Episode 1: the complexity to organize meetings

It starts with a paradoxical situation. On one hand, we are able to send men to space, manufacture self-driving cars, build high-speed trading intelligent systems. On the other hand, we have basic daily actions in our job that are still long and painful. Probably the most frequent one is setting up meetings. Any professional will confirm that organizing a meeting is still a complex and unpleasant task that he is facing on a daily basis. If tons of books and websites exist about how to handle a meeting, the process of planning one has not evolved to this day

Let’s face it, setting up meetings today is still a real challenge, especially if one or more invites are from outside the company. The challenge increases with the number of people invited to join the meeting. We have all often faced the long exchange of emails or WhatsApp about the availability of each attendant, which day, what time ….

“John: we should evaluate the plan, may I suggest a meeting on Tuesday or Thursday? 10 AM

Alicia: Tuesday is fully booked, can we try Thursday 11 AM
Eddy: does not work for me, Friday PM will be great..”
John : I’m sorry, I’m off this Friday PM… I will set up a Doodle for next week
Eddy : go for it, I will try to answer quicker than last time…learning from the experience

And so on and so on…and that is only for a meeting with 3 people.

We probably can define the pain of setting up a meeting through this formula :

A study ran in 19 different countries about meetings “COLLABORATION 2.0: DEATH OF THE WEB CONFERENCE” covered all industries. It shows that on average an employee attends 8 meetings per week, while a senior executive joins 12 meetings during the same period. In the US only, an estimated 36 to 56 million meetings are set up daily. It says a lot about the need to find a solution.

So the question is: how do we get rid of this pain point?

In the next episode, we will speak about the gap between natural language and user interface when planning meetings.