The multifaceted problem of meeting waste

According to a University of North Carolina study quoted by Bloomberg, companies across various industries waste approximately 25,000 USD annually per employee due to attendance at non-critical meetings. The researchers recommend coping with this problem by better preparing meetings. Notably, they suggest ahead of a meeting, to collect and prioritise the questions to be answered at the meeting, so that participants can decide if they need to attend, can just contribute their input without attending, or just ignore it.

But now let us just take stock of the practical implications of this recommendation. To do so let’s visualise the communications needed for this preparation, so that participants can safely decide if and how they attend. At first sight things look simple and easy. So why does it only rarely work in practice?

• It is often necessary to chase different pieces of information at different stages from different people. In practice this is a painful process which is insufficiently supported by existing digital tools and demands a lot of effort and mental charge, when it is carried out by a dedicated meeting organiser. Therefore, it is often simpler to have people attend wasteful meetings than to organize them effectively; albeit participants often only discover in real-time the subjects to be discussed and find out, at any stage of the meeting, if their attendance is really needed. Without proper tools, more in-depth meeting preparation can easily create substantial additional overhead. This “friction” creates significant inertia, hindering the change of collective practices and individual habits. But the price we pay is high. In the current social meeting practice, as the meeting preparation is insufficient, participants are not sufficiently prepared, except for topics, which are already clear in their minds; in many cases such topics would not require meetings because it would be sufficient to share the information, to ask the question and to get the result.  Also, a deficient pre-meeting coordination often implies that participants have not sufficiently prepared the meeting. Which implies that learning / understanding processes which need to take place, take time during the meeting. That, in turn, leads to meetings where decisions are either not sufficiently thought through, and hence are of lower quality, or have to be revisited.  
• The “right way” of collecting and prioritising subjects will depend on many factors which induce complexity. The social dynamic structure of the group will condition how people will contribute ; this encompasses aspects such as the potential for conflict in the group, the social status games in the group, and / or the need for deliberate inclusiveness etc.). Another determinant for the process structure will relate to the purpose of the meeting, the context and pressure, the variety of meeting topics. If the process for collecting and prioritising the agenda contributions is not adapted to these particularities, the meeting will often fail. Such adaptations to the nature of the meeting will have multiple dimensions. For example, for inclusiveness it may be better to collect inputs anonymously ; if the example of key participants inspires the other participants, it may be better to do it nominatively. If participants can leverage their respective contributions, it may be better to share contributions in real-time ; if “slow thinking” is required and / or contributions need to be independent to optimise the neutrality of collective intelligence, inputs should only be shared asynchronously once everybody has made his contribution. If a problem is complex and requires the progressive emergence of understanding and ideas, it will be better to give time to the process and iterate several times until there is a minimum of convergence ; if spontaneity and time are of the essence it may be better not to iterate and leave a very short time span for contributions and to directly use the outcomes. When it comes to collecting priorities for a one-in-a-time decision, it may be better to prioritise inputs by ranking subjects or simply tagging “priority subjects” versus “for-later subjects”; if the group goes regularly through prioritising processes, and it is important that minorities also get their priorities on the top, it may be interesting to allocate every participant a budget of tokens to spend on “betting” for topics (with a budget reduction in case of successful bets and a periodically adjusted budget renewal).
• Often meetings are not properly followed up, and thus follow-up meetings are needed to check on progress of actions which have been agreed upon beforehand. Also, let’s remember that many meetings are periodic and involve the same group of (potential) participants; the key topics are often conditioned by what happened at earlier meetings. That can easily induce a decreasing discipline to prepare (“the next meeting is coming up anyway”).
• Often meetings mix different purposes – finding ideas, taking decisions, coordinating actions, reporting on progress. Different purposes require very different forms of meeting organisation, participation and hence preparation.

These are just some of the major factors that make effective meeting organisation so difficult. Ineffective meeting preparation not only leads to wasteful meeting participation. It also implies longer meeting durations as participants have to “familiarise” themselves with subjects. Another consequence is that meetings are not prepared well enough, cannot “conclude” and hence are painfully ineffective and demotivating. And by overloading the physical meeting, inclusion of the introverted and less powerful is more difficult, because the too big part of informal spontaneous communication, which is typical of unprepared meetings, favours the spontaneous more talkative extroverts over the “slower”, more reflective introverts; mixing the two effectively requires structure and process which requires dedicated other social meeting practices.

Simply put, reducing meeting waste is a complex problem, which requires more than “just” a bit of discipline, and cannot be easily handled with the current tools.

SymPlace’s approach to ALC-empowered macro-organisation of smart meetings

ALC is both a digital and a social technology with the purpose of coping with these complexities of collaboration and in particular of macro-organising meetings. And SymPlace’s ALC technology is designed to address the abovementioned issues by squashing the overhead barrier and enabling new social practices.

Traditional meetings often operate in isolation, focusing solely on the event itself. SymPlace’s approach integrates meetings into a larger collaboration flow, called the symFlo, encompassing both “slow collaboration” (asynchronous interaction) and “fast collaboration” (active, real-time interaction), as well different approaches to stimulate the inclusion of participants. This integration of meetings into a broader collaboration flow ensures they contribute to a greater common good, rather than merely being standalone events. It also opens the perspective of distributing efforts and contributions differently over time, before and after the meeting. A sound social practice for a meeting with complex agenda items should encompass  proper preparation; in groups, where such discipline is not standard, the symFlo template can organise the meeting process and guide participants through it, collect commitments for preparation and follow up on them.

In SymPlace’s approach the symFlo template describes the specific social meeting practice. This encompasses the aforementioned “right way” of collecting inputs, but also to time the process and the order of steps, the types of commitments that will be collected and how they will be followed up, etc. Thanks to this approach it becomes possible to propose a myriad of possible symFlo templates for macro-organising meetings, depending on the purpose of their purpose (e.g., brainstorming versus coordination versus recruitment versus socialising), the group (a small tightly knit group of people who enjoy and know how to work together versus a more formal and “political” group) and many other characteristics. A group will start by choosing an existing template, and then, based on its experience, progressively improve it. Thus emerges the social practice of the group.

A large variety of symFlo templates, driving the symBots, will embody specific meeting practices, and hence guide participants in the application, thus vastly reducing the time and effort to deploy them. These symFlo templates can be subjected to “meta-collaboration” facilitating organisational learning.

In this context, the symFlo template acts as the “DNA” for symBots, i.e., dedicated smart virtual agents which are combined and orchestrated to guide, automate, assist, and participate as agents in the corresponding complex symFlos. In the case of macro-organising meetings, symBots can handle tasks like the collection of agenda points and contributions; sharing important contents before the meeting and checking if participants have sufficiently prepared; prioritising agenda points, and more generally orchestrating the collaboration flow, mixing formal / structured interactions with informal chat. This approach also works for the meta-collaboration symBots that drive the continuous evaluation and improvement processes. The result is an ecosystem of social practices.

But symBots also can add AI to meetings, making them hybrid collaborative meetings, bringing together both people and virtual agents. ALC applied to such meetings enables Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI). Dedicated symBots can encapsulate AI-supported agents enhancing virtual meetings by providing features such as agenda management; collaborative notetaking; real-time transcription; language translation; production of minutes; integration with productivity tools ; specific forms of factual expertise which are needed for the meeting. By encapsulating them, they become more robust and transparent because inputs and outputs can be better controlled. Such virtual participants / expert-symBots can propose relevant background information, suggest options for decisions and identify issues which should have been addressed but were not. By encapsulating AI functions in symBots and integrating them into larger hybrid symFlos they can be tailored to the needs of specific collaborative purposes and be integrated into larger social hybrid practices. This approach makes it possible to balance AI's limitations with human intuition: in response to LLMs' lack of "right brain" capabilities, SymPlace's ALC framework leverages human intuition and social practices. By integrating human insights into AI-driven processes, SymPlace compensates for the lack of common sense, intuition, and ethical judgment in LLMs. It also contributes to reliable and bias-free AI, by mitigating the concerns about LLMs being prone to hallucination and misinformation through controlled data input and human oversight. By ensuring that AI's training and output are overseen by human collaborators, SymPlace reduces the risks of biases and unreliable outputs.

In the SymPlace approach, symFlo templates are described in a no-code collaboration modelling language. This opens the potential for the use of generative AI to suggest new approaches (generate new symFlo templates) as well as to propose means to evaluate and improve existing ones. All this will accelerate the development of a dedicated ecosystem of social hybrid practices to make collaboration at work more effective.

Business benefits and ecological impacts

The increased efficiency resulting from this approach offers numerous business benefits and fosters new collaborative practices within organizations. The ALC enabled macro-organisation of meetings offers significant economic benefits, by reducing the wasteful participation in meetings and the related physical travel. The target reduction of meeting participation by 20% and of meeting duration by 15%, will save companies between 5% and 10% of their total salary costs!

With these changes, meetings will no longer be wasteful but will instead involve the right participants, who will have prepared before the meeting. To do so they will have combined slow and fast interactions. Such meetings will involve less people, will be shorter and will be more effective.  They will make it practical to alternate more rapidly through a savvy combination of individual and group thinking, slow and fast, asynchronous, and real-time exchanges. And then things become even better: once tools squash the overhead, the possibility of new practices emerges, allowing for more collective intelligence, more inclusion, more fun and gamification, more trust. Physical face-to-face meetings, videoconferences and asynchronous collaboration will be mixed combined in entirely new to open the potential of much more creativity, productivity, motivation, and socialising….

Ecologically, if extrapolated to the world’s 450 million office workers, ALC-supported macro-organisation of meetings could save 8% of greenhouse gas emissions..." required until 2050 to stay under 1.5°C.

Why does SymPlace start its commercial development with the ALC-enabled macro-organisation of meetings?

SymPlace initiates its market development with this B2B application due to a range of complementary considerations.

Not surprisingly, in view of its value proposition and the market size in the hundreds of millions of office workers (not even to mention other forms of meetings), the business potential of this single application already represents a multi-billion euros market.

This significant short-term business potential is our prime motivator to catalyse the SymPlace’s market launch. Following this initial offering, in a second phase SymPlace intends to deliver  applications for needs in science, innovation, health, education or democracy, which take longer to unfold, or B2C applications, which will require significant marketing investments, if the technology has not already established an initial strong user base. But there are also other reasons:

• The requirements for developing SymPlace’s first generation of commercial ALC technologies are representative of many other applications. This contributes to the genericity of the approach and catalyses the many opportunities to branch into other usages and applications.
• By organising hybrid meetings that involve virtual agents as both experts and providers of advanced meeting support services, SymPlace will begin developing Collaborative Hybrid Intelligence (CHI).

SymPlace is currently running a collaborative financing operation to collect the funds to develop its first operational generic technology and commercialise a first application. The choice of the application to macro-organise meetings will be a first stepping stone for building an impactful and profitable next-generation platform and marketplace supporting new social practices in all domains; in both B2B and B2C markets.