wrapping paper.png


The Filament Blog


We all suffer from a profound case of “Idea Surplus Disorder” at Filament — and we think that’s a good thing. Here are some of those ideas we’d like to share with you.



Monday Morning Meeting

Happy Monday, everyone!  It is time for our Monday Morning Meeting.  

Hard to disagree with this:

Do you know your meeting math?  The first lesson: there’s no such thing as a one-hour meeting.

Basic meeting math applies to all meetings: The time blocked off doesn’t equal actual time spent. The time spent is the time blocked off multiplied by the number of people in the meeting. So, a one hour meeting with 6 people is a six hour meeting. A 15 minute meeting with 9 people is a two-and-a-quarter-hour meeting. Even a 15 minute meeting with 4 people costs an hour of collective work time.

Factor in salaries and hourly rates, and meetings get expensive quick. Add in attention diverted and the cost goes up even more. Was that last meeting you had worth it? I’d almost certainly bet it wasn’t. Still not convinced? How would you feel if you had to regularly expense $1200 so you could “tell a few teammates something”. Think that would go over well?

If you're looking for a new approach to business strategy, think about what action will move the needles.

Of course, if you'd rather just come up with a tagline instead of a strategy, you can try this instead.

Looking for a great icebreaker question?  How about, "What's the one thing you want to do before you die?"


At Filament, we love this idea:  Hold Conversations, Not Meetings:

The best way to energise thinking is to hold conversations rather than meetings. In our personal lives, we are used to talking openly with one another, but most organisations have failed to capitalize on the power of conversation in a business setting. So how does a conversation differ from a meeting?

A conversation is informal. As the great German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer said, you only have a conversation when you don’t know the outcome at the beginning. Think about a conversation you have with a friend over a cup of coffee. It flows from one topic to another; ideas spark spontaneously. A conversation is alive and interesting, and sometimes even a little dangerous.

A conversation is a creative process. A conversation is not about walking through an agenda. It is a journey that takes people through the full range of thinking, not just a problem at hand. In a conversation, people explore issues, invent solutions, and find ways forward through messy circumstances. (The broad scope of a conversation differentiates it from “brainstorming,” which only focuses on generating solutions. Brainstorming can’t help you address wicked problems like a military engagement in Afghanistan or a messy merger.)

A conversation is democratic. In a conversation, no single person holds forth while everyone else nods sleepily. Instead, the dialogue bounces around the room as participants design a new idea together.

That's it for this MMM. We'll see you next week.