ChatGPT won’t take your job, it will only create more meetings #ChangeMyMind

👉🏼 Change my mind

If ChatGPT ever successfully replaces human work, the time surplus will be stupidly spent on meetings. #ChangeMyMind

This could easily be an ad for Patrick Lencioni’s 2004 book “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable... About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business”. Alas, it is not.

A while back, I spent the day working at a friend's house, and at one point he told me that he was about to enter the most expensive meeting ever: more than 20 managers, for an hour and a half, telling the rest what they did during the week.

I felt almost personally attacked about the mere existence of such a meeting, so I shared some of my views on the subject on LinkedIn and it went ballistic: almost 430.000 views, over 2700 interactions, 286 comments and 239 shares.

It seems that all of us hold very strong, albeit in different degrees and ways, opininons about meetings. Some felt very strongly that meetings were a thing of the past, that it was about time we stopped having them altogether, and that meetingless orgs were the new order. Some others, in turn, felt –also very strongly– that meetings were the blood that made organizations survive and thrive, and that going against them was a sure-fire way to kill a business.

Whether you are on one side or the other, whether these ideas seem positive, negative or none of the above to you, what we cannot ignore is that there is something that impacts us deeply, even if we are not aware that it exists: organizations are designed.

You can organize your organization (a toast for redundancy 🥂) around meetings, you can do it around the concept of having no meetings at all, or you can have meetings (or not) without the organizational design crumbling down. As you’ve probably guessed, meetings are not the important thing; what matters is that you realize that organizations can be designed to behave in very specific ways and, even more important, they can be re-designed.

I always go back to Parkinson’s Law which states that “the amount of work to be done expands to fill the whole of the available time”. Whatever ChatGPT gives us back in terms of available time, I firmly believe people will fill it with the thing they already know: meetings. I would love to believe they will use the extra time to explore new horizons, but I seriously doubt it.

As a sidenote, at the end of 2022, we embarked on a mission to connect with experts from all around the world, and invite them to share their most incendiary, controversial and transformative ideas about how organizations can be shaped. Here is the –fully forever free– book that came as a result:

👉🏼 A t-shirt that says

“Growth for the sake of growth is the 'ideology' of the cancer cell.”

This lovely quote that we hold dear in our hearts was gifted to us by Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book so influential that the term "monkeywrench" became a synonym for sabotage and any sort of activism or intentional damage to machines related to social causes. Talk about impact!

We are adamant lobbyists for well-designed growth, that both makes sense and makes people feel cared for in the midst of acceleration.

👉🏼 In case you missed it

Dan Ariely , international best-seller and one of the leading minds in behavioral economics, launched a new course on Changing Customer Behavior.

In case you haven’t heard of Dan, he is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight, and co-founder of several companies implementing insights from behavioral science. Also, he authored some mind bending books like Predictably Irrational and The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

This newsletter was put together with love, dedication, (a bit of) sarcasm and not enough time by the minds behind Sunstone. Do feel invited to share your comments, ideas, suggestions and/or insults with us at start@sunstone.pro