Donna McGeorge on Red Brick Thinking

Donna McGeorge has written five books on how people work, from The 25 Minute Meeting to Red Brick Thinking. She talks about why leaders answer tangled problems by adding a policy or a meeting, what The First 2 Hours would say differently now that Slack and back-to-back calls have replaced the inbox, and why AI can fetch case studies but not do the thinking.

Your books run from The 25 Minute Meeting through to Red Brick Thinking. Looking back across the whole run, which of your original convictions about work has proved most durable, and which one have you quietly let go of?

The First 2 Hours has probably been the one that most people have said changed their lives although Red Brick Thinking is starting to take over that. All of them have had a longer-than-expected shelf life, and I think The One Day Refund has quietly taken a back seat.

The First 2 Hours arrived before hybrid work, before anyone's calendar looked the way it does now. Which parts of that argument have aged best, and what would you write differently for the way people actually work today?

The idea of "when" you do work rather than "what" or "where" is as strong now as it was in 2019. I think many people still have the habit of opening their inbox and sitting in it all day, then wondering why they're not getting their "real" work done. The difference now is all the communication channels most workers deal with beyond email, like Slack, Teams, and WhatsApp, to name a few. I still think the advice is sound, but instead of email, it's more about comms and choosing to be the boss of these channels rather than them being the boss of you. I also think planning the next day in the 4th two hours is still relevant.

What I'd change, or talk more about, is hybrid and time zones as well as back to back zoom calls that other people have put in your diary. This seems to be the biggest time thief these days. Flexibility with School Runs would also probably get a mention if I did a go-around, as well as more about using the model as a guide rather than taking it so literally.

Red Brick Thinking makes the case for subtracting complexity rather than installing better systems. Was that the argument you had been circling in the earlier books without naming it, or did something shift in what you were seeing inside organisations?

It was totally swirling around before I wrote it. I'd say my It's About Time series was foreshadowing RBT before I even knew it was a thing. If you think about it, everyone of these books asks people to remove aspects of their work or time. I did the research behind it (without knowing at the time) while writing The 1 Day Refund, and I used Lego activity when I taught that material in class.

You have spent two decades in rooms with managers at places like Ford, Jetstar and Medibank. What do leaders still get wrong about complexity that they were getting wrong when you started?

Most leaders still think a complicated problem needs a complicated answer, so when things get tangled they add something, another policy or another meeting.

Busyness is still worn like a badge of honour and I'm hoping to see the younger generations sort this out as they move into leadership roles.

I've always believed that workplaces are complex but not hard. More often than not, it's about getting the simple things right, consistently over time.

The ChatGPT Revolution was written while the ground was still moving under it. What did that experience teach you about publishing on a fast topic, and with drafting tools now so capable, which part of writing a book do you think genuinely cannot be shortcut?

This was the first time I wrote about something I was still learning about, on the fly. The book itself is a record of me learning about Generative AI.

It was also the first time I had an "intern" to help me with the more tedious parts of book writing: the research, referencing, etc. That was great, and I still use it for that.

The thing you cannot shortcut is the thinking. What I mean by this is the model creation, the structure, the big ideas you want in the book, the deep audience analysis.

I use AI to find case studies, but the type of case study I need, how I introduce them, and what I say about them still have to come from me.

Five books in, what has writing them given your work and reputation that the workshops and keynotes never could? And what would you say to the version of you who was about to sit down with the first one?

A workshop or keynote ends when people walk out the door. The book is still sitting on their desks or bedside tables months later, which is where I hope all my books would end up, dog-eared and covered in Post-it note bookmarks.

Red Brick Thinking is also developing a life of it's own as I have been accrediting other facilitators to use the material in with their own clients in their own workshops. They've taken it places I wouldn't have, and I couldn't have imagined it would happen. And it certainly wouldn't happen on the back of a workshop or keynote.

What I'd say to the scared imposter who opened a Word document and typed 'The 25-Minute Meeting by Donna McGeorge . . . chapter 1' would be, "Don't stress, you've got this. You know your stuff, it's valid, useful and the world needs it so, stay focused and keep your head down."

Red Brick Thinking is available from Booktopia or Amazon.

You can find Donna at donnamcgeorge.com and connect on LinkedIn.