Navigating the Information Age

I have a high bar when it comes to effective meetings. Because my job is supporting leaders and teams in using their time together effectively, I get impatient quickly. One of my pet peeves especially is when too much time is sucked up by updates. Given the pace of change we experience, sharing information early and often is critical. The updates themselves are important, but is there a better way to share them?

I’ve found transparency to be a real unlock for team communication. On the super transparent side of the spectrum, I’ve seen teams hold nearly all conversations publicly. They prioritise transparency as an underlying value. At any time, there are multiple conversations happening all around. It can get pretty noisy, and there’s definitely a lot of information to take in. But, information sharing becomes automated. Team members start to get a sense of work happening across the board. Updates happen in writing and often, and people tune in and out as needed. This is a practice of working in public- everyone shares (almost) everything all the time. People understand the context they’re operating in so much more deeply, and this happens organically with little effort. As a bonus there’s even a designated space for informal chats and team fun.

So why don’t more teams adopt it? The noise can be a deterrent and teams don’t always recognise the underlying benefits. More importantly, teams need psychological safety to work in public in this way. It takes courage to share work that’s in progress. Sometimes teams can be mired in perfection over progress and judge a draft product as though it’s a final product. There is a cultural underpinning to making transparency work, which starts with leaders prioritising progress over perfection and substance over style. Individuals also need to find their own way of filtering for what’s important.

But once those foundations are in place, transparency offers an effective antidote to silos, unlocks collaboration and allows teams to stay synced up organically. Meeting time becomes freed up to focus on working out what we do with the information in front us, rather than just sharing it. With technology supporting information flow and communication, teams can focus on what humans do best- create, problem-solve and connect.