SPEAKER_00 0:16

Okay, today we're going to talk about an operating rhythm or a meeting rhythm could be. You know, a lot of businesses uh manage really on a day-to-day basis, man, just putting out fires, you know, we've all sort of come across it and really dealing with the most urgent thing. Well, today we want to talk about, you know, what sort of meeting rhythm you need. And of course, so over the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about the engine pillar in the VERT flywheel. Remember, VERT uh value engine reach and team. That's the acronym. So we've spoken about in episode 202, we spoke about mapping out the customer journey from end to end. Episode 203, last week we talked about making quality repeatable. Well, today we want to talk about, you know, the squeaky wheel, squeaky wheel always gets the oil, of course, but you know, that's not a very strategic way to run a business. And really, a good meeting rhythm kind of has four features. They're the features you want to look for. The first one is that you're making decisions strategically. So you're not just firefighting. Secondly, that there's a clear owner in the business for those decisions, and it doesn't necessarily need to be you, the founder. That's the whole point is to try and diversify that, you know, being single point sensitive. Third, you need the inputs, the information to make the decision. You need to define what they are. So that's really management information systems, which are really critical. And then finally, there's a set time for when decisions are made and when they get reviewed. And it's important to have that sort of key structure within your business because communication issues uh tend to be the biggest problems in business. You know, that one part of the business didn't know the other part of the business does it that way, or they were going to do something new, or marketing didn't know what operations is doing, and so on and so forth. So, really, we're looking at a good meeting rhythm, and there's really kind of three layers to that, if you like: your weekly meetings, your monthly meetings, and then your quarterly meetings. And to have the good discipline, and remember, I think meetings get a bad name, don't they, Mina? I mean, no one wants to go to another meeting and sit there just nodding or trying to not days off and daydream about something else. So the key point here, I think, is we want to make is we want to make these meetings productive. Doesn't meet in an hour meeting, could be a 10-minute one, could be five minutes, but the regular cadence of it is critical. Mina, why don't we talk about the weekly meeting?

SPEAKER_01 2:36

Yeah, so with the weekly meetings, it's it's probably more so about keeping delivery on track. So it's not about, you know, solving every problem in the business because it's more so just ensuring that the work that you're promised to clients or customers or to your counter, your stakeholders, that is actually being delivered on time. So you're not trying to solve every problem in the business. That comes later, right? So this is more sort of a proactive approach to understand where the work or product or where you're actually sitting in the in the timeline of your delivery and making sure you've got the right people and resources in place to actually deliver on that promise. Now, with these meetings, it's important not to try to keep it short, concise with key metrics or KPIs for you to actually track. There's a lot of a lot of times with a lot of sort of bigger personalities, they can sometimes take over meetings, and that's why sometimes they can go longer than expected, they can not address the actual underlying issues or uh get an understanding of where things are at. So it's really important to try to keep them on track so that you can actually get the results or the information that you're trying to get out of that meeting.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

I mean, setting an agenda is key to this, right? And but setting the agenda and sticking to the agenda, and that's why I think you've got to have one person running the meeting, one person that's responsible for the agenda. Because sometimes people find it as a you know a place to have a whinge or you know, air some grievances or you know, just get something off their back, which is fine, but you don't necessarily need everyone in the team sitting around listening to that. You know, those sort of conversations should be done one-on-one. But I find sometimes it's you know, it it's not a perfect science, I don't think. Sometimes it's difficult to keep meetings on track, but you could as much as you possibly can. I think it's really about agenda and here are the things that we want to talk about. It's anything outside of that, and that's where I think meetings bleed, man. I like that's where they get a bad name, is you don't have that median discipline, you'll end up wasting a lot of time in meetings.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

That's right. And I think it comes down to the person that's also running the meeting. If you've got someone that's quite passive in nature and will just let you know the participants just run and ramble on, then you're not gonna get much out of it. So I think it's really important to select who that person is very strategically so that they can actually get the agenda items addressed. So that person is then responsible for what we call the scorecard. And this is where a lot of businesses sort of get it wrong in in two really direct in two different directions. So some of them run on numbers, uh sorry, run on no numbers at all. So it's just whoever argues most confidently in the room, sort of like what you were referring to earlier.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

And there's always a couple of people in a team that do most of that already. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

And funny enough, you always find maybe the quieter people in the room, I don't know, from my experience anyway, probably have more insightful opinions or ways to actually improve a business, but they're just not confident enough to say it. So it's really important for that person that's running the meeting to try to encourage a more collaborative sort of environment across every team member. And then others try to track everything down and and drown out sort of any noise. So from my perspective, the scorecard should really have probably what is it, two to ten to fifteen metrics, you think? And from my perspective, anyway, I reckon that's any more than that is probably too much, any any any less is probably not enough. So if you've got the 10 to 15 metrics, you you can then clearly see the whole system and what you're trying to address. Then it's probably worth sort of setting the differences between lag and lead indicators. So a lag indicator is what tells you what's already happened. Sort of that could be, you know, last week's PL, last week's revenue, last week's complaints. It's all important information, but it's a lag indicator. Whereas a lead indicator tells you what's actually coming, how many inquiries have you had, what's the delivery time frames on certain services or products. Because if, for example, your inquiry volumes increase by 30% over the last week, then you know that you're going to have an upcoming bottleneck if you're not resourced correctly. So it's really important to for those metrics to be both lag and lead indicators to make sure that you've got the right systems and resources in place to actually deliver on your product or service. Now, if you think about FedEx back in Stuart's Day, a very long time ago, one of their headline uh sort of slogans was that or one of their core promises. Core promises, thank you. I was looking for that. So the core promise was delivered on time every time. But again, it was somewhat of a lag metric because it didn't sort of have oversight on the actual delivery itself. So it didn't capture things such as damaged boxes or products, a missed call, the things that were delivered to the wrong address. So in 1990 they actually retired it and replaced it with a service quality indicator, which was a 12 component weighted index. So sort of like what we're referring to in terms of having a weekly meeting with 10 to 15 metrics, they had a 12 weighted index where each type of failure accounted according to how much it actually hurt the customer, not just when so it wasn't all just about when it was actually delivered.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

So I think it's it's a good point, Mina. Like actually, I think, you know, we said so 10 to 15 metrics. I mean, that might work in some businesses, and maybe some businesses might find it difficult to get it down to 15. But if there's only really three or four super meaningful KPIs, just go with three or four. We've spent a lot of time in our business working out what are the things that are important to measure. Because you know, the other thing too, every time you measure a KPI, you've got to ask yourself, what are you gonna do with the number? Like if the number's bad, what action can you take? And that's why leading versus lagging indicators are really important too, because if it's a leading indicator, you can take some action. But if all it's telling you is what's happened in the past, and that's funny for us to say as accountants, because you know, we spend most of our time in the past preparing financials, all that tells us is what happened last year. So I guess you can still get some information from it. But sometimes we measure things in business just because that industry has always measured that. But if there's no insightful information, why measure it? Why spend too much? Well, maybe you measure it, but you don't bring it to the meeting and talk about it. So I think really honing in, it's obviously what FedEx did, hone in what's really going to move the dial in your business and let's talk and look about, look at these things on a weekly basis.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Yeah, definitely. You raise a good point, Stuart. I think from my experience with sort of small to medium business, that a lot of businesses try to overcomplicate their own businesses or affairs, and sometimes it's sort of something out of pride more than anything else. So I I personally think, you know, if it is only three or four things that are really key to your business, just focus on those. All right. It's it's all about quality rather than quantity. Now, Stuart, maybe you can talk to us about if a repeated problem keeps happening on the scorecard, say three, three, four weeks running, what should we do?

SPEAKER_00 8:57

That's where the real hard work of fixing the engine and improving the engine meaner, I think, happens. Remember, you want to be strategic about these things. So I look at the weekly meetings as a bit of data collection, just managing the team a little bit and also still managing the engine, but just sort of making sure things are steering through the right direction and fixing really quick, easy wins. Like sometimes this one little bit of the process is broken, no big deal, just fix it quickly, is what it is. But what we want to do at monthly meetings is bring a whole bunch of data to help us really understand how well is the engine in our business working. And of course, margin's a big one, profit margin, but turnover, debtors, whip, all these sorts of things, got to, depending on your business, work out what those KPIs are. But the monthly meeting, the focus of the monthly meeting is really engine improvements. So, what in our engine isn't working so much? And it's important to have the right people in the room too, of course. It can't be just the accountant. No one wants a meeting with a bunch of nerds, Mina. It can't be just the accountant, you've got to have someone there from sales, someone from operations, you know, someone that's managing the team, you know, all the right people in the room, so you can have an end-to-end discussion about particular parts of the engine. And there's a a great example is Domino's. So back in 2009, their share price was terrible. It was all-time lows. They had, I don't know who ranks the pizza, like in terms of how good pizza is. But anyway, they they ranked the lowest. Wouldn't have won that job. It's a pretty good job. Anyway, they so they had chip pizza and the the share price reflected it, of course. So it would have been easy to blame, you know, maybe delivery or the stores that weren't making or the consistency or training. There were a lot of things that they could have thrown stones at it, but they they worked out it's a recipe. They worked out if they just tinkered with the recipe, they actually they could actually improve the underlying product. And that's really an engine decision, but you've got to have the right information and you've got to have the right cadence. I think the thing that Domino's may have not done as well is the answer could have been if they were running these engine monthly meetings, would have they picked it up before the share price was terrible and before they got that terrible rating. And that's what we've got to think about in our own businesses. If something starts to drift, because often these things don't happen overnight. It's not like Domino's made the best pizza on Monday, but by Tuesday it was terrible. These things tend to drift over time and they are difficult sometimes to pick up. But that's why we've got to have those key and hopefully leading KPIs so we can measure this stuff and we can start to see, okay, this is coming off a little bit. We made a decision, a product decision or gradient decision that we thought was going to save us 5% in terms of a hard cost, but actually it's having a big impact on the quality of the product. Now, the other thing too is to resist trying to do too many things on the engine at once because you will fatigue the team. And also what you want to do is isolate the improvements and and attack the the improvements that are going to have the biggest impact initially. So that's why we have the monthly meeting. That's why the weekly meetings, we don't want to solve any really big problems. What we want to do is collect the data. Okay, there's a couple of things in this engine that might not be working so well. Let's put them on the agenda for the monthly meeting. At the monthly meeting, we get all the data that's hopefully allows us to diagnose it, like Domino's did. And then we get to work out, okay, what are the priorities? Which bit do we want to fix first? Because you don't want to go off and try and fix 20 things all at once. As I said, the team's going to be running in multiple directions. And that kind of feeds into quarterly meetings, Mina.

SPEAKER_01 12:32

Yeah, probably my favorite, I've got to admit, because I feel like this is where strategy comes into play. And so where quarterly meetings uh sort of differentiate from the others is that monthly meetings are really about, or sorry, weekly meetings are really about control. Whereas monthly meetings are about improvement. And a quarterly meeting, like I said, is about strategy. It's about direction, it's about how we can actually turn a multi-year strategy into something we can actually execute within 90 days. So the it's important here to really focus on priority, right? Because there's a lot of things that you cannot always do in your business. Like we always say, your business is either growing or dying. So it's really important to focus on one to two, three, three things. Okay. And again, the fewer is better. The more you throw at it, the more people get fatigued, the more people lose focus. So it's really important that it's just short, concise, and the things that are gonna really impact your business the most, and then a leadership team then runs with it. They set the theme, they communicate it across the business, and it's really important that they decide that it's a deliberate theme for the quarter. That no that there's there's no deviation, that there's no contention around, oh, but this could actually be a better yield a better result, or it might be something that fell out of the one to two themes, uh, one to three themes, sorry. So it's really important that it there's a clear role, someone that's a responsible person for that theme, and a clear indication of what the output is actually trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

It's like the whole Steve Jobs principle, isn't it, Mina? Like he worked on one, apparently, I didn't know him, of course, but one one product at a time. And it makes sense. I just listened to a a uh watched a documentary actually on a plane about how the brain works and it was really evidence-based. Uh yeah, surprisingly, I actually have one. And you and use it from time to time. But anyway, you know, it really is multitasking is the worst thing. And there's actually a study about that that they did. I'll try and remember the data, but there was a study that they measured how often medications were emitted incorrectly or given to patients incorrectly in a in a hospital. And they worked out that the doctors were being distracted too often. And so they put this process in place where they had one hour a day where the doctor could work with the patient and they couldn't be interrupted. So all the medications were given to patients in that particular hour. And the instances of mistakes reduced substantially. And, you know, doctors obviously pretty smart, they're obviously all able to multitask. So, you know, but it does go to what you're trying to do is get the team all on the one page. Everyone thinking about this one particular thing. I think quarterly themes are a great way to do that. And the temptation, particularly in business, is to maybe have two themes or maybe even three themes, because you think, oh, all these three things need to be improved, hopefully all at the same time. But actually, you diminish, I think you diminish greatly the impact of those themes by having multiple. So instead, you're probably better off say, what are the top four things we want to do this year? Then break it up into quarters and just have one theme per quarter. And then trying to as much as possible bring it into the conversation and the language within the business. I mean, that's how you really influence a culture, and that's how I think you influence a team. So, and the leaders really need to live that, right? So if the theme is make value visible, for instance, which is one we use in our business, then Mina and I, as leaders in the business, need to show how we're making value visible, like that we're we tell stories that we, you know, we had a discussion with a client because we did this and they saved X and and so on and so forth. So you've really got to bring it into the daily conversation to really make that quarterly theme as impactful as possible.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Yeah, so again, that was one of the examples that we used in our business, and it really came down to the leaders in our business to communicate and reinforce that every at every level within the business. So it became part of the the sort of scorecard metrics in our weekly meetings, for example. We used to talk about uh client scenarios or situations or outcomes we were uh to achieve, and each staff member needed to actually come to the table with something. So, you know, and then it used to be a collaborative approach around, oh, have we thought about this? Or if it has actually been an item that's worth worthy of note, then how did we communicate what we achieved to the client? Because what we found in our business is that a lot of work happens behind the scenes and we achieve great outcomes, but it's not necessarily communicated to the client because it was almost under the assumption at the time that clients were we understood what we were doing, we obviously have the best interests at heart, but they don't understand everything that went behind it. And making that value visible was one of the themes that really improved, I think, from our speaking firsthand, our business, because we got the we got the outcomes clearly articulated to the client and the client could actually see what we're actually doing behind the scenes. It's not a basically just a plain set of financials or tax returns, for example, that are just being sent to them for signing.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

And it's a it's a perfect quarterly theme because it wasn't just one thing we needed to change. It was the value that's produced that we might produce for a client could be on different levels. It could be the, you know, administrative team or client services team did something that was amazing, or it could have been the direct advisor or it could have been something completely different. So it's not like one sort of process or system. We needed everyone to be thinking about this. And it was a double-edged sword too, because not only were we able to say, oh, look, hey client, this is what we've done and this is the outcome and this is the benefit to you, and they feel good about that, but also the team member feels good about it as well because it's so easy to come to work and do your work and go, oh, that's that's no big deal because we do it every day. But you know, if you if you've moved the dial, it is actually a big deal, and we should really feel proud about it. So it's a great example of a quarterly theme because it's not quarterly theme suits where the whole business can get on board and the whole all team members can contribute, and you really need everyone sort of moving in one direction.

SPEAKER_01 18:23

Definitely, but I think cadence is important because it's very easy for what what we found sometimes as well, that you get the staff are behind it and they understand the theme, they understand the process, but it's the weekly meeting that keeps them accountable. So that's the cadence that is really required and needs to be part of your scorecard for that theme going forward so that they always know that they're accountable to bring something to the table every Monday. And that's where I think the test really is. And the test isn't how good it sounds or how good it sounded in the in a in the planning session. More so did something actually happen every Monday morning? Did someone actually bring something to the table every Monday morning to discuss? And that's where I think the priorities are really sort of laid out and what becomes what's important in the business.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Yeah, 100% Mina. And that's how, you know, it's it again, it doesn't come back to one thing. Like, how do you make this quarterly theme work? It's really just ongoing conversation, ongoing talking about it, making sure you're tracking these things, like Mina said in the in the uh weekly meetings. And sometimes a quarterly theme will be too big for a quarter. So, I mean, it's just a terminology saying a quarterly theme, but there's nothing to say that it can't be a half-yearly theme if it's if you only feel like it's just getting going, it's taken a bit of time to get going. Of course, you know, run it or run it on not consecutive, but multiple a couple of times a year if you've got a different sort of priority.

SPEAKER_01 19:41

Yep, definitely. Now, I'm sure you've been doing this a lot longer than I have. So maybe you can talk to us about how we actually run the meetings themselves.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah, so I spoke at the beginning, you know, about having a set of agenda and trying to stick on that agenda. I guess what we want to do is first have a an idea, a rough idea in our head around how long these meetings should go. So just typically the weekly meeting should last anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half. I think if it's taking longer than an hour and a half, you're probably not doing it correctly. You're probably not really focusing on the absolutely key, you know, elements to it. The monthly meeting should take one to two hours. Again, depending on the complexity and so forth, I like to keep it. I like to keep the weekly one like half an hour, 45 minutes. I like to keep the monthly one under an hour or just on an hour typically is actually sometimes a little over, but not certainly not two hours. And the quarterly one is going to depend on your quarterly theme, I think, and the complexity in the business and size of the business. But anywhere from, you know, one hour just to two or three hours is is probably fine. But again, you don't want to fatigue your team too much, and you don't want to end up sort of creating all these, you know, different meetings and everything's oh, just another meeting. You want them to be productive. So to be productive, you want to make sure that you've got all the information to make the decision. So one of the things that I think gets a lot of time gets wasted in meeting is communicate. The communication can happen before the meeting. We all don't need to be sitting around a table to do that. And it's really interesting, actually. Seth Godin wrote a wrote a blog about how you can improve communication in businesses. He's just making the observation that I sort of shared at the beginning that communication is the biggest thing, and that's why you have meeting rhythm. That is, lack of communication destroys a lot of businesses or certainly doesn't help them. And he sort of spoke about, and I thought it was a great idea. Why don't you produce a podcast for your for your business in a way as a way of disseminating information and conveying information? And his idea was that, you know, we all we all have downturn to downtime like travel time, go to the gym, walk the dog, whatever it might be. And we can spend those times consuming that information. Whereas I've been to plenty of meetings where, you know, someone's spent the first half hour just sort of telling us about the problem. And that could have that could have happened, you know, sort of somewhere else. So firstly come with the information. You then got to work out who's making the decision. So is it a team decision? Is it unanimous? Is it just about sort of bouncing some ideas or getting some input, but ultimately you're going to make the decision? And then who's executing? You know, who's actually going to run with it and what's the timeline, making sure someone has an Owner or has some ownership of it. Really interesting, Mina. Actually, Mina, you've got a sometimes you use notebook LM. Maybe you can in terms of like being able to consume information in a productive manner.

SPEAKER_01 22:28

I'm not much of a reader. So um I I have a cheat code with notebook LM in that. Stuart tends to send some lengthy emails, very lengthy emails. So I tend to sometimes put that through a notebook LM and then it actually converts it into a podcast for you. So and it what's really good about it is it is AI driven, obviously, but it doesn't hallucinate. So it keeps everything in terms of what is actually being said in that material. So it doesn't go deviating or anything like that. It gets it into a very sort of informative sort of an engaging actually podcast. Oh, because I wrote it, of course, it's engaging that you can listen to prior to the meeting. I've I tend to I I catch a train from time to time. Sometimes it's good to, you know, before I start the day, I'll listen to these lengthy emails. And then, you know, I've got a uh I've got a pretext for what's actually to come into the meeting.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, so that that's a good way to do it. So I we try and separate information sharing from discussion and decision making. The discussion and the decision making should happen in the meeting. The information sharing shouldn't. Interesting, Jeff Basos uh at uh when he was at Amazon, obviously he's still involved, but not on a day-to-day basis, he had an interesting sort of way of running meetings. He would get, if the meeting was at a particular topic, someone would write an essay on that topic, you know, it could be 10 pages, giving people all the information they needed to make a decision. So what is the problem? How do we measure it? What are the potential solutions? Blah, blah, blah. And he would make all the executives read it in the meeting. So the first part of the meeting, so it's almost the reverse of what I said, by the way, but the first part of the meeting was just reading the memo. And that might have taken 15, 20 minutes or something. And the reason why he did that, he goes because the executives are busy, everyone's busy, they'll take shortcuts and the people will come to the meeting and they'll say they read the memo, but they won't really, and they'll sort of fudge their way through it. So I thought those are interesting, interesting observations. So I think probably you know, you it you've got to work out what works for your business, of course. But if you've got, you know, a small, very fully engaged team, you can rely on, you know, people to read the stuff, then it's fine. But if you think that there's a there's a a chance of that slipping, that could be a decent idea. So Mina, let's talk about actually getting people to do what you want them to do.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah. And it's it's really a fine line between sort of making performance visible and micromanaging. So I I feel like there's a real risk where you share too much in information where individuals are then under the spotlight. They feel under pressure, they feel like they're they're being micromanaged, they they can't actually perform their roles because they feel like at every point in time someone's looking over their shoulder. So I think you really need to be deliberate about what you're building, the scorecard that you're building, how you're actually tracking your performance. And there needs to be sort of some visible outcomes for your staff to see, but not too much to the point where they lose their ability to sort of think on their feet or or work or work in a particular way where they're not it's not so rigid. So we always use uh we always say in our business, when something goes wrong, always blame the system, not the person. So it's really important to have a shared scorecard when the whole so that the whole organization can actually see the outcomes that matter and each team member can actually see the metrics that directly controls.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

Yeah, that's right, Mena. It's a fine line between, like you said, measurement and micromanagement. And you've got to try and balance that, I think. You've always got to be aware of it. Look, I I think in a business, the right people always do the right thing. So if you're micromanaging or you have to micromanage, you've got to really ask yourself, is that the right team member in that in that position? They might be the right team member for your business, but maybe they're just in the wrong role, or maybe they're just the wrong person for your business. So, but also people need a scorecard. Like a scorecard is good. I know, you know, if I've gone to work and done a good job, or if this month has been a good month. And then also people want to, the right people want to come to work and do a good job. So if I'm not doing a good job, where do I need to improve? And so really it's about helping people do the best job they can do within their role. I think that's what it really is, rather than micromanaging or saying, okay, now we're going to measure all these things. Like, you know, you hear about work from home and that some businesses measure like uh keyboard strokes and how often the mouse moves and all that sort of stuff. I think once you're down to measuring that, your whole culture's broken, really.

SPEAKER_01 26:43

Like you've lost trust.

SPEAKER_00 26:44

You've lost trust, it's terrible. So it sends a really poor message. So I think it's also about framing, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Like I think so. And I think we've spoken about Kyoto in a in a previous podcast, Joe, and from my perspective, they've done that really well. You know, when they they changed a culture in their business under and I always get this wrong, is it the uh Taichi Ono's is it I don't even know your printing. I don't know. But let's go with that. Under his production system, that no matter your chain of command, whether you're sort of lower down the food chain or higher up the food chain, if you spot a defect in the production line, then you can actually put the whole production to a halt. So that and that and it gives a lot of ownership, a lot of pride to the people or the team members to for to actually do that. So they're actually looking for issues in the production line, in their product, for them to actually improve. So I think that and and uh what they what that actually did within Toyota is that the team member who actually stopped the the production wasn't actually blamed, they were celebrated. They were celebrated because they actually found the defect that they they can actually find a root cause for so that they can actually improve their system, their product, their processes. And I think that's really important in the business.

SPEAKER_00 27:54

Yeah, and look, I think the right people want to come to work and do a great job, like I said. And you know, sometimes when we interview people, they say, Oh, look, I I like the job, I like the culture, I like the people, but I just weren't able to affect change. Like I wanted to use a different system or redesign a process, and the business wasn't keen to do that. Like we're always, men and I are always surprised about that. So that's the other benefit of having these meetings, having the cadence, the KPIs, is that I mean, in our business, a junior person can spot something that maybe because we've been doing it for a long time, we just don't see. And it would be stupid of us not to, you know, not to give them the opportunity to sort of add that value. So I think, you know, that's the thing with job satisfaction. That's the thing that people want to come to work and feel like they've or go home at the end of the day and feel like they've actually made some positive change.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Yeah, definitely. And I think with that transparency, Stuart, like it reduces politics in a business. You know, when performance is hidden away from team members, people tend to fill the gaps with their own stories. They tend to blame other people or rather than the system or the process or even themselves sometimes. But when it's visible, the source of the problem you can is easy to locate. And there's really nothing left on the table to argue about. So I think that comes to the end of it. So, Stuart, what does someone actually listening do with all of this?

SPEAKER_00 29:08

Not really sure, I mean, I've probably just given them a big to-do list. Look, I think the the thing you've got to do is if if you're not having if you don't have a good meeting meeting rhythm in your business at the moment, then you've got to think about how do we implement something like that. And I'm not sure that I would go from no meetings to I'm gonna have a daily, a weekly, a monthly, a quarterly meeting straight away. Maybe it's about just getting that good monthly cadence in. And then once people are comfortable with that, introducing a quarterly meeting and then a weekly or whatever. You've got to work it out. But that's the starting point is work out what is your meeting meeting cadence like? How do you know if it's a weekly problem, a monthly problem, or something that should be dealt with at a quarterly meeting? Do you have quarterly themes? So do you have something in the business, you know, something that a theme that the business is really focusing over a period of time, whether it's a quarter or a half year, whatever it might be. So I think that's where I would start is really understanding what are those different meetings used for. And it's really around the discipline of this. So it's about having the weekly meeting every week. And it could be five minutes, it's not a big deal, or it could be 50 minutes if there's a lot to talk about. I don't think we need to be attached to the time. It's just attached to the usefulness. And so if you're just starting this process, I think it's good to also get input from the team. Okay, was that useful? Was that where did we waste time? And it's a learning exercise for everyone else. Like someone might bring, it happens in our business, someone will bring an issue to a weekly meeting. It's not a weekly meeting issue. Look, we want to acknowledge it. Thank you, great. If we can deal with it now quickly, that's good. But just for your information, that's something we'd like to talk about at the monthly meeting. And it sounds a bit rigid and you want to capture, you want to have a way of capturing the idea so it does turn up on the agenda at the monthly meeting, but it all really is about meeting discipline.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

Yeah, but I think it's also you've got to be careful with that as well, in the sense that you don't discourage those person, those people from bringing it up as well in your meeting. So I think it's really important to stay encouraging, you know, in the fact that they have brought it up, but not discount it just because it wasn't well placed at a weekly meeting.

SPEAKER_00 31:09

Yeah, 100%, Mina. And this is really change management, right? So if you're going from that's why I said if you go from zero meetings, don't go to like a hundred meetings, and also don't be too rigid. Like it's you over the course, I would say over the course of a year or maybe 18 months, after you've been doing it for 18 months, people get people get how it's going to work. And again, in 80 months' time, you want people to go being almost enthusiastic for the meeting because they know they're going, some decisions are going to be made, some improvements are going to be made as a result of those decisions, and things, their job's going to get easier. So, but you can't, it's a learning process. People need to learn, you know, what to bring to what meeting, how to be disciplined, how to stay on track, all those sorts of things. So we don't want to be too aggressive about it. Okay, that's it for today. Until next week. Bye for now.