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How we ditched presentations and embraced silence in our lab meetings
Nature • • science
Key Points:
- Since April 2024, a neuroscience lab has adopted a monthly “memo meeting” format where members spend 20 minutes silently reading a six-page memo followed by 70 minutes of discussion, resulting in around 50,000 words of detailed scientific discourse.
- The memo meeting format, inspired by Amazon’s 2004 practice, emphasizes dense written communication over presentations, aiming to improve meeting efficiency and deepen participants’ understanding by requiring precise, full-sentence writing.
- This approach levels the intellectual playing field by ensuring all members engage equally with the material during the reading period, minimizing distractions and encouraging note-taking.
- Writing memos helps authors clarify uncertainties and gaps in their thinking, which are less likely to be exposed in slide presentations, thereby improving the quality of scientific discussions.
- The memos typically follow a structure that poses a problem or question at the start and concludes with discussion questions, with a strict 20-minute reading limit enforcing concise and focused writing.
