THE SIGNAL
In “Stop the Meeting Madness” (Harvard Business Review, July to August 2017), Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun report that research shows executives “spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week” in meetings, “up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.” In their interviews with hundreds of executives, one said, “I cannot get my head above water to breathe during the week.”
Twenty-three hours is more than half of a 40-hour week, before email, travel or the work the meetings were meant to unlock.
BEFORE
Hypothetical: a property and casualty insurer’s reserving team has a proposed reserve adjustment for one line of business. The actuarial analysis is done and finance has reviewed the impact. The chief actuary must sign off, and her calendar is full of meetings through Friday.
The file is ready. The person who can release it is not.
WHAT THE WAIT COSTS
The adjustment waits while the close calendar keeps moving. The team schedules a prep meeting to brief her for the review meeting, and each meeting adds to the hours she already cannot spare. The work is finished. The judgment is booked.
AFTER
The chief actuary gets the adjustment as one packet: the analysis, the finance review, the open questions and how she decided similar adjustments before, each with its source.
She reviews it between meetings, asks one question in writing, and signs off. The record shows who decided, when and why.
HOW WISDOMTWIN FITS
WisdomTwin.ai is building a sovereign judgment layer for regulated enterprises. It is designed to give each named approver a role-specific judgment twin that prepares the decision packet the way that person reviews, with the evidence attached, so the decision moves faster and leaves an auditable record. It is designed to run on-premises, on-device or in your private cloud, and the named person still makes the call.
We don’t replace judgment. We remove the wait.
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
Add up the hours your top three approvers spent in meetings last week.
List the decisions that waited on each of them during those hours.
Pick one recurring briefing and replace it with a written packet the approver can review on their own time.
SOURCES
Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun, “Stop the Meeting Madness”, Harvard Business Review, July to August 2017: https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness
Examples in this issue are hypothetical, and nothing here describes a customer result.
JOIN US AT WISDOMTWIN LIVE
We’re hosting our first-ever WisdomTwin Live, a session on the true cost of meetings: the money, the slow decisions and the toll on the people sitting in them. Prefer a one-on-one conversation first? Book a call: https://calendly.com/romanbodnarchuk
Want in? Comment two words: No Meetings. We’ll invite you to the next WisdomTwin Live, or send you the replay if you miss it.
Roman Bodnarchuk
Co-Founder and CEO, WisdomTwin.ai