In this episode of the Bad Meetings podcast, host Erika McKellar interviews Jason Loomis, the Chief Information Security Officer at Freshworks, about his experiences with improving meeting productivity. They discuss common pitfalls in meetings, such as unproductive discussions and the challenge of prioritizing risks in cybersecurity. Jason shares strategies like enforced time boxing and ensuring active participation from remote attendees to make meetings more efficient and engaging.
Host: Erika McKellar, Host and Conflict Resolution Seeker
Guest: Jason Loomis, the Chief Information Security Officer for Freshworks
In this episode of Bad Meetings Podcast, host Erika McKellar is joined by Jason Loomis, the Chief Information Security Officer for Freshworks, they delve into the intricacies of transforming these meetings into effective decision-making sessions.
Jason shares his extensive experience in the tech and cybersecurity sectors, tracing his career from financial controlling to leading cybersecurity efforts at prominent companies like JustFab and MindBody. Now at Freshworks, a global SaaS business solutions provider, Jason discusses the challenges of managing a large number of people in meetings and emphasizes the importance of leadership skills, teamwork, and conflict resolution in making sound decisions.
The episode covers innovative diagnostic tools that treat organizations like living organisms, underscoring the need for regular check-ins and continuous feedback to maintain organizational health. Jason also highlights the concept of time boxing to manage large meetings efficiently and shares practical strategies like pre-meeting preparation and rotating leadership roles to ensure more productive discussions. Erika and Jason offer actionable insights and tips for listeners to enhance their meeting culture, emphasizing the critical role of diverse perspectives and cognitive conflict in achieving better outcomes.
Key Time Stamps:
Notable Quotes
"I'm a big believer in the more people that are involved in the decision-making process, it's going to be a challenge, but the more involved, the more buy-in you're going to get, and the better the decision will be. You don't necessarily have to have just three experts in the room." - Jason Loomis.
Tools and Resources
Risk Register:A tool used to keep track of all the cybersecurity risks within an organization. Jason describes how the risk register helps prioritize and manage these risks effectively by documenting them and reviewing them quarterly.
Time Boxing: A strategy where specific time limits are set for discussing each topic. Jason uses a timer to enforce these limits, ensuring that the meeting stays on track and all topics are covered within the allocated time.
AI Integration in Meetings: Discussed as a future potential tool, AI could help provide real-time summaries and answer questions during meetings, aiding in decision-making processes by determining when there is sufficient information to proceed.
Erika McKellar (00:04.238)
Believe it or not, over 55 million meetings are held daily across the globe. That's a whole lot of potential for greatness or a whole lot of wasted time. Here's the hard truth. Up to 70 % of meetings are considered unproductive by the people who attend them. Be honest, when was the last time you sent an email in a meeting? And how often have you left a meeting and thought, well, that could have gone better. On Bad Meetings podcast, we're not here to judge. We're here to embrace the awkward, the weird, the boring.
and everything in between when it comes to professional and sometimes not so professional get togethers. Erica McKellar here, conflict resolution expert. I invite brave souls onto Bad Meetings podcast to share their stories of meetings gone well, a little sour. We start by being curious about what happened. We uncover hidden opportunities and at the end, we finish off with actionable insights on how to have better meetings. The truth is all conflict has something positive to teach us.
but only are brave enough to explore it. Thanks for listening. Hey there and welcome to Bad Meetings podcast where we share stories about workplace encounters that leave a lot on the table. And we're not here to make fun or to make others feel bad. This is about having more engaging meetings at work and also to getting better at mining for conflict.
Today we have a very special guest and that is Jason Loomis. And Jason is the Chief Information Security Officer for Freshworks. And Jason and I have known each other for how many decades? Ever. For ever. Twenty -five years, I think. It's been a while. And back in our, we're working for a big finance company in San Francisco.
I think 2000, mid 2000s, 2005, 2006. Let's not date ourselves. Let's move on. Well, a long time, a long time. I think the first iPhone came out during that time just to put a little. good. You're being really nice because I was on a Blackberry when we met. That is true. I remember that. And I think at that point, Jason, you weren't really into cybersecurity then. Not very many people were. It wasn't quite the same.
Erika McKellar (02:17.742)
industry and profession that it is now. Yeah, it definitely was not the Ron Burgundy like it is today. It's kind of a big deal these days. Yeah. I was in tech, you know, in business because we both worked, you know, for the huge financial Institute of LASAP Management. So it was a lot of, you know, dress right for work and corporate structure and tech. Yeah.
Yeah, those were the days. And then you climbed your way up, you went and got your MBA, and you moved through companies like JustFab and MindBody, and now you're at FreshWorks. So from fashion to fitness, and now you're a B2B. Yeah, so FreshWorks, just to give context to what I deal with is we are a global SaaS business solutions provider. We do ITSM, CX software globally. So big Europe.
Europe is one of our big markets. EMEA, Southeast Asia is big, and of course, the United States. About 65 ,000 customers, 5 ,500 employees at my company, so I have a lot of meetings with a lot of different people. And while IT is your chosen career path, you're also passionate about leadership skills, teamwork, and conflict.
Right. I'm a big fan. Yes, this makes you sound like so you like conflict you say is that yeah. No, it within context of absolutely I think it's critical for teams to work well together and to make good decisions. I'm really big on you know, I'd say the thing here's here's my motto is is how your teams make decisions is more important than the decisions themselves.
Really well said. I couldn't agree with you more. And I think this goes into the topic and the story that you have to tell today. And that's how we do it here on Bad Meetings podcast. We start with the story, we start with the experience, and then we break it down. You and I, we talk about why things happen the way they did, what you tried that worked, what didn't work. And then we hopefully can leave off with some better ways of doing things. So while this is called Bad Meetings,
Erika McKellar (04:23.982)
The goal is better meetings. So why don't we start there? Yeah, that's great. And I like how you said like we want to give them some takeaways because I've had plenty of podcasts like, well, what do I do with that? You didn't give me anything. So hopefully we can give you something or give some give your audience some recommendations as my idea is to improve bad meetings because like everyone else listen to this podcast. I hate bad meetings. I don't know if anybody's ever had a listener say I love bad meetings. They're the best. No, can't stand them.
Yeah, and most people just you don't even need to add the word bad. They're like, another meeting. my gosh. They assume bad is assumed as an adjective. Yeah. And that's sad. And it shouldn't be that way. The time that we get together. I mean, it's so rare. I mean, rare enough that we should. That should be the time where we actually, you know, put our brains together, think up new ideas, not just tell each other what happened when we were working by ourselves. So anyway, that's my feeling about it. So that's what this is all about. So let's jump in.
Are you ready to tell us? My meeting experience. I'm ready to tell our meeting experience. Your bad or could have been better meeting experience. I think as we cover, there's a lot of meetings that can be better. But I have one specific one that I wanted to talk about with you today. And they're called, it's this quarterly meeting. So I work in cybersecurity and we deal with risk. What are the risks to the organization in cybersecurity? Is there hackers coming after us? Do we have data leaking out?
Well, these risks, so think of it, you know, a good analogy is to think that you own a house and there's all these things wrong with your house. Your front stairs is shaky and someone could fall off the front stairs as they grab and it's, you know, you have a leaky roof that could cause damage over time and, you know, cause, you know, you might have termites in the basement. You have all these different risks. We do in cybersecurity for organization. We have, okay, we have the threat of this. We have a vulnerability over here. We know that, you know, our
login practices over here aren't good. And we keep a long list of these things, and we call it a risk register. But it doesn't just build itself. That list for your house isn't, okay, when I first moved in, I got the list and I'm done. Things change over time, right? Things become old, they get worn out, you install a new refrigerator and it causes a new risk. So we keep this risk register at every quarter, every three months, we get together and we look through it and say, does this look right? Are these still risks?
Erika McKellar (06:43.502)
And are they in the right priority? Because we can't do everything. We have like 50 of them. Even in your house, you don't have unlimited budget to just go fix everything that's wrong with your house. We have limited resources. We have to figure out what to apply them. So we get together as a group. And we, Jason, sorry to interrupt you. We is this. Good question. Who is in this? Who is in this meeting? And what are their motivations? What is it that they have to represent? I'm schizophrenic, so it's me, myself, and I.
No, it's a great question. It is almost my entire cybersecurity team. Because I'm a, so this is something I drive too, I'm a big believer in the more people that are involved in the decision making process, it's gonna be a challenge, but the more that involved, the more buy -in you're gonna get, and the more, the better decision can be an outcome of that. You know, you don't necessarily have to have just a bunch of three experts in the room.
A lot of times there's people that may not have expertise in that domain or knowledge about it, or they may bring something to the table at a different viewpoint. So as many people as we can. So in this circumstance, so I have a team of 80, it's actually about 20 that we invite to this risk. And we invite from all different departments. I have about like five or six different departments under me and I get at least two or three, two reps from each department, two to three. So a room of about 20 people.
At some point, I would love to hear how you organize a meeting with 20 people, because I found in my experience is anything over six is really challenging. So I'd love to hear that. Yeah, that's the Bezos pizza thing, right? Like if your meeting is you can't feed a people with a medium pizza, then you have too many people. Exactly. Yeah. So we get about 20 of us and we get together and we review all the top risks.
Practically, how we do it is we prep a spreadsheet ahead of time with each risk and give each attendee a voting column so that it can be done electronically on the voting to say, I think that's a priority, critical high, medium low of what their assessment is. And then we average the scores across the board to get output. That's the only way you can do 20 people fast. If you went around the room and asked each person, what do you think about this?
Erika McKellar (08:59.214)
So the tactic that we have, and we'll get into the problem statement of what's wrong with this meeting in a minute. And hopefully, some ways that I've worked to solving these meetings or solving this is we'll start with a topic. Let's say we start with the number one risk. I think the leaky roof is the number one risk. Currently, we present for about a minute. This is our number one risk. Here's a description. Everybody has a spreadsheet. And you asked the room, do we think this is accurate?
Does anybody disagree with this? And then someone will raise their hand and they'll disagree and they'll say why and they'll start talking. Well, I think the roof is this. I think this is this. The problem is I don't have enough time in that hour and a half meeting to go through 50 risks like.
and we'll get stuck talking about leaky roofs for 15 minutes. You know, it's really the challenge is that I'm finding with this meeting and I'm working to solve it is how do you get to, how do you know to what level of fidelity do you need to get before you can move on and make a decision? Have we discussed it enough? Do we have enough information to make an educated decision to move on to the next one? Or are we analysis paralysis where we're just thinking about it way too much and going into way too much depth.
and we don't need to do that. So that's the challenges of the time. How do I get 50 decisions from a group of 20 people? Even if it's six people, let's say you, Jason, here's your first problem. You invited 20 people to your meeting, let's keep it to six. Yeah, I mean, that's the most obvious solution. Well, I would argue that six people too is tough. To what extent do you, when do you know when to do that? So the meeting just ends up never finishing on time or.
We don't finish the content. I like, I always finish, try to finish my meetings on time because we got other things to do, but you don't finish. You can't complete your goal of the meeting and why you met because you only got through 25 % of it.
Erika McKellar (10:55.278)
Hmm. So tell me what types of exercises or different ways have you tried to to improve this and feel better about the choices that you're making in prioritizing time boxing? And I hear this concept of time boxing from leaders all the time, but I never see it enforced. We're going to tie. Let's time box everybody. Someone will make a statement at the beginning. And I don't think that's enough. So
What I tried, so when I talked about this meeting, this was three quarters ago, so I have improved this. Time boxing is forced time boxing, where I actually set a timer and I explained in the beginning, hey everybody, I'm not meaning to be rude, but we do only have an hour and a half for this meeting. So we're gonna time box your answers to this and time backs the topics. Every topic gets three minutes. Your response gets 30 seconds. And I have to sit with, I sit with a timer. I sit with a timer and.
time it off and be like, okay, 30 seconds. And I say, time's up. And believe it or not, after the first couple ones, it's pretty uncomfortable for people. Be like, I wanted to talk more. They keep talking. Eventually the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth person gets in that pace and starts preparing for only that amount of time to talk. So that's one tactic. Have you experienced time boxing or worked with time boxing and what works, what have you seen work out there?
Sadly, I've very rarely seen it done effectively. It takes a really good project manager to time box well. And what I found too is that if the group gets above five, six people, it's really good to have a moderator as well as a meeting lead. So if you're leading the meeting, you have the presentation, you have the data, and you're the one sharing, there needs to be somebody else that's solely keeping track of, let's say,
Is everyone contributing and are we staying on time? And they are like the police for that. Basically, that's the only time I've seen it work. Yeah, I completely agree. You can't just at the beginning of the meeting, OK, everybody, time box your time and expect the crowd just to control themselves. You need either you as a leader. I would say you point to yourself first, whoever coordinated that meeting. I'm assuming it's you listener. You coordinated that meeting and you're running it. You need to do that. Or you assign someone to do it for you. Yeah.
Erika McKellar (13:17.038)
I think if most people started to expect that maybe like at some point in time during the week, they're going to be the moderator of a meeting, whether, you know, sort of like everyone takes turns and it's not, it doesn't feel so much that you're putting someone on the spot or like, you know, cause, cause when you're moderating, I've been in this position before when you're taking meeting notes, it's really hard to participate. So you don't want people to feel like, they're just kind of trying to take me out of the meeting or, you know, I don't know enough to contribute. So it's always good to make that change that roll around a little bit.
Right. And what I found when I implemented this, I want to talk the other thing that I found is that you can cause, you can really cause a shift to quick agreement and people are just agreeing to agree. That's like, it's often called the culture of yes, where people just want to say yes, even though in the back of their mind, they're saying no, or just get out of this meeting. Yeah, fine. It's this. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one. So you have to counter that. And I counter that by
what we talked about at the beginning about ensuring that there's conflict and debate in the discussion. If I have six, let's go with a room of six people. If I have six people agreeing with, agreeing with, every six people agree, that's a problem. Absolutely. So I will, I will assign, try to assign or I'll play the role myself as leader of this devil's advocate or the sole purpose is to sort of poke holes in those six agreements. Say, well, you agreed with this. Why, if not, and ask some questions, you know, all question -based.
interrogation of, well, if you think that, why did you think, why did you pick critical? What was it about that that made that more important than say this risk and get them to start thinking? It's less getting people emotional and more asking them open -ended questions, right? Like, hey, inviting them to share and asking them to share their true opinion. Just be like, no, right? And that's and when you give someone permission, then they feel safer telling you the truth. Yeah, the conflict isn't a isn't a
what's called affective conflict where you're arguing with the person. It's cognitive conflict where you're causing conflict about the idea that was put up. It's that idea that we want to conflict about. Do you agree with that? No, I think it should be this and this is why I think it should be this. And that's what you really need to mind for to make sure that you're not just
Erika McKellar (15:35.214)
creating this culture of, okay, great, move on, it's not important to us, and making sure you get every, try to get everyone to have a voice. Now that can be challenging in meetings this big, even with six people, right? Maybe not everyone can speak up on every topic in an hour and a half if you're trying to go through 50 things. So when you're running these meetings with 20 people, my guess is you probably, do you have some people in person and some people remote? good question. I prefer in person.
But obviously in today's world, we're hybrid, right? Yes, some people are going to be remote. It's more challenging in a hybrid model. So how do you get people to participate, engage, and share their ideas? Because the fact that you're trying to get 20 people in a room or in a virtual room to share and come up with the best answer, it only works if you're really helping everyone participate, even the ones that aren't physically in the room. Yeah.
I'll call it leaning and I do this a lot with things where I'll lean heavily into something like, whoa, really that much? I'll go yes, because the pushback will bring it right to where it needs to be. Or you always think you're doing something enough and you're not. I would lean heavily towards ensuring those remote people are speaking more than the people in the room. Because I know it never works like that. They're never that engaging. But if I lean with the intent that, hey,
My goal for this meeting is that Erica's remote, I'm going to make sure she talks more than anybody else in the room. That's my goal. The back of my head, I know that's not realistic, but if I lean that heavily into it, what's going to happen is she's probably going to participate equally as everyone else in the room because I'm leaning that heavily into it. So as the leader or the facilitator, you are making an active effort to make sure that they are doing more than everybody else in the room. Erica, I haven't heard from you on this one. What's your opinion, Erica, in calling those people in to get them engaged?
And I think the statistic is something like 70 % of people who are in a virtual meeting are doing something else during that meeting. So I mean, it's just human nature. Anybody who wants to run a good meeting hybrid, let me tell you, and probably people will throw things at me, camera's on.
Erika McKellar (17:50.958)
yeah. Definitely. I mean, unless it's like a 100 -person informational company meeting, okay, camera's on. Yeah. But the six people meeting that we're talking about or the 20 person that we're making decisions and everyone has an active involvement, your camera is on. That's the rule I made any time. I didn't want to force it too much on my team down to like, hey, if you want to have your own little meeting and have it audio only, that's fine. I always tell my team, if I'm on the call, your camera is on. Plan ahead. I don't care if you just got out of bed and you're great.
You know, and I don't care, put a hat on. Camera must be on. Because that gives that engagement. Look how we're engaged right now because we can see each other. I could be playing with my dog right now and you wouldn't know any different. And that's like you said, 70 % are just, you know, off slack and doing something else. And you can't see eye contact. You can't see the body language. There's so much to human communication beyond just what we hear and talk. It's the eye contact. It's the body movement. It's critical.
Yeah. And I mean, why are you even there? If you're not going to engage, why are you even in the meeting? You know, I actually over engage in meetings that maybe I think are so relevant to me because I'm like, well, I'm here, I might as well learn something. So I'm going to start asking a bunch of really tough questions and see what happens. So I mean, people go about it different ways. That's great. That's a great tactic.
Yeah, it takes effort, but you know, and I'm not always successful, but it's, it's a good fit. It works, you know, if you're if you put your mind to it. So Jason, you've said some really good things in meetings like this, where you're getting through some really important stuff with a lot of people, and you have to get through it fast. And prioritization is the thing that comes to mind. The word that comes to mind when we're talking about this. But I mean, prioritization, when you're talking about
Do you fix the hole in your roof or do you fix the broken sewage system? I mean, that's a really tough question. However, if it's summertime, I have a feeling you're probably gonna make a different choice than if it's wintertime. So there are a lot of factors that can affect this. So how do you manage this in this short period of time where maybe people are emotional, they're acting out on...
Erika McKellar (20:02.702)
whatever happened to them that day. And maybe after they thought about it for a day or two, maybe they might have a different opinion on what's critical and what's not. boy. No, that's a nice wrench you just threw in. Thanks, Eric. I actually don't take that into account. So there isn't something I say, hey, go home and think about this and get back to me. No, I actually prefer the meeting to be made in the room at the time. So I'm OK with that cost, that maybe it's not something they decide if they thought about it more. I just don't have the time.
So, you know, it's here's another good example of decision making and I think this fits this. I feel like we're covering so many topics, but I've been writing down every single one so we can highlight and go back over them. So it's the idea of the of the door when you're making decisions. Can you is it a one way door or can you come back through? So for decisions that are that are a two way that you can change your mind. If we go through this door, we can always back out and come back and we decide.
Those decisions aren't something I need people to take a couple days and think about or to really strategize or it's a critical decision. To me, they're decisions that you can just go, hey, that risk, you know, we changed our mind, we want to do it this way. So for me, for this meeting, I wouldn't need that. But for meetings that are one way that if once we go down this path, there's no going back. Those are the decisions I would say, we're going to take our time with this. Take your time, decide, think, act, think, and then act. And that's where I would apply something like.
Bezos came up, I think he's credited with that whole door analogy of decision making. Jeff Bezos from Amazon.
So Jason, you talked about this being a recent meeting or experience that you've been having. And I wonder, because you had mentioned that there were some challenges with it and you still are not in a place that you want to be. If you could wave a magic wand and make this meeting ideal in its length and its structure, in the encounters that you have with everyone that you invite to it, what would that look like and what is the path to getting there? So the
Erika McKellar (22:02.286)
The tactic that I'm approaching it with is, and anybody who's listening to this probably has heard of this before, is the idea of the pre -read is that you don't use that meeting for information dissemination. The meeting's intent is not to go teach you about this risk. Hey, so we have this risk and here's why, and here's what's going on. No, you should already come into the meeting knowing why that risk exists and at least a high level understanding of the risk. The meeting is meant to debate if you disagree with that.
or you agree with it and then assign a criticality or severity to it to prioritize it. So the pre -read is the new tactic that we're going. Say everybody, I expect you to take, you know, I'll actually put an hour pre -meeting scheduled on their calendar because everybody meets with me. That's a pleasure of being a leader. And I put an hour and go, hey, what's this meeting about? That's your hour to go read the risk register and familiarize yourself three or four days before the meeting so that we're not wasting time with the risks having to read them in the meeting. So it's the pre -read. That's one tactic.
that I'm following to make it go quicker. So you're putting it actually the time on their calendar and saying that this is important enough. And here's the information again, you know, the links and make sure you know what we're talking about because we are going straight into decision making. Yeah. Right. And they can. And even if you're like, well, I'm busy at that hour, I booked over something they have, they're going to get the message like, I need to spend some time doing this pre -read. You know, again, it's unfortunate because I'm the boss. So I can kind of put that time on their calendar.
But even as a project manager, you can do that. If you're just project managing it or it's a project you're responsible for, invite them to that meeting and even put in the note, hey, this is a meeting because you really need to pre -read this. If you can't make this and set this time aside, move this and set time aside to do the pre -read. That's the expectation as a participant of this meeting. So how long have you been trying this and has it been working? Or did you feel that it's sort of a little bit of change every week and people are getting tired of it?
I don't know yet. My first attempt was two weeks ago, but the meeting was pushed due to unforeseen circumstances. So we I'll let you know in two weeks. Can I get back to you on that? Please. I'm really curious to see how that's working, because I mean, this is not the first time that this has been said. And I think most people, they know that this is what we should be doing is everyone should be informed, especially if the type of meeting is very clear. This is a brainstorming meeting. This is a decision making meeting. You know, this is one where we're not talking about
Erika McKellar (24:33.294)
the substance, you should know that already. So I think it's a really, it's common, but you have to make an effort and you have to do, you have to be sort of the strict, you know, meeting keeper. You have to sort of, you know, put that time on people's calendar and hold them accountable for it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and another note to leaders out there or project managers when you're doing this, don't do it the day before. You need to plan ahead.
Give them a good week. Well, you want to do it not too far out, but I'd say within a week ahead of time, you've got it on their calendar and not wait till the last minute. by the way, we got a meeting tomorrow. Here, you need to read this. Great, you're giving me four hours left in my work day to go through an hour worth of material. So plan ahead. Yeah, I mean, putting any calendar or any meeting on a calendar 24 hours without having a chat first about it is usually over the top. But you know what? Sometimes it happens.
You know, the last piece that we haven't talked about yet that really is my biggest challenge that I have not solved yet. You know, I know this podcast is we should have some solutions and some ideas for people, but maybe you and I can talk about it a little bit and understand is the, to what level of fidelity do you go with decision -making? How do you know enough is enough? How do you know that, okay, we have enough information, we can decide. Even with time boxing, if you're time boxing it, was that the right amount of time? How do you know? I haven't solved for that.
Like sometimes you'll get a topic that is, you know, the stairs, let's say the stairs in the front of the house, like, that's a no brainer because we just hire someone for 50 bucks. They fix it and we're done. Well, the rain could be well, if you could have all these alternative, we call them mitigating controls. Well, what if we threw a tarp over it? That's right. We could throw a tarp and that could, and that's only this much money. Well, what if we only fix part of it and ran a gutter that would fix it temporarily and
You could go down and start discussing all these different because for one thing, any decision should not be a go no go decision, right? It's a hey, what are the different options with this decision? And the same goes for risk. Like there isn't a you fix the risk or you don't. There's these we could do things to lower the risk, just like the house leak. Well, we could lower the risk by putting a tarp. We could lower the risk by maybe, you know, doing a rain dance to prevent to reduce the likelihood of rain. So I haven't solved for that. Have you seen anything regarding like
Erika McKellar (26:57.838)
decision -making fidelity of when to decide, knowing when to decide. Like when enough is enough, right? Or when, yeah, because at some point, you know, you are making an educated guess, right? We don't, no one has a crystal ball. You know, it probably comes down to like the collective comfort of the team with each other. I think that if, if there's a high level of trust on the team, if people know each other really well,
then they're going to be responsive to each other's energy. Like whether they've said enough or whether, you know, they're disagreeing to disagree or they're actually disagreeing because they feel really passionately about something. I think the better that people know each other in the room, then you're going to be, it's going to be more obvious when enough is enough. But in this day and age when we're all remote and people are, you know,
going all over the place, it's not common to stay at companies for a long time. It's hard to build those relationships. Right. So how do you do it between people? I'm working on it. Have me on in a couple of months, I'll have the answers back to how my pre -read worked and how my level of fidelity worked.
What about a technical solution? That's sort of a light bulb. I mean, there has to be prioritization. Are you going to bring up the most popular acronym right now in today's world? AI might be able to solve that for you. Hey, you never know. Ask ChatGPD. You absolutely could. So AI is really integrated with meeting, and they give you real -time summaries. And you can ask, I don't know if you knew this, on some of the meeting technology, like Zoom and Teams. You can literally ask a question real -time.
Hey, what was said about this topic in AI kind of knows. So that might be a potential solution coming in the near future of, hey, we need to make a decision. You have this threshold that AI determines when there's so much information about it, it's ready to make a decision. And it says, yep, you're ready to decide. That would be interesting. Yeah. I mean, we're humans, and we're always going to not have. There's always going to be some information that we don't have, right? I mean, that's just, that's it.
Erika McKellar (29:08.654)
If we can use technology to help us prioritize better, yeah, and reflect back on it too, because - Yeah, and something more quantitative versus our qualitative assessment that we have enough information. Because I'm sure you and I both kind of follow, I'm assuming you do, the Z8020 rule. It's like once you have 80 % of your information, that's enough to make a decision because the cost of getting that other 20 % isn't worth it for you to move forward to make a decision. But how do I know my 80 %?
Another thing that could be a suggestion is, and this would be something that you would just have to do over time, is bring another, because you said everyone in the room is in cybersecurity, right? No, correct. We have some that are not. Okay, but making sure that you have a variety of perspectives in the room and maybe even allowing, I mean, because if you're just clicking through a spreadsheet,
Maybe even just handing that task over to somebody new each time. I mean, it's not a difficult task. Anyone could do it. We'll make them feel more engaged and think about things in a different way. yeah, that's a great you just brought up how many tactics are we coming up with? Like this might be your whole season because you just gave people we give people like eight tips. Rotating leaders is absolutely key for so for every meeting that I have with my own leaders, we rotate who runs the meeting every time. Absolutely. It gets that.
participation and buying like, I'm up, I got to run this and gives them some empathy for the next person running it to understand what it's like to have to keep people on track and keep them flowing and doing pre -reads and basically everything that we talked about and rotating that ownership is a fantastic idea. We did. We had so many great tips, Jason. And, you know, I'm actually really glad that we talked this out together because I can't wait to hear about it. And I think this is a good a good episode.
for some interaction from listeners. So if there are any suggestions that maybe other people have, you know, we probably only have four and a half listeners, but maybe someone can have a suggestion on. If you're counting, if you're counting your kid and my kid is the haves and we have five, you're at five now. And our spouses. They just feel so. yeah, well that's, I threw that, yeah. I threw that in as the plus one automatic. Now we just gave away our whole audience.
Erika McKellar (31:25.454)
Four of them are family. Okay. So honey, if you have any suggestions, put it in the comments and thank you, Jason. This has been really fun. Yeah. Anybody that wants to reach out to me about fidelity and the pre -read stuff, you have recommendations for better ways to execute that. Jason .Lumis at freshworks .com. thanks for sharing, Jason. Appreciate it. Always, we appreciate your time and hope to have you back on soon. Thanks.
Thanks for listening.