> The most famous I can think of is the Amazon culture where each meeting starts with 10 minutes of quiet reading, to ensure everyone is on the same page.
As an American, I've never heard of this, and can't even imagine it.
As an American, I've never heard of this, and can't even imagine it.
Instead, using a written document absolutely forces the presenter/writer to have clarity in thought and it absolutely requires that they "cut the bullshit" and get to the point – what matters and what doesn't matter.
These kinds of meetings will derail if the writer hasn't fully fleshed out their ideas or even if the document is missing important structure ... the purpose of the document, what the author is trying to get out of the meeting ("what is the success criteria for the document or meeting?"), what's in scope, if it's a technical document then clarity in functional requirements, non-functional requirements/constraints, options/alternatives, trade offs, and so on.
In my honest opinion, the document driven meetings provide Amazon a competitive advantage.
Is it literally a quiet-read time where everyone just sits there silently reading a shared doc? Or is it what Ive seen happen in a lot of companies where someone projects the doc, and walks through it, reading/summarizing it aloud to attendees. I like to call that activity "executive storytime", since it's often underlings reading status reports to execs.
Some reasons why (loosely paraphrasing internal guidance on how to run meetings and why writing culture matters):
- PowerPoints are lazy/evil, and not good formats for conveying complex ideas; by nature, PPT's encourage shallow thinking, and is thus antithetical to the goal of having rigorous analysis/deep-thinking in making complex tech/business decisions
- Docs should stand on their own, without needing to be presented or walked-through by a person; forcing you to explain your ideas and support them in such a way that any sufficiently motivated reader can follow along and work out what they mean on their own, is again a way to encourage you to be rigorous and thorough (but limiting you to 6-pager format, for brevity)
- Writing long-form paragraphs and full sentences forces you to take time to refine your ideas
- Forcing people to take time to digest the doc first, gives everyone a chance to take notes and formulate ideas/responses to the info/arguments presented; this saves a lot of time as compared to, walking through a doc/slides for the first time, and having a roomful of people encounter those ideas for the first time and to ask questions in real time as they encounter them... reading the doc should hopefully already address the most common questions/critiques, and so you can spend more time on 2nd/3rd-order more advanced decisions or arguments
If you try talking during this time, you will get lots of dirty looks (and then probably be fired if you keep it up).