Joe Ely of Learning About Lean and I are organizing a community A3 project to figure out how to eliminate (or at least reduce) the soul-sucking waste of time masquerading as corporate meetings.
No less an eminence than Peter Drucker believed that a company is “malorganized” if it causes you to spend more than 25% of your time in meetings. (See my post on this topic here.) Based on our own experience and conversations with others, we’re guessing by that definition most companies are in trouble. So we’re going to take up arms against this sea of administrative troubles and by opposing, end them.
We’d like you to join our effort. We’re hoping that the collective wisdom of the lean community can give us more time to do important things (like, say, work) and spend less time in conference rooms sleeping through a 93 slide PowerPoint deck.
Here are the details:
Purpose:
- To reduce the plague of meetings so that we can, you know, actually do some work
People:
- Participation is limited to the first eight companies (or groups) to respond
- All members of the lean community are welcome to review the A3s at any time, or comment on the open access Google Doc
Process:
- Dan Markovitz & Joe Ely will provide the problem statement for the A3 (this creates a uniform starting point for all groups)
- Each company works simultaneously on its own A3
- All A3s posted and readable (but not editable) on Google Docs to anyone who is interested during and after the course of the project
- Comments/updates/funny cat pictures can be submitted on a separate Google Doc so that everyone can read them
Timeframe (75 days):
- Target launch date: Monday, May 3
- Target completion date: Monday, July 12
- Two weeks to fill out the left side of the A3 (background; current conditions; goal; analysis)
- Eight weeks for Do-Check-Act (proposal; implementation plan; follow up)
- Report out/reflection by July 19
If you’re interested in joining us, please send an email to Dan Markovitz (dan ATSIGN timebackmanagment.com) with your name, organization, and contact information. We’ll send you the link to the Google Docs area with the A3 template and problem statement.
Questions? Comments? Contact Dan or Joe (joeely618 ATSIGN gmail.com).
We hope you can join us.
[...] few months ago, I started an online “community A3” project to figure out how to eliminate the waste of crappy meetings. One of the participants [...]