Has anyone implemented 'Amazon-inspired' written narratives for their internal or customer meetings?

Shaun Porcar

Curious to hear about your experience from making this transition OR from anyone who tried this approach and decided that it wasn't a fit for their organization. 

I'm also considering this approach for specific inflection points in the customer journey such as kickoff meetings and EBR's. Our ability to expeditiously gain alignment when both senior and junior stakeholders are [ideally] present for meetings is especially critical to building and sustaining positive outcomes long term.

Some background here if you're not familiar with this approach pioneered by Amazon.

Patrick Kalie

This is something I've played around with for internal meetings. The biggest problem (predictably) was getting other folks on board. People are busy, and the first thing they'll procrastinate on is reading/developing a memo.

For external meetings, we've been engaging our new clients in email drip campaigns so they at least know the very basics of our platform. That makes conversations a little more specific and actionable without requiring any work from either party. We're experimenting with a few drip campaigns for implementation 101 that's targeted towards admins. 

Jan Young

I haven't tried it, but I do think it is particular to Amazon's culture and is valued from the top down. It takes commitment. I would liken it to Neflix's requirement that everyone participate in a meeting or they aren't invited to the next one...

Shaun Porcar

Agreed on the behavioral challenge with change. Ideally there's alignment top down — or at least middle management down. Procrastination — yea I get that people are busy so I ask that the meeting is rescheduled appropriately if someone has not had (or taken) sufficient time to prepare. If this becomes a pattern there are deeper issues to address.

I am wondering, though, for some of these detailed emails that I have found myself and many of my colleagues writing if there is a place for elevating the visibility of certain information proactively to a meeting brief rather than slides or talking points. When you have folks present there's opportunity to engage with everyone on the same page rather than rushing to catch up the unprepared side of the room which invariably wastes precious time and momentum.