Revolutionizing Meetings: From Sabotage to Strategy (with Rebecca Hinds)
August 18, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readIn 1944, the Office of Strategic Services—the precursor to the CIA—published a manual advising ordinary citizens living in enemy territory on how to sabotage the Axis war machine. One of the recommended tactics: run unproductive, long-winded meetings and "do everything through channels." The manual was declassified in 2008, and Rebecca Hinds, author of Your Best Meeting Ever, points out the darkly ironic truth: that wartime weapon of sabotage is now business as usual in too many organizations. Hinds argues that we need to treat meetings like a product, applying product design principles to fix a system where leaders now spend over 23 hours a week in meetings—more than double what they did in the 1960s.
The Meeting Doomsday and the Subtraction Habit
The first and most radical intervention Hinds recommends is a "meeting doomsday": a 48-hour cleanse where employees delete all recurring meetings from their calendars. After the 48 hours, they are invited to rebuild their calendars from scratch, adding back only the meetings that still serve a clear purpose and redesigning their length, cadence, attendees, and agenda items for the current state of work. This gives people the social permission to kill legacy meetings—what Hinds calls "meeting debt"—that have outlived their value.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:35) **Introducing Rebecca Hinds and the Meeting Sabotage Origin Story** - Kim Scott welcomes Rebecca Hinds, author of *Your Best Meeting Ever*, who shares a World War II-era origin for unproductive meetings.
- 2 (04:18) **The Escalating Cost of Meetings** - A stark historical comparison shows how meeting time has ballooned, and why it’s a sign of a broken communication system.
- 3 (05:30) **Solution #1: Volume – The Meeting Doomsday** - Rebecca introduces a radical product-design approach to slash meeting debt.
- 4 (08:13) **The Subtraction Habit and One-on-Ones** - Discussing the psychology of deleting meetings and the special case of manager one-on-ones.
- 5 (11:20) **Solution #2: Measuring – Return on Time Investment** - A simple, low-lift method to get objective feedback on meeting effectiveness.
- 6 (15:23) **Solution #3: Meeting Minimalism – The 27-Minute Meeting** - How to fight Parkinson's Law and the default 30/60-minute calendar grid.
- 7 (19:32) **The Psychology of Attendee Lists** - Why fewer people leads to better decisions and how to combat FOMO.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
While the podcast team is taking a Radical Sabbatical, Kim is interviewing authors of the books that have had a big impact on her in the past two years.
In this episode, Kim speaks with Rebecca Hinds, the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. They explore the evolution of meetings from wartime sabotage tools to the challenges and strategies for improving meetings in today's technology-driven workplace. They discuss the increasing time spent in meetings, especially post-pandemic, and present seven solutions to eliminate unnecessary meetings and to redesign the necessary ones. They discuss the impact of distractions, the importance of effective meeting structures, and the need for a culture that encourages open disagreement. The conversation also highlights the significance of asynchronous communication, preparation, and technology's role in enhancing collaboration. Ultimately, they emphasize the need for meetings to be engaging and aligned with natural rhythms to foster productivity and creativity.
Guest Background: Rebecca Hinds, PhD, is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. She is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. For more than 15 years, she has helped organizations rethink how work gets done, challenging outdated management playbooks and offering leaders a more ambitious and more human vision for the future.
Rebecca has founded and led two first-of-their-kind research institutes dedicated to reinventing work. In 2022, she launched the Work Innovation Lab at Asana, building it into an influential source of practical workplace research. In 2025, she founded the Work AI Institute at Glean to help organizations navigate the next transformation of work.
CHAPTERS
(00:00) The Origins of Meetings as Sabotage Tools
(02:45) The Evolution of Meeting Culture
(05:14) Radical Meeting Solutions
(08:20) Measuring Meeting Effectiveness
(11:05) The Minimalism Approach to Meetings
(14:06) Optimizing Meeting Flow and Communication
(16:56) The Role of Tools in Meeting Efficiency
(23:40) Managing Distractions in a Tech-Heavy World
(25:58) The Importance of Effective Meetings
(28:58) Creating a Culture of Open Disagreement
(29:49) Building Strong Asynchronous Communication
(32:01) The Role of Preparation in Meetings
(36:51) Designing Engaging Meetings
(38:47) Timing and Rhythm in Meetings
(41:31) Leveraging Technology for Better Meetings
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