RiteFeeling behavior modification program to reduce meetings
Organizational design fiction #2
How would you feel if your work wanted you to install something in your brain? In this piece of design fiction I’m considering how we might solve the “too many meetings” problem in the future of brain hacking.
As with the previous organizational design fiction, it pulls from speculative practices, specifically design fiction, to ask provocative questions about what is the future in which we work with each other.
Read on for the inspiration for this design fiction and a second piece that is focused on the behavioral aspects for organizations.
Organizational design fiction ideation, part 2
Like last time, I decided to use a combination of The Work Kit of Design Fiction cards from the Near Future Laboratories with the Tensions and Practices cards from The Ready.
When drawing them I got the following combination:
- Tension card: “too many meetings”
- Attribute: bio-hacking
- Tone: lonely
- Archetype: press release
- Object: fan
- Action: translate
While I was happy to stay on the topic of meetings, I wanted to rotate to something else than an action of “sonify” so I drew another card “translate.”
This time, before jumping into the ideation of design fictions I wanted to dive a bit more into why I’ve seen “too many meetings” happen in organizations. This was just asking “why” might this happen:
- No async processes
- Poor or non-existent decision making processes
- “Meetings are theater”
- Need to feel important
- Fear-of-missing-out (FOMO)
- Power grabbing to “own” a discussion (and decision)
- Feels uncomfortable to say “no” to a meeting
- Mimicking of teams and their processes
- “Best practice”
- Loneliness for solo roles
From this I got even more ideas than last time:
- Wireheading to make you feel bad if you schedule a meeting or good if you avoid one.
- Monitor everyone’s vitals and brainwaves during the meeting and put it on a display in the meeting about engagement, boredom, daydreaming, creativity.
- Run meetings with generative AI attendees that will praise you and mean you don’t have to include your coworkers — like rubber duck debugging.
- A huge fan blowing dollars around the office and gets louder/faster when there are more meetings happening at once.
- Auto-translate your meeting agenda to an email — “this meeting should have been an email.”
- Team meetings through hive mind — no need to call a meeting at all.
- “Should I schedule this meeting?” brain analysis that will tell you if you are doing it for the wrong reasons and warn you.
I remembered that Shopify made a huge deal back in January of 2023 about them canceling all of their meetings. That seemed like a pretty extreme step and could make for a good background on taking it even further to make meetings effective.
The press release archetype is one that is usually done within PRFAQs but I wanted to push on the diegetic prototype aspect by including “internal only” comments while the PR was being drafted up. This resulted in the following design fiction:
How would you feel if you were asked to do this to work at a company? How much could you trust that they would only use certain functionality or data coming out of your head? Is hacking our feelings helpful in general? Who should control those hacks?
Organizational design fiction focused on practice
To push this even more, I wanted to think about what unorthodox behaviors might we consider if we weren’t limited by “products” that existed in the world. I think this is tough because the design fiction in this place was probably more metaphorical than it was about a particular diegetic prototype…
We might end up with practices in our employee handbook like the following:
- Only 1:1s, no group meetings allowed and you have to pass messages between each other like playing telephone
- Only group meetings, no 1:1s to make sure we are pushing information as wide as possible
- Only team meetings that include “everyone” are allowed otherwise everything goes in docs — you need to be very sure that you are calling a good meeting
- Pen pals only through documents and async docs — with some time delay between getting the communications
- Only parasocial relationships allowed — everyone has a feed of videos that you can subscribe to but no “replies” to things
You could imagine another press release that might be focused on practice changes that are being rolled out through the company like Shopify, Netflix’s culture deck, and Valve’s employee handbook. Design fiction is still useful here in that we could remove the objects and just talk about the practices. Something I’ll consider in my next one…
Designing future behaviors
Design fiction is still fairly new for me as a practice but I’m having a lot of fun doing it. What is most interesting to me is if we can start to play with the human systems and norms without specific products in mind.
How might this look if you went to a different place and the rituals and customs were so different. You could consider it through specific items that might be there but you could also read a customs book you might buy from the airport to read on your way there.
Here are all of the organizational design fiction posts so far:
- #1 — Rotten Tomatoes Meeting Reviews Google Chrome Extension
- #2 — RiteFeeling behavior modification program to reduce meetings
- #3 — MICROMANAGED? Don’t fight your bureaucracy, insure against it!
And I’ve also talked about how product managers write fiction, starting with the PRFAQ.
