Meeting Canary was created to help ‘make meetings better’.
I like this simple strapline as it has a dual meaning. The first is the obvious; let’s provide measurements that can help meeting participants have improved, shorter, more constructive, more inclusive, and yes, better meetings. But the second has a more subtle meaning, which suggests that meetings are actually somewhat unwell, and some medicine is needed to make them better!
After a long career that now seems to be an unending stream of largely pointless online, hybrid and face-to-face meetings I, for one, welcome any antidote to the malaise of bad meetings.
Meeting Canary has made huge strides in delivering solutions that will help the patient. Our FIRE (Focus, Inclusion, Respect and Energy) metrics have already been used in many, many live meetings. Companies are seeing, in real time, nudges that help bring energy back into a faltering meeting, that show the negative consequences of monologuing, of frequent interruptions and how all that is so counterproductive.
Constantly evolving our thinking, we also have a strand of work that looks at other, much more subtle features of dialogue. Our work to identify small talk is a small but important addition to the suite of features and is the subject of another article, however one area that really intrigues us is the minefield of so-called unconscious bias and its evil twin: micro aggression.
I say minefield because I have stepped into it myself – unknowingly mind you! Bear with me, I’m not some kind of mindless bigot, I have always self-identified as tolerant and welcoming to all views and all people (well nearly all views…)
I figured that I wasn’t biased – consciously or unconsciously – so to prove it I took a test. The test was very simple – it involved the repeating presentation of photographs of different sets of people. One set was European and one set was Indigenous American. I was then required to react positively or negatively to the pictures presented. I’m not certain how the algorithm worked but I believe it was based on the speed of response, because I was entirely positive about both sets of images – but I was assessed as mildly biased towards people from where I am from (Europe).
I guess I hesitated just for a fraction of a second in my replies. Damn. My bad. I blame Hollywood.
There is more than a growing set of evidence for this phenomenon and an excellent project, founded in 1998, called Project Implicit, sets out to understand more about implicit social cognition. Give it a go yourself – you might be (unpleasantly!?) surprised.
So, what has that got to do with Meeting Canary? Well as part of our approach we look at the way that dialogue happens throughout meetings. Part of our Respect metric looks at how people speak to each other and what they say. At the most elemental level we might detect bad language, or repeated interruptions, and at the more advanced end we unpick human reasoning – looking to see where ideas originate and if they grow and evolve with time.
While we don’t record meetings verbatim (that’s for others to do) we can seek out the unconscious biases. That can be quite simple, such as the use of words such as ‘blacklist’ or phrases like ‘man up’ or ‘hey guys’ or words with ugly and often forgotten origins, like ‘nitty gritty’. But, we may well also be able to point out those phrases people use which, perhaps unknowingly (with the emphasis on perhaps!), can cause offence, phrases like:
- ‘You don’t seem like you grew up poor.’
- “I didn’t realise you were Jewish — you don’t look Jewish.’
- ‘Your English is so good — where are your parents from?’
- ‘You don’t seem like you are depressed. Sometimes I get sad too.’
- ‘Don’t mind my OCD!’
- ‘Don’t be so sensitive.’
- ‘Thanks, sweetheart.’
- ‘You don’t have kids to pick up, so you can work later, right?’
How many times have we all heard this sort of exchange? I have so many examples.
Yet, it is these micro aggressions that on their own merit might only score one out of 10 in the bigotry scale I have just made up, but when they happen again and again, they begin to assume proportions that can cause significant morale issues. Meeting Canary carried out some research with a very reputable polling firm, recently, which surveyed a thousand people. The survey company that carried this work out suggested that an open text field would probably illicit few replies. Oh contraire, we were inundated with hundreds and hundreds of examples that annoy the hell out of people – here’s just a couple that I picked out because they resonated so well with me:
“My manager often finds at least five different sentences to make the same point and continues even when multiple other people in the meeting have made it clear they understand the point.”
“Men completely taking all the air space and not giving any for women to speak. And then penalising women after for being quiet, completely not realising or understanding they made the meeting inaccessible. This has happened multiple times.”
It seems useful then for Meeting Canary to try and point out these kinds of biases. If you are indeed doing it subconsciously like I experienced, then it’s useful to have it pointed out, but if you are actually knowingly being micro-aggressive (as the two real examples above clearly are) then having that behaviour called out by an innocent cartoon bird surely has to be helpful, too?
HC
Ref: https://hbr.org/2022/05/recognizing-and-responding-to-microaggressions-at-work