”

It’s often not that we dislike subtraction. It’s often, it doesn’t even occur to us as an option. It doesn’t even occur to us that, as we add another person to the meeting, what we should probably think about, “Is there someone we can remove where the meeting is no longer relevant to them or as relevant as it once was?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take for this notion of the person who speaks more is perceived as the leader more. Are there any compelling studies or experiments or data points to highlight just how substantial an effect this is?

Rebecca Hinds
Interesting. So I think that the study that I anchor, and in the book, I believe it was for every 34 seconds of talk time on that order, people gained an extra point as a leader.

Now this was done in a context where there was no natural leader in the meeting in terms of having a bigger title than anyone else. But it skewed the perception in the room. And what’s also fascinating is, in this particular study, and there have been other studies where they didn’t find this effect, but in this study in particular, men automatically earned an extra point for being a leader, just for being male.

And I think that’s also a key part of the power dynamics is, you know, the gender, the diversity in the room, how quickly you speak as well. If you speak more quickly, in general, you’re perceived to be more competent.

And a lot of these cues, and we’re seeing it with AI as well right now, you know, depending on the way an AI tool is framing the output, how sycophantic it is, we also know that if people agree with us, we tend to view them as more intelligent and more capable. And all of these biases, you know, they are front and center in meetings and something that we need to pay very close attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are tantalizing tidbits. But maybe we should zoom out and say, what’s your big idea, main message, key thesis of Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
So the big idea is meetings are a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. They’re where decisions get made, culture gets built, alignment gets set, and yet they’re also the least optimized. They’re the least optimized product in our entire organization.

And when we think about great products, great everyday products, well, they have certain product design principles. We should be applying those same product design principles to meetings. So the seven chapters of the book each walk through a product design principle applied to our meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you say product, I can read that word in multiple ways. Like, a product might be a physical item that I can purchase at a store. Or, in the tech world, products are not so much physical. They’re software things with features and experiences and a user interface. So how are you using the word product here?

Rebecca Hinds
In a few different ways and with a few different dimensions. Meetings are a communication tool. They’re a communication and coordination and collaboration mechanism within our organization. So they’re intangible in that way.

But what I’m getting at with the idea of product is intentionality. Just as we would think very carefully about how we build products and services for our customers, well, we need to approach meetings with the same discipline.

We would never launch a product to our customers without design, feedback, refinement, iteration. We do that with meetings every single day. We throw them on the calendar and they’re often our default reaction to any sort of uncertainty or ambiguity within the organization.

We don’t treat them like a product we would sell or give to our customers, which, in the context of meetings, those are the attendees in the room. They are not ourselves as organizers of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the product is something that needs to be thoughtfully, carefully considered and not just knee-jerk default, “Here’s meeting,” and to put some upfront effort into crafting how that’s going to be effective. Can you share with us some additional implications of the product mindset toward meetings?

Rebecca Hinds
Countless. You know, countless implications in terms of employee engagement. We know that meeting effectiveness is a strong predictor of employee engagement within the organization, even controlling for the factors that you would think to be important, your manager, your role within the organization.

Real business results, right? I think I often work with organizations where you’ll go in and you’ll start to hear people talk about meetings as if they’re not the real work, you know, “Oh, I have to get through all these meetings and then I can finally get to my work,” right?

If we design meetings correctly, they should be the real work, right? They should move work forward. So often, it’s not the case because they’re used performatively. They’re used as a box-checking exercise and not a mechanism, not a product that moves our work forward.

And so key business results, you know, moving work forward, better engagement, better cooperation, better relationships between the manager and the direct report, you know, meetings are the most common form of collaboration within our organizations.

As knowledge workers, as desk workers, we spend 90% of our time collaborating. There is nothing that we can do as leaders within organizations that is more impactful in boosting collaboration, improving that 90% of time than meetings because they’re so ubiquitous, they’re so common, and they’re so dysfunctional.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well said. So I like that notion of box-checking versus moving the work forward. And, boy, that’s a really good, bright line of distinction associated with, “Is the meeting real work or is it not?” You’re thinking about effectiveness on these dimensions over the relationship, as well as moving work forward.

Can you give us some more clarity on how I can assess, “Is this meeting amazing, terrible, okay, pretty good?” How do I get a gauge on how effective or ineffective a meeting is?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s such a great question, it’s a hard question. And the reason why it’s a hard question is we have what I call a meeting-suck reflex. Meaning we are conditioned to dislike meetings, and we are conditioned to believe that that’s how we should behave, right?

There are a few things that bond coworkers more than lamenting over that meeting that could have been a two-line email. And because of that, you can’t just go into an organization, your own organization, and ask people, “Are your meetings effective?” because you’re going to trigger that reflex and not the reality. And that’s why we need to be very careful about meeting measurement.

One of my top recommendations is, if you want to gut check into how effective your meetings are, the ones you run, after about 10% of those meetings, ask attendees, “On a scale of zero to five, was this meeting worth the time you invested?”

My colleague Elise Keith calls this ROTI, return on time investment, and it does a couple things. One, it’s usually, in almost all cases, anonymous, so it avoids that temptation to either inflate or deflate the ratings.

Two, unlike meetings, which are socially loaded, everyone has some intuitive sense of the value of their time, and they know more or less whether this has been a good investment of the time. So you avoid that sort of meeting-suck reflex and it’s simple, you know, it’s not after every meeting. Survey overload is real with an organization.

Finally, it’s coming from the attendees and not you as the organizer. My colleague, Steven Rogelberg has done fantastic research to show there are two people that tend to leave the meeting most satisfied, two types of people. One is the organizer and, two, as we’ve talked about, is the person who has spoken the most in the meeting.

And so we can’t ask those two people whether the meeting has been effective. Their ratings will be inflated. We need to ask the users, the attendees of the meeting, whether this meeting has been worth the time.

Often you see split ratings. Often you see a cohort rating the meetings five and four versus zero and one. And that can also be very helpful information to understand, “Okay, this meeting was worthwhile for some cohort of folks, but not for the entire attendee population. Well, now we can redesign the meeting and design it to be much more effective.”

Pete Mockaitis
Worthwhile. And I hear what you’re saying that it’s tricky because meetings have different objectives and that’s a handy gauge. I imagine every potential measure of meaning effectiveness could have some limitations.

This one is like, “Well, hey, you didn’t think it was effective, but, by golly, you needed to know that. And now you do. And it was essential that that occurred,” and emails get ignored. So I suppose there’s a big gray zone, too.

Rebecca Hinds
There is, and that’s why the agenda is also very important. I recommend framing every agenda item as a combination of a verb and a noun. So it’s not just budget discussion, it’s “align” or “decide” on the Q2 budget.

You’re being very clear about, “What is the verb we need to accomplish?” because then you can assess or you can now use AI to assess, “Have we done the thing?” because that is now a measure of effectiveness within the meeting. If you’re unclear on what you’re trying to achieve, well, it’s impossible to determine what it even means to be effective in terms of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if your verb is “inform,” what do we think? Some schools of thought would say, “Well, if all you’re doing is informing and it’s not a collaborative back and forth, then you should just do an email or some alternative medium.” What’s your take on that?

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly that. Information exchange is not a good purpose for a meeting. In the book, I talk about the 4D CEO rule, a two-part test to determine whether that meeting deserves to exist. First test, a meeting should only happen if the purpose is to debate, discuss, decide, or develop yourself or your team.

Information exchange, status updates, boss briefings, often these meetings are designed for the organizer, often for the powerful person in the room who either needs to consume information or disseminate information. In those settings, it is far more effective to communicate asynchronously through email, through Slack, and let attendees self-serve the information.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s very handy and sensible and that feels true. I’m wondering about this tricky challenge of, when folks have overwhelming inboxes and too much just flood of information coming at them, but it is essential that something gets to them, I think that’s one of the top reasons folks are tempted to do meetings, like these town hall meetings.

It’s like, “No, everyone really needs to know this. So we’re going to, by golly, put it on the calendar to make sure it gets there.” I’m curious, what’s your thought on making sure, in a world where that is not communicated via meeting, how do we make sure that the memo is sent and received?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s a great point and, you know, there’s the ideal case in organizations, there’s always the ideal case, and then there’s the reality. And the reality in many organizations is workers are overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed with information and, often, the meeting feels like the most reliable way to get people’s attention to share the information.

There are certainly cases where that makes sense and that’s the unfortunate reality of our organizations, but in the best cases, we’re designing a communication system so that employees get the information they need and are able to distinguish between what’s important and what’s urgent.

And that requires being very clear in terms of, “What is the purpose of a meeting? What is the purpose of an email?” Ideally, you’re designing the asynchronous channels to be consumable and digestible, right? It’s not a memo that’s 20 pages that employees are needing to sift through.

You make it engaging. You make the asynchronous update a video. You make it a video where the CEO or executive team is in a location that has some personal relevance and it’s engaging to people.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s TikTok dancing.

Rebecca Hinds
There’s TikTok dancing, there’s family. One of my favorite all-time sales leaders would record videos after a run, dripping in sweat.

And that’s so important right now, that connection to leaders, not feeling like they’re on a different pedestal than the rest of the organization, which is often what happens in town halls or all hands or all staff meetings is you get this very rosy picture of reality in a way that does very little to strengthen the relationships between individual contributors and the people at the top of the organizational totem pole.

And even in the context of town halls, it’s usually significantly more effective to do those in smaller group settings. We know that as soon as a meeting or any team size gets above seven, eight, nine, 10 people, people start to check out.

Social loafing kicks in, people feel less supported. And so even if you’re doing far fewer town halls, but you’re doing them very intentionally in a way that can encourage back-and-forth dialogue between the individual contributors and the managers, well, that’s going to do so much more to boost the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say designing a communication system, that sounds very sophisticated, could you give us some examples that maybe we’re not thinking of, like, “Sure, I could say an email, maybe a loom video”? Are there other elements of a communication system that are super effective but underutilized in your view?

Rebecca Hinds
So there’s a really important delineation between synchronous ways of communication and asynchronous ways of communication. And a common misconception is inherently technologies are either asynchronous or synchronous.

We often think of Slack as an asynchronous communication channel, right, because it doesn’t require real-time communication – similar, email. But the reality is any technology can either be used asynchronously or synchronously, right?

We can, and we often do, operate in a world where Slack is treated like a synchronous communication. We get the ping and we’re immediately either drawn to it or respond to it. There is an implicit expectation that you are always available and responding. It’s far more important for organizations to think not so much about the technologies but around the cultures and practices and norms associated with asynchronous communication.

In order for asynchronous communication to work, in order for you to be able to transmit, convey information through asynchronous channels, there needs to be strong, strong documentation culture, right? There needs to be single sources of truth for this information, for the meeting transcripts, for the memos. There needs to be very strong written communication cultures.

And this is something that remote-first organizations tend to do really well. They even train their employees on, “How do you communicate in an effective way asynchronous?” That often requires significantly more context than in face-to-face interactions when you can ask the follow-up question.

I worked with an organization a couple years ago where they had a norm, a company-wide norm, that employees were evaluated on around “No lazy asks.” If you’re going to ask someone for something, it can’t be a lazy ask. You can’t remove context, fail to include context, include the deadline, include the why, include the what, right?

All of these things ensure that we can communicate more efficiently asynchronous, because if there’s ambiguity, if there’s uncertainty, well, people are going to schedule that meeting to get the information they need to move the work forward.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I can’t help but think of the episode of “The Office” where the new boss asked Jim Halpert for a rundown, and he’s like, “Okay,” and so he spends the whole day worrying, “What does that even mean? What is a rundown?”

Rebecca Hinds
Yeah. And that’s the jargon, those are the acronyms, right? And we’re alienating people, in addition to adding ambiguity within the organization. And we see this all the time, you know, with the office jargon, the synergies, the circle backs.

Now with AI, people are, you know, it’s AI everything, “What are you talking about? And do you even need to include AI in what you’re saying?” It’s very important. I think written communication has never been more important, as well as verbal communication, right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And are there certain key things you’re looking at to ensure you have clarity and comprehensiveness or completion when you’re making an ask or trying to communicate a thing?

Rebecca Hinds
Deadlines are very important and, especially, I work with lot of global organizations being clear on what time zone. It sounds simple, but end of day Friday means something completely different in Japan versus San Francisco, as well as depending on your culture.

The why is very important, and we continue to see the why is significantly impactful in helping employees feel bought in to the ask. I see this especially, too, with policy, any sort of policy within an organization. We saw it with remote work, with remote and hybrid policies. We’re seeing it with AI right now.

One of the biggest predictors of whether people get on board with a policy is whether they understand the rationale behind it, even more so than whether they agree with it. And that helps them understand, “Is this worth my time? Is it worth my time to invest in this ask?”

If they can understand the why, the rationale behind it, and it’s something bigger than themselves, that’s going to motivate them to complete it, complete it well, and complete it on time.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve got a couple interesting concepts in your book I’d love to hear about. What is your meeting doomsday?

Rebecca Hinds
Meeting doomsday is my favorite meeting strategy to improve our meeting culture. It’s a 48-hour calendar cleanse. Employees delete their recurring meetings for 48 hours and then they re-add meetings back to their calendar in a way they think is going to be most effective.

So many meetings never make it back on the calendar. They’ve outlived their purpose. Perhaps they never had a purpose. For the meetings that have some value, they are redesigned. So thinking about the length, the cadence, the attendees, the agenda items, every meeting on our calendar can be redesigned to be most effective.

And we see significant benefit of this doomsday activity as opposed to a traditional meeting audit. We talked about addition sickness at the beginning and strategic subtraction. Well, what the doomsday does is it jolts you out of the status quo and makes subtraction the default.

When people are doing a meeting audit, they tend to justify the meetings because the meetings are still on their calendar. Whereas, the doomsday, it forces you out of the status quo and it gives employees social permission to delete the meetings in a way that removes that social guilt we all feel when we think about canceling meetings or think about not showing up to meetings.

Meetings are so personal that we often think people will take it personally, and they often do, if we cancel or don’t show up to the meeting. And so I recommend every organization do a meeting doomsday at least once a year. And, again, not just to save time, and we do see big time savings, but to reset our assumptions about what actually deserves to be a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay, can you walk us through step-by-step in practice, if we’re saying, “Ooh, we like meeting doomsday. We’re going to do it”? How do I execute that step-by-step?

Rebecca Hinds
Lots of planning. It’s a radical effort. It requires lots of planning. It requires understanding, “Are you going to do it at an organizational level?” That’s ideal. Or, “Are you going to do it on a team level, department level?” I’ve done both. I’ve done as small as a nine-person team.

And then it’s about preparation, making sure there’s leadership buy in. The leadership is communicating the why behind this. There are clear instructions in terms of, “When are we going to do this? We’re not going to do this at the busiest time of the year. We’re going to do it in a lull period.”

How are people going to assess whether the meetings should be brought back? What dimensions are they going to use? Increasingly, I’m working with organizations to use AI to identify, flag those dysfunctional meetings. That becomes very exciting.

And then how are we going to celebrate? How are we going to celebrate along the way the success stories? This needs to be something that is fun. There’s a reason I call it meeting doomsday, right? There needs to be a rallying movement around it.

Meetings need to be the enemy. It’s not the person who scheduled the bad meeting. And we need to create a sense of energy around it. Get people bought in. And you start to see this becomes a big culture-building movement when done right.

And people become very excited about not only doing the doomsday, but also sticking to it. And meetings never are set in stone in terms of being effective. This is something we need ongoing maintenance to do. And, again, doing it at a consistent cadence every year is a way we continue to instill this practice of meeting hygiene.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So then, when they are executing this, “It’s on this day,” I guess that’s the doomsday, “On this day, all recurring meetings, organization wide are deleted.” And then the hope, and with your prep and your communication and your pre-work, is that the new meetings that are established will be good and better ones, as opposed to just, “Oh, hey, I need that meeting. Let’s put it back on the calendar.”

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly. And there’s a big difference. I’ve studied two types of organizations. One, they’ll do this doomsday top-down. They’ll write a script, the IT team will come in and do a massive wipe of the calendar. I’ve seen that. You know, Dropbox did that. Shopify did that. Slack did that.

The meeting doomsday is explicitly designed to put that determination in the hands of employees because we know that, when employees do something themselves, they feel significantly more valuable. It feels significantly more valuable to them, and they’re more likely to stick to it.

Sometimes this is called the IKEA effect, right? When we build something ourselves, whether it’s an IKEA desk, a newly built idea, a newly built calendar, we’re much more likely to stick to it and value it even if it’s a little bit wobbly.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is your rule of halves?

Rebecca Hinds
The rule of halves, inspired by two folks I’ve talked about, Bob Sutton and Leidy Klotz, it’s essentially look at the four dimensions of your meeting – the length, the cadence, the attendees, and the agenda items – and decide one, two, three, or four dimensions you can cut in half.

And often this is a valuable practice as you’re doing the doomsday, but you can take any dysfunctional meeting or any meeting that you know isn’t fully optimized, and pick one dimension, cut it in half, take that 30 minute meeting, try to run it for just 15 minutes, take that six person meeting, “What if it’s three people?”

And what you often find is you didn’t need all that time, you didn’t need those attendees. You might cut too deep, but it’s also often in those moments where you go one step too far, do you realize what was actually essential and what was dead weight.

And so I think that’s, you know, whether you’re doing it one, two, three or four dimensions, the rule of halves can be another effective way to jolt us out of the status quo. I think we often, in organizations, suffer from what’s called Parkinson’s Law, too, meaning work expands to fill the time allotted.

If we give a meeting 30 minutes, if we give a meeting 60 minutes, which is what our calendar tells us should be a meeting, well, it’s probably going to take that 30 minutes, 60 minutes because of this Parkinson’s Law. Whereas, if we cut it to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, it’s more diligent in terms of encouraging us to stick to that time. We’re more diligent because we only have that time available.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are those four dimensions again?

Rebecca Hinds
The length, so the duration of the meeting; the cadence, so thinking about weekly versus monthly, quarterly meetings; the attendees, only inviting stakeholders, not spectators or meeting tourists; and the agenda items. So thinking about, very carefully, “What are the agenda items we want to include on the agenda?”

We also know that agendas suffer from what’s called the law of triviality, meaning, we will disproportionately spend more time on the agenda items that are the least important, the most trivial. And so it’s very dangerous to add agenda items that are trivial, much less important than the higher stakes one, in part because they feel safer.

They feel safer for people to weigh in on. In general, most people want to hear their voice in the meeting, as we’ve talked about, and everyone feels more safe to weigh in on the trivial topics as opposed to the higher stakes one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m thinking about this a lot when it comes to, like, color choices or names of something. And it’s kind of, like, “You know, if people like it, they’re going to buy it no matter what colors on the website or what we call it within reason.” And so, yeah, that is a great observation.

Rebecca Hinds
Naming, font sizes, what do we do over the weekend, what are we eating at the offsite, you know, all of these things. And we see it all the time in meetings, and it’s a reflection of the law of triviality. The other bias is the primacy effect, meaning we will also spend disproportionately more time on the first agenda item. And so agenda design is very, very important as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about injecting delight into meetings. What are your favorite approaches for this?

Rebecca Hinds
Yes, delight. Now, delight is interesting because delight is a combination of two things. It’s a combination of joy and it’s a combination of surprise. So, delight needs to have an element of surprise. Employees, attendees can’t be expecting it for it to work.

And so, this is something that I recommend it be 10 seconds, a minute in the meeting, an unexpected shoutout for an employee that has done something well. You’re bringing some, you know, food item. Food is a great engagement booster in the meeting that has some personal connection.

Something that is going to leave employees remembering the meeting and wanting to show up the next time. It sounds trivial, but so much of our meeting dysfunction is driven by the fact that employees dread meetings and they’re largely rinse and repeat.

Delight ensures that there’s that moment of surprise that’s positive and joyful that employees will keep coming back to and keep wanting more of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Rebecca, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Rebecca Hinds
No, I think that the common thread through all of this is intentionality and intentional design and how do we ensure that we are treating meetings as that important product.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve always loved the quote, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” And I really believe that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rebecca Hinds
So we’ve done some research over the past few years looking at the mental models through which employees approach AI.

And what we’re starting to see, we’ve seen it for years, we’re still seeing, is depending on whether people are approaching AI from the mental model of a tool versus teammate, they interact with the technology differently and they’re significantly more likely to be productive when they approach AI with the mental model of the teammate because they’re not just asking, “What can the technology do for me in a really transactional way?”

They’re asking, “What can I do with the technology?” They’re also recognizing that AI is not perfect. They’re not giving up after the first prompt. They’re pushing the technology to think and act deeper. And I think that’s at the core of a lot of the failures of AI transformation right now, is not recognizing how important the psychology is and how important that relationship between humans and AI is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rebecca Hinds
So I’m a massive fan of both Bob Sutton and Adam Grant’s books, so Give and Take is a key one that has influenced so much of my life, as well as Bob Sutton’s book, Scaling Up Excellence, The Friction Project.

I think “The Friction Project,” in particular, is so relevant right now in terms of, “How do we ensure that we are injecting good friction into our organization through the use of AI,” for example, “and removing the bad friction from our organization’s dysfunctional meaning?” are one great example of negative friction.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rebecca Hinds
So I work at Glean. Glean is my new favorite tool. I use it for all things AI. It’s my first pane of glass into my work in the morning, and it’s a highly intelligent teammate that helps me do my work.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with audiences, they quote it back to you often?

Rebecca Hinds
You know, I think I work with a lot of organizations on change management, and I think my mantra is always “Change doesn’t fail because of the technology, it fails because of the humans.” And as we think about AI, in particular, but also meetings and everything in between, making sure that we’re designing for the humans involved is super important.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Rebecca Hinds
I’m on LinkedIn. My book, Your Best Meeting Ever is at all your favorite bookstores. And my website is RebeccaHinds.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Rebecca Hinds
Do that meeting doomsday. I think it’s the single most effective way to jolt you out of the status quo and get a small team and do it together.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Rebecca Hinds
Thanks so much, Pete.