Meeting Canary was so named because the cute little yellow bird is one of a handful of creatures that people have used as ‘sentinel’ companion animals, the term derived from a soldier or guard whose job is to keep us safe.
The poor canary is especially susceptible to noxious gases, so when these are present in an enclosed space, such as a mine shaft, it drops off its tiny perch before the miner gets ill.
There are quite a few other sentinel creatures – dogs (not cats, oh no – they would love to see your demise, and may well be plotting it as you read this article), geese, and my special favourite – fainting goats. These are used to save a herd of sheep when attacked by wolves by simply collapsing and offering a fresh kebab by way of thoughtful self-sacrifice.
Our ethos as a business is to do good. We are a group of like-minded men and women who work in all sorts of different sectors, from academia to business, not for profits to profits. Some of us are extroverts, some introverts, some loud, some quiet, some instinctive, some analytical but our one connecting thread is a deep dissatisfaction with the way that meetings have developed in the past few years.
The financial cost of waste is relatively easy to show. Surveying people (as we ourselves have done recently – see here) and seeing how many meetings are without merit and relating that to average salary – and therefore money wasted – is simple enough. Some research suggests that in the US alone this could be as high as $400bn per year – or put it another way, that’s $2.5k per working person in the US per year. Given that not all people have endless meetings each week, it may well be three times as bad.
There’s more to it, though. Productivity is adversely impacted by wasting time. People’s mental health is hardly enhanced by time spent poorly, leading to burn outs and quiet quitting.
So the canary was born and now has more than 100 smart features and clever functionalities that help guide people in meetings in real time to show how they might do better and give themselves their professional life back (and maybe personal as well).
We love our canary. We see it as the benign, friendly, helpful assistant that guides us towards the path of better meetings. Our own behaviours have changed – those who speak more, know they do and listen better. Those who stay quiet, know they do and speak up more. Arguments are better made as our approach to reasoning shows well-made arguments win out, rather than the capricious nature of instinct-based thinking.
So far, all our customers are seeing the same benefits as we are, but that said we are also coming across detractors. We’ve heard from professionals who feel that Meeting Canary – with all its AI wizardry – has the potential to become a sinister meeting monitor; a ‘being’ who makes introverts feel bad, the anti-camera colleague uncomfortable – even that we might encourage extroverts to game the system and ‘win’ points over others for career advantage.
We don’t see this with our own use of Meeting Canary, but we do have the advantage of knowing that ‘under the hood’ is thousands of hours of good intentions. We want to help, and we never want the canary to be seen as a vulture in a yellow feathered costume. Just as the canary in the mine was there to help save lives, our hope is that we make working better, more inclusive, and more productive.
Should we ever move too far into the ‘uncanny valley’ we assure you we will reverse and stick to our core principles of ‘making meetings better’.
Do let us know what you think. Increasingly Meeting Canary is adapting and evolving not from ‘our’ ideas but from ‘your’ ideas.
Only this week we added a feature that not only shows which colleagues you spent time talking with, but it also visualises which region they were from – so at a glance you can see if your inclusive nature is restricted to people in your own country. This was a suggestion from one of our very active users who has colleagues in Australia that they want to make feel more involved. Visualising it will be very helpful, we think. We hope you agree.