Scaling Alignment with an Operational Meeting Rhythm

[This is currently work in progress and being implemented - There will be updates]

At Y42, we strive to reduce the number of meetings that we have in order for everyone to be able to use their time effectively.

However, in a world of collaboration certain meetings are not avoidable. The meetings that are necessary should be catalysts for information sharing, accountability and creativity. However, instead of creating many different ad-hoc meetings in places where an asynchronous alignment is not possible, we decided to put a structure in place that solves for:

• Deduplication: Discussing topics only once (and documenting decisions)

• Specificity: Clarifying which people are needed for any decision

• Documentation: All Agenda Items are protocolled and attendance is not mandatory.

The meeting structure is built like a pyramid, from many “on the ground meetings” to the leadership meeting at the top. 

• Information flows from “on the ground” to the decision making circles in an aggregated form

• Clarifications flow from top to bottom after all important information has been processed

In practice, we use ClickUp tickets to async communicate information between different meetings.

Using a staggered calendar (see illustration) optimizes for the pyramid-like information structure of the meetings so that topics that are raised do not have to wait longer than a week.

Meeting where the leadership team meets to discuss company wide topics and priorities.

• Strategic Guidance

• Company-Wide Issues

• Resource allocation

Meeting where the operators of the company meet to discuss how to achieve key goals and objectives within the company.

• Accountability & goal achievement (OKR & KPIs)

• Discover major blockers & opportunities

• Alignment between different departments

• Feedback & guidance for Leadership Meeting

• Achieve Project/Team Goals

• Discover major blockers & opportunities

• Tactical Discussions

• Accountability on Goals & Actions

• Coaching on topics & decisions

• Transparency & feedback

Reasons for using ClickUp:

• Better accountability across the organization

  • Easier global prioritization

  • Much better accountability on agreed Action Items

  • Everything is traceable

• Finally transparency

  • You don't have to attend meetings as “FYI” but can easily see action items & decisions

  • Roll up all action items/decisions across team, department, company

  • More buy-in from every person due to visibility into everyones effort

• Enables highly structured communication

  • Structured meetings with clear boundaries, agendas

  • Interchangeable data format (same data structure across different meetings)

  • Clear flow on how to escalate decisions (from 1-1 to leadership)

  • Deduplication of information (using ClickUp references)

Downsides to be aware of:

• It’s a heavy structure with some onboarding required

• People may not “work this way”

• It requires a device to be part of the meeting