Summary: In Episode 13 of the Together London Podcast, I talk to Kevin Hoffman about how to fix meetings, facilitating great design, and growing through crisis. Check out Kevin’s website, his upcoming Dare Conference talk, and follow him on twitter @kevinmhoffman. Listen to the podcast Download MP3 file or subscribe in iTunes. Read the transcript Jonathan Kahn: I'm speaking to Kevin Hoffman who's joining me from Philadelphia. He's a design strategist and he's been building stuff with pixels since '95. He now leads digital strategy projects for a variety of well-known brands. He's joining us in September in London for the Dare Conference. Kevin, thank you so much for joining me. Kevin Hoffman: My pleasure. Jonathan: One of your specialist subjects--I think the thing that I've heard about most from you-- is this idea of improving meetings. Why did you get into that topic? Kevin: I started thinking about it when I worked in higher education before I worked in agencies. I was a webmaster in the '90s and early 2000s at colleges and universities. Universities are really interesting culturally, because universities always, regardless of the university I've worked with, and I've worked with about 4 or 5-actually about 10 if you count ones I've worked with while I've been at an agency. But I've been on internal teams at about four or five different universities. I feel like it's risky to say anything is universal to a certain kind of culture, but I do feel like university cultures usually have this tendency to be very democratic to a fault. Like almost egalitarian in that they'll have standing meetings for vice presidents, or open meetings where students can come and make their voices heard, or whatever. No matter what the meeting, if you're in that meeting --whether you've been invited or it's open-- there's always this kind of unwritten cultural agreement that anything anyone has to say has value. That's really nice. I feel like that's a good value, but the flip side of that is there's not really a clear path for what role those meetings are playing in the larger process. The assumption is that the leadership is going to take what they learn from that meeting away and go apply it to something and bring it back, but in actuality those meetings, to me, they felt almost like a lack of confidence. Like, "We're not sure what we're doing. We just want to make sure that every single person we can ask is OK with it." Jonathan: Right, so it sounds like the consensus… people talk about consensus like we must reach consensus on this before we can act. Kevin: Yeah. The way you're phrasing it right there is the problem in that the time to have the meeting is before you act. A lot of the meetings that I have attended, and a lot of the meetings in the design process if you kind of create genres of meetings out of the design process like critiques, design reviews, or sign off meetings, or whatever. A lot of them are too late to really be involved, and as a result they feel kind of deceptive. Or they feel like, "I've come to this discussion, but my insights or ideas don't really matter because a lot of stuff has already been decided." Jonathan: It's like people are going to read something out from a sheet about what has already been decided in this kind of passive voice. And it's like, "Well, then why am I here?" Kevin: Yeah. That's why I became interested in the process, because I felt like there's this false division in our heads of, "Well, when I'm in meetings I don't do work, and when I'm by myself I do do work." I feel like that happens for a lot of people, myself included. I have days where I have meetings that are very low calorie, or high calorie low value. I don't know. Whatever the candy analogy would be. Jonathan: [laughs] Kevin: But there are also meetings where I get a lot of energy and value and actionable information from. I started to look at it as a design problem.
