Exactly how I will be using it for my own clients in 2024

A bonus guide! Today I'm going to share how I will personally be using AI to help my clients create the light, human, precise collaboration flow they're looking for.

 

Last week, I shared five core emails with you around how AI will transform meeting and collaboration culture - and the huge question marks it will lob into your organisation!

We got familiar with the tech, talked use cases, explored issues and then started to think about what people development might be needed and what decisions you'll need to make as a leader.

Today, I just want to give you a bonus email and I hope this is the most inspiring of them all.

If you know me already, you’ll know that I work with organisations to help them develop ways of collaborating that are:

• light, fast, agile

• precise and focused

• candid

• progressive

• imaginative

• human, fair and cognitively diverse

 

Here’s my guide to how AI might enable and underpin the FewerFasterBolder collaboration philosophy and techniques - and some key issues to look out for! This list is non-exhaustive but it serves as an example of what I will be doing with my clients and I hope it provides some tangible inspiration.

Much of the meeting and collaboration dysfunction I see comes back to time, energy, discipline and norms. It's like a 'diet'. Monday we're inspired to write agendas / eat fruit with every meal. By Wednesday, we're flagging - a bit too difficult. By Friday we're back to plonking meetings in the diary without an agenda / finishing lunch with a Kitkat. 

There is only so much we can achieve at once with mindset and behaviour shifts with our existing tools. AI will almost certainly be part of the solution to our, let's say, mediocre meeting hygiene habits. 

So, in mostly chronological order, here are eight things I'll be helping clients do with AI.

 

1. Consult wide, meet small

One of my core FewerFasterBolder philosophies is to reduce the number of synchronous participants in meetings. Instead, I advise organisations to find ways to consult wider with people and then trust a small group to work with this data and make decisions on behalf of this wider group. There are lots of benefits to this (have a browse of them here) but the key one being we all go to fewer meetings! 

GenAI can really help make this possible at scale by providing a mechanism for analysing a vast range of contributions quickly.

 

2. Form a strong social contract

My PhD thesis emphasises the importance of social contracting in all forms of collaboration especially meetings. 

A social contract in meetings is basically an implicit / unspoken agreement we all make before the meeting starts, deciding how we'll spend our time and what we'll get out of it. It's important because it helps everyone trust that the meeting will be worth their while, and makes sure we're all on the same page and ready to pitch in. Without this kind of understanding, meetings can easily turn into a bit of a mess, with people feeling frustrated and like they're just wasting time.

Creating a social contract takes time which is why mostly we don't do it. I will be helping my clients use AI to take the strain of this.

For example GenAI can:

• suggest agenda items
• remind attendees of key prep and make this easy to do
• review whether attendees are aligned before the meeting
• analyse contributions before the meeting

 

3. Designing meetings with AI

At FewerFasterBolder, I talk a lot about how meetings are over formalised .. but under structured. Too little time is spent designing ways to collaborate efficiently to achieve certain tasks within a meeting.

GenAI can massively help with this. It can create agendas, populate them with exercises and questions and provide the facilitators' notes.

One use case I've been experimenting with is helping clients to create compressed meetings using GenAI to redesign an existing format into a shorter timeframe, using structures and scaffolding from my own playbook.

 

4. Using AI as your meeting facilitator (stay with me on this one)

For a long time, I've wondered whether large organisations would benefit from having a specific 'meeting facilitator role'. A team whose job it is to facilitate any kind of meeting across the organisation to get the very best out of people's time and to build trust, generate progress etc. It's just not a Thing and now it likely never will be as I think GenAI has the potential to do this really quite well.

It's not such a wild idea that AI will be your meeting facilitator sometime soon. So much of my work is about helping people facilitate focused, candid, genuinely progressive conversations and I honestly think GenAI can help do that. Let's explore what it could look like....

GenAI might:

• Remind everyone of the meeting purpose and each person's role at the start

• Detect what kind of meeting it is and ask appropriate questions to open the session and kick off discussions

• Flag up when a time boxed discussion point is nearing an end 

• Listen the the conversation and ask incisive questions of the group at key moments

• Detect key meeting stumbling points e.g. unresolved conflict, failure to achieve a decision and pause the discussion to reflect and agree how to move forward

• Remind the group of the purpose and outcomes when needed

• Summarise back the meeting's progress so far

• Suggest actions and next steps

 

There are already some really nice examples of simple GPTs created by people like me and you which guide groups through a known process like the CPS Facilitator, in the ChatGPT marketplace. CPS is a deliberate creative problem solving technique for finding opportunities and you can read more about it here. Why not give the GPT a try?

Could GenAI be the ultimate neutral, positive meeting referee? I think it can help develop some group awareness of dynamics, timings, rabbit holes - things that are not always easy to spot when you are face-planted into the meeting.

What do you think? Can GenAI play a valuable role here?

 

5. GenAI as an in-meeting personal coach

Just like the above, your meeting copilot can act an an individual prompt.

Microsoft Teams copilot can already flag up in real time:

• whether you are talking too fast

• how much of the airtime you are using

• any unsafe or potentially offensive language you are using

We can ask it to:

• suggest questions we might want to pose of the group

• summarise other people's position or arguments

• help us understand something about the discussion we don't want to ask out loud

 

6. Taking the legwork out of meeting capture (FewerFasterBolder-style)

Lots of my clients struggle with simple meeting capture. FewerFasterBolder talks about creating 'group brain' in and after meetings by capturing a shared picture of what was said and agreed so that recollections don't drift. I also talk about packaging up meeting 'product' in a format where it can get to work back in the real world.

In theory, AI can do this really well by transcribing the audio, indexing the video and summarising into key points and actions. All at the click of a button.

However, the standard copilot way of doing this is not going to be precise enough for most teams. It will be too 'AI-ified' and require too much manual tweaking. This friction will be enough to put most teams off using it for any kind of meeting that matters. Generated text is often verbose, forming long, somewhat generic sentences most people don't have time to read.

So, I will be teaching them how to train GenAI to recap to capture meetings in the format they prefer. This might be under a series of specific headings, or using specific language or a level of concision that means people can scan and absorb it quickly. 

I will also help them train copilots to add meeting outcomes to the right places within the wider system e.g. adding tasks to backlogs, sharing the right level info with stakeholders and putting deadlines and dates into people’s diary, finding next meeting dates etc.


It’s this training element that will be most useful. Generic GenAI capability will only get teams so far. LLMs need to respond to your preferences and workflow to truly pick up the heavy lifting.


 

7. Scheduling to minimise meeting burnout

Scheduling is a hugely manual process at the moment but I will be helping clients to use AI agents to manage diaries.

The technology is already there to:

• allow each person to provide constraints, preferences and permitted exceptions around how meetings are scheduled for them
• optimise each person's diary, finding mutually convenient times 
• shuffle meetings as new priorities arise

I see a scenario where our diaries are fluid, with our AI scheduler shifting and changing some of our working week daily - even hourly? - to keep optimising for new priorities. Our work shifts all the time. Our diaries will start to do that too. 

 

8. Democratising collaboration and providing an equitable playing field

We all know AI's capacity for bias (remember the racist soap dispenser on day 3 last week?). But AI could also be a great leveller. When AI transcribes and summarises a meeting, it doesn’t care if you are junior, senior, what your ethnicity is, whether you sound confident or not – it will accurately collate and attribute your ideas and opinions. What an unconsciously biased colleague might have overlooked or discounted is all meat and gravy to a meeting copilot.

I will also be helping my clients use it to give more people a voice through text contributions. A level of contribution that would be previously unmanageable in anything but the occasional consultation is now instantly processable via AI. 

And GenAI has the capacity to handle 'reasonable adjustments' well. If you are neurodivergent, you can add your preferences and constraints and AI may well be able to help you with these in real time, without slowing down the group. 

I'd love to hear what you think about some of these opportunities I'm working on.

What are you hoping AI will do for your teams?

 

Need some more support? 

You might consider:

• inviting me to deliver a talk to stimulate discussion around these issues in your leadership team or wider employee base

• getting some 1:1 support from me as you proactively manage the cultural and behaviour transitions your organisation 

• working with me on how you communicate with your employees about AI, opportunities and issues

 

Thanks for coming along for the ride! 

It's been great to work with you over these last 6 days. 

Best regards, Carrie