In this guest article, Martin Wiens explains what a sync meeting is, how it works and what the most important components are.
I have spent too many hours of my life in editorial meetings 🥵.
My experience is that many editorial teams spend a lot of time in meetings, but spend very little time making these meetings functional. It's different at Neue Narrative. Our aim is to leave every meeting with more energy and clarity than when we came in.
In this article, I introduce our most important meeting type: the (editorial) sync meeting.
The sync meeting is an operational meeting based on the tactical meeting from the Holacracy organizational framework. It is used for quick and effective synchronization within the team. In the sync meeting, information is exchanged, next steps are defined and tensions that hinder work at an operational level are resolved. The sync meeting gives everyone in the team transparency about project progress.
At Neue Narrative, we have a lot of sync meetings, for example a funnel sync for the marketing team and an editorial sync for the editorial team. The meeting is always made up of the same building blocks:
Every Sync meeting starts with a check-in. This is important because the meeting is incredibly fast and sometimes cool, especially in a remote context. The check-in is there to arrive and give context to the current mood.
The standard agenda consists of agenda items that recur at every meeting. These are topics that are always worth looking at together. In our editorial sync, these are the points:
Unlike the standard agenda, the open agenda looks completely different at every sync meeting. All participants can contribute their questions, impulses and tensions here. Ideally, they enter their points in a shared list before the meeting. For each item, they indicate what they need so that it can be ticked off:
With New Narratives, depending on the complexity of the points, we sometimes manage to work through 20 agenda points in 20 minutes.
"How do you leave the meeting? What do we want to do differently next time?"
Martin Wiens is co-founder of Neue Narrative. His goal is to build a prototype for the publishing house of the future. He prefers to develop processes in which people can develop content collaboratively and efficiently.
