Love Collaborating, Hate Meetings?

Deep dive guides

Make space for the work that matters

📝 Minimum viable meeting

What's the minimum you need to do to take up your colleagues' time in meetings?

📝 How to redesign any meeting so it fits in 30 minutes

A practical method for stripping a meeting back without losing the outcomes you actually need.

📝 How to shift an update meeting to async and give everyone deep work time back

Step-by-step guidance on moving your most common meeting type out of the calendar entirely. 

📝 Should you offer a meeting free day?

Examining whether protecting a full day from meetings is the right call, and how to make it work if so.

📝 Consult wide, meet small (here's how to do it)

The single most underused lever for reducing meeting load - invite (a LOT) fewer people.

Use structure to unlock powerful contribution

 📝 Introduction to scaffolding — 13 techniques I use all the time

The master reference: a library of structures for making any meeting more interactive and participatory. 

📝 Agreement Levels — a fast, nuanced way to make better group decisions

A simple tool that replaces the awkward 'is everyone OK with this?' with something that actually reveals where people are. 

📝 Stop presenting slides in meetings — instead, do this...

Why slide-led meetings suppress contribution — and a better format that gets people thinking from the moment they arrive.

📝 Should you be using the Jeff Bezos silent reading technique?

The Amazon method for levelling the playing field and drawing out richer input from quieter voices. 

📝 A 90-second tool for adding helpful structure to a meeting

When you haven't time to prepare a full agenda, this buys you the structure you need in under two minutes.

📝 Signature meetings

How to design repeating meeting types so they run consistently well without reinventing the wheel each time. 

📝 A simple format for capturing the value of every meeting

Closing a meeting well — so the contributions and decisions made in it don't immediately evaporate.

Surface tension early, handle it cleanly

📝 How I turn bad conflict into good conflict

The core distinction between conflict that blocks progress and conflict that generates it, and how to move between the two. 

📝 How to excavate what people in your team really think (before it sinks your project)

Practical techniques for drawing out the real concerns people are holding back, before they derail the project.

📝 My go-to script for de-risking a tough conversation

A structured approach to opening a difficult conversation without triggering defensiveness or derailing the meeting.

📝 Rupture and repair

Why conflict at work is inevitable, and why repair (not avoidance) is the skill we need to learn. 

📝 Psychologically strong teams and how to develop one (Part 1)

The foundations of a team that can handle disagreement and how to build them. 

📝 Steelman technique: how to disagree and decide better in meetings

How arguing against your own position leads to better decisions, healthier debate, and fewer meeting stalemates.