I heard again this week about a professional team, in this case a team of 12, spending an insane amount of time, in this case 8 hours weekly, in an update meeting. I could understand this thirty years ago before we had free, scalable and user friendly virtual collaborative technologies like wiki's, Google docs and now great apps like Asana, Trello and Slack.
With these tech tools, several things become possible.
- Everyone can post the status of everything they're doing in real time
- Anyone can post questions, ideas, feedback and help on the status of anything
- Everyone can know what's being planned, begun and done without separate status reports
- No one wastes any time, emails or meetings preparing, presenting or receiving status reports
- Ongoing transparency makes collaboration and peer accountability possible
This fuels the team's focus, connection, alignment and velocity in new ways, leading to thriving cultures of performance and growth.