 Why do people hate meetings so much? Why do meetings get such a bad rap? I don't know if you've ever seen any meeting memes, but there's quite a lot of them, like this one, this one, this one, this one. Well basically you get the point, meetings are a meme within themselves. Basically people think meetings are a waste of time or that meetings are just there to spawn more meetings. And yeah, meetings are almost like this running joke of corporates especially. It's just something you do to waste time. It's not a real thing. Almost nothing real is happening in these meetings, even though it's one of the key ways that people get things done at companies and it's so wild to me that they're just so bad and so badly optimized at most companies. And in this video, I want to show you exactly, scientifically, why meetings are broken. And to do this, I'm going to show you inside our course called Workshop or Master where we teach people how to run problem solving and decision making sessions. And in the video, you're going to see me talk about why meetings are broken and why you should run a structured step by step workshop instead. And there's a little fun exercise in here that I think you're going to like. So grab a pen and paper and let's jump into the video. Why should you run workshops? Why should your clients want you to run workshops? Can't we just run meetings? Well, there are a lot of good reasons to run a workshop instead of a meeting. But often it's just a good idea to be able to prove to someone very quickly the limitations of a meeting and why meetings don't work so often, especially when you're trying to solve complex tasks or especially when you've got a lot of options to choose from and you need to make a decision and move on. Now, to prove this to our clients and just to show you how this works in real life and just one quick example, what I want you to do is just grab a pen and a piece of paper. So you can pause this so you can grab a pen and a piece of paper when you unpause will continue. Oh, I'm so glad they paused it. Okay, welcome back. You've unpaused or you didn't pause and you don't want to do the task and it's just very sad. All right. What I'm going to do is I'm going to flash a couple of words up on the screen and all I want you to do is look at the screen. Nothing else. Okay, here you go and it's gone back to me. Now what I want you to do is just take 20 seconds to write down every word you remember and please don't cheat. Of course you can go back and pause it but that's not the point of this exercise. Write down everything you remember. I'll wait. I'll give you a few seconds. You don't need to pause this time. Okay, stop writing. Now, I'm going to show you the words again on the screen and I want you to figure out how many you remembered. So basically match up the ones you've written to what I'm going to show you on the screen again. So here's what we had up on the screen again. Now, how many did you remember? Was it somewhere between five and nine words? Well, statistically it should be somewhere between five and nine words. If you remembered less than five or more than nine, then well, I just not making any assumptions but either you're a super genius or you weren't paying any attention. So what you just saw was a quick experiment from a study that was run by George Miller in 1956. And this was from a group of studies that he and some other colleagues ran to figure out how much information can the average person process. This was just one of the really quick crude experiments that I want to give you an idea of. Now, you could only remember between five and nine things there. Imagine if you were in a meeting you have, and I'm going to get some help from my video editors here, you have person A, person B, person C, and person D. Let's actually give them names, people at AJ & Smart, Amar, Sarah, Laura, Callum. Okay, they're all standing, they're in a meeting, for some reason they look like whatever they look like here. And in this meeting, Laura says data point A, we're having a conversation and she gives out some information. Let's say we're trying to figure out something for the next year's strategy for the company. I'm not going into detail, but she basically gives out data dump A. So she's talking about the things she thinks we could do. So then Callum listens to that, everyone else listens, some people take notes, then Callum says something, he agrees but he adds something to it, he creates basically A2. Then we have Amar and Amar is like, actually, what about B? And so he talks for a while and talks about B. And then Sarah is like, well, what about C? And now already, you have a ton of information in the room before any decisions have been made. This is just conversation. And everyone is, you know, collecting that information in their own way with their own notes. But basically, people aren't really necessarily remembering what's going on. And there's all these brain issues that come up like recency bias and primacy bias. For example, the fact that people generally remember the first few things in a set of numbers or the first few numbers in a set of numbers, and the last few numbers in a set of numbers, so that you're all the stuff in between just becomes kind of a mess and people don't remember things. Our brains are just not made to process the amount of data that happens in meetings. And what a workshop does is allows us to visualize the conversation. That's one of the core things. It allows us to have somebody, a workshopper, visualize and standardize the conversation on the walls around us or on the Miro board if you're doing it remotely. And this basically takes away the need for the individuals in the meeting to remember the data that's being processed and being kind of downloaded onto the group. There are a ton of other reasons, and that's something we'll talk about more in the rest of the program. But just that one thing, that one limitation that humans can't remember more than five to nine pieces of information. Now it's a little bit different when the information is kind of clustered, etc, etc. And just the fact that in a normal meeting, people are taking their own notes and having to rely on memory to make decisions, that's a massive issue with meetings. Workshops allow you to visualize meetings and then make decisions based on the data that is visualized around you. And just that alone is the reason why you should run a workshop instead of a meeting if multiple people need to come together, share information and then make decisions. That one little quick experiment from George Miller is a great thing to show your team, a great thing to show your clients. Companies beat themselves up about being bad about meetings. They try to make better agendas, they try to take better notes. But in the end, our brains are not created for meetings to be efficient, right? We jam meetings into our work lives, but our brains are not made for that. Now that doesn't mean you should run workshops for everything. Workshops don't need to be run when it's just a quick one-on-one meeting. But if you have like three or more people that need to sit around for a few hours to make decisions, it's ideal to have a workshopper in the room to visualize that conversation. So that, you know, Amar can have his data dump posted up on the wall and Sarah can say, ah, two hours ago, Amar mentioned this instead of I only remember what happened five minutes ago or the specific way I wrote my notes. This is how misalignment happens. I just wanted to show you that one thing, because I mean there's a million reasons people should run workshops, but that one thing, that one little issue with the human brain is the reason people need workshops. It's the reason people like you can be the guide, can be the workshopper who helps teams get more done and also you help people augment their brains so that they can actually get things done in an efficient way, in a fun way and in a way that actually moves the company and the team forward. It's honestly one of the most satisfying things ever to show someone the difference between a meeting and a workshop. I'm going to leave you with that and we're going to move on to the actual real work of the four pillars I mentioned earlier. Building workshops, learning how to facilitate, learning the specific exercises you need to focus on and looking at some of the master recipes that we've created to create this well-rounded workshopper within you that I didn't want to jump straight into it without telling you why workshops are important. Workshops help us augment the part of our brain that does not work in meetings and that's super exciting. All right, that was the end of module one. Let's move on to module two where we're going to learn how to actually build workshops. We're going to learn the deep mechanics behind how workshops work and these are things we've never shared with the public but have always been within AJ. I'm super excited to share this with you. Let's just move on and jump right into it. All right, I'm actually going to walk off, get a coffee and I'll walk back in for module two. See you later. Maybe I'm even going to change my, I'm going to change my clothes too. See you later. All right, I hope that was useful for you. You notice I look a bit different. I think I don't know if my hair is better or worse now. You can decide. Let me know in the comments if my hair is better or worse now than it was before in that video that that video was recorded one and a half years ago. This video is recorded now. Okay, I have braces now in this in real life. Okay, so if you like that video, it's from a program called workshopper master. There's a one and a half hour preview, free preview of that program down below if you're interested in facilitation, workshopping, et cetera, et cetera. Check it out. Let me know if you found that video useful. Let me know how many of those things that you remembered. Was it between five and nine? Was it more than nine? Was it less than five? Did you remember cat and hammer? Let me know in the comments. Thanks so much for watching. Hit like if you liked it, hit subscribe if you're not subscribed. Love you all. Bye-bye.