Need to bring back some of those brownbag lunch & learn events, starting with "SPICE up your clocks"! Except people might not be comfortable sitting in the same room these days
Not sure if you are speaking from experience, but if that is the case, and this is true, then NASA as an organization seems to be a poor judge of what's important.
Even now with everything being virtual, I get invites to brown-bag type events probably 3-4 time per week. I can go to one or two, but there's no way I can fit every single one into my schedule.
The other question is why we have so many meetings per project. That one's tougher to tackle and I don't really have an answer. The one thing that I have identified is that we're very in to making sure that everyone has their say on things before taking action. That's a good thing overall, but it also leads to tremendous meeting bloat. A meeting that would only take 5 minutes if everyone restricted themselves to discussing critical issues before making a decision regularly takes a full hour in which we examine every pitfall, no matter how minor.
I wonder if there would be a benefit in your case if folks had to follow a similar process to the one Amazon requires for its meetings (this may be something NASA already does, but I will admit I'm projecting a bit here and am wishing my organization required some writing before calling for a meeting):
> We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.
> ...
> Here’s what we’ve figured out. Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more! They’re trying to perfect a handstand in just two weeks, and we’re not coaching them right. The great memos are written and re-written, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind. They simply can’t be done in a day or two. The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope – that a great memo probably should take a week or more.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312518...