I love meetings when they are useful. When they’re bad, I want to run for the hills. We’ve had our fair share of stale and boring meetings at Trace, we’re human after all. But I thought it would be worth sharing a story about how we’ve tried to make meetings better.

Here’s a story about how we broke The Sound of Silence.

About four years ago, I decided to add music to our strategic planning meetings that involve about 15 Partners in the firm, a facilitator, and our minute taker. It’s been a great idea so far. Here’s how it works.

Prior to the meeting, we ask people to send me their two favourite songs at this very moment in time. There are only two rules to follow: 1) nothing massively inappropriate (light swearing is fine 😊), and 2) it must be uplifting (no sleepers or snooze-fest songs). We compile the songs into a playlist and put it on shuffle as people are gathering, during breaks, and as we say goodbye. What happens is pretty cool, the playlist becomes the soundtrack for the meeting. As people are listening to the songs they try and guess who picked what song. It’s a lot of fun. Much better than hiring a professional team builder to come in to teach us how to have fun.

For us, the results (fun, bonding, relationship building, etc.) have been outstanding. If you’re reading this and we sound like the type of company you’d like to work with or for, give me a shout and let me know what song you’d add to our next playlist. And for interest’s sake, the top song pick for 2017 was “The Sound of Silence” by Disturbed. Great tune.

Enjoy one of our playlists.

Darrell