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The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days. A simple rule can help: before an issue is discussed, all members of the committee should be asked to write a very brief summary of their position. This procedure makes good use of the value of the diversity of knowledge and opinion in the group. The standard practice of open discussion gives too much weight to the opinions of those who speak early and assertively, causing others to line up behind them.

Some team leaders at Google make checkmarks next to people's names each time they speak, and won't end a meeting until those checks are all roughly equivalent.

Effective executives know what they expect to get out of a meeting, a report, or a presentation and what the purpose of the occasion is or should be. They ask themselves: 'Why are we having this meeting: do we want a decision, do we want to inform, or do we want to make clear to ourselves what we should be doing?' They will insist that the purpose be thought through and spelled out before a meeting is called, a report asked for, or a presentation organized.

After we conduct a blameless post-mortem meeting, we should widely announce the availability of the meeting notes and any associated artifacts (e.g., timelines, IRC chat logs, external communications). This information should (ideally) be placed in a centralized location where our entire organization can access it and learn from the incident. Conducting post-mortems is so important that we may even prohibit production incidents from being closed until the post-mortem meeting has been completed.

But a meeting called by him to stimulate thinking and ideas also does not become simply a presentation on the part of one of the members, but is run to challenge and stimulate everybody in the room. He always, at the end of his meetings, goes back to the opening statement and relates the final conclusions to the original intent.

"What do you want to have happen in this meeting?" "What is the purpose of this form?" "What would the ideal person for this job be able to do?" "What do we want to accomplish with this software?" These and a multitude of other, similar questions are still sorely lacking in many quarters. There's plenty of talk in the big meetings that sounds good, but learning to ask, "Why are we doing this?" and "What will it look like when it's done successfully?" and to apply the answers at the day-to-day, operational level--that will create profound results.

Make it clear who is directing the meeting and whom it is meant to serve. Every meeting should be aimed at achieving someone's goals; that person is the one responsible for the meeting and decides what they want to get out of it and how they will do so. Meetings without someone clearly responsible run a high risk of being directionless and unproductive.

One last comment on the topic of meetings is the acknowledgment that the regular cadence of a meeting held at the same time, in the same location is extremely helpful for all involved. This relatively simple guideline reduced uncertainty for thirty-five expensive people.