The Morning Meeting - A Tool for Change Agents
July 3, 2006
In a previous GCA posting, we wrote about the change agent George Naccara, who helped to transform Logan International airport into one of the safest in the country. Mr. Naccara found that one way to accelerate change and improve communication was to hold a short team meeting every morning. Last week, the Harvard Business School online publication "Working Knowledge" wrote this article, mirroring Naccara’s thoughts on the effectiveness of the morning meeting.
After reading both articles, my first reaction was, "of course, it’s common sense". Working at Sapient, I take the morning meetings for granted. Every project here holds one daily; in fact the company has been using this highly effective process for over a decade. Each morning, the team gets together for an informal meeting to cover everything from general project/client updates to low level progress on individual tasks. In this forum, teams can raise issues, concerns, discuss new ideas, and receive immediate feedback. Much like the Harvard article suggests, our own method is ritualistic and has been refined over the years to the point where it has become a science in maximizing our value output per time spent. This article does a good job of describing the positive outcomes which can result from this simple little exercise, and is summarized nicely in the closing sentence.
"On the surface, TMM (The Morning Meeting) is about communication, but imbedded within it are norms and values that are critical for organizations that must deal with difficult issues and adapt nimbly to new situations: an openness to considering multiple perspectives, a willingness to share responsibility for finding creative solutions, and the discipline to move consistently from strategy to execution."
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