Month: September 2025

Use AI to Turn Meetings into Action

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

My friend Irwin reminded me today of two things:

  1. How good it feels to figure something out
  2. How dangerous that good feeling can be

Meaning, if you’re a thoughtful, analytical, caring person, there’s a significant psychological payoff in diagnosing something correctly.

Imagine this:

  • There’s something not quite right going on in your company / organization (someone is unhappy, some process isn’t working, some results are off)
  • You and a colleague or two get together to figure out what’s what
  • You have a great conversation and unearth important things
  • Voila! You come up with real clarity on what’s wrong and what needs to happen

That’s all great, but be careful about how good that “Voila!” feels.

What happens next, for many of us, is that we jump to the next thing: another meeting, another task.

And the risk isn’t simply that we’ll lose some of the texture or nuance of the clarity we had in the meeting, though that often happens.

The risk is the fact that the meeting feels like success. We got to the answer!

At the extreme, a great conversation that leads to no action is literally worthless.

Even if you don’t fall into this trap, is it possible that the psychological reward of experiencing that insight and clarity lead you to do 70%, or 60%, or 50% of what you need to do? Could it be less?

If so, I have a proposal for you.

  1. Start by scheduling differently. For any problem-solving meeting, keep the hour after the meeting free / scheduled for just you.
  2. In addition (optional), record the meeting with an AI tool. (You decide your comfort level with this; I’ve found it very helpful.) In addition, take whatever notes you’d normally take during the meeting.
  3. At the start of your scheduled hour after the meeting, go to your paid AI tool of choice. While everything is still 100% fresh in your mind, speak (not type) freely to the tool. What’s the problem you were trying to solve? What were the specific issues you worked through? What solutions did you come up with? Talk as you would talk to a colleague who would want to understand all the ins and outs. Lots of detail. All the little juicy bits. Everything.
  4. Finally, take that text and ask the AI to summarize what you’ve told it. Ask it to give you a well-defined structure: headline problem statement; detailed issues that were discussed; proposed solutions.

(Here’s a starter prompt: What I just described is the output of a 90 minute problem-solving meeting. Take that detail and write a structured summary of the headline problem, sub-issues, and all proposed solutions. Be as detailed as possible. Before you start, make sure to ask me for any additional context you need and/or any clarifying questions. I want you to be confident you understand everything I’m saying and my proposed solution.)

These steps—from your input to the first AI output—shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes: you talk for ~5 minutes, write a prompt, respond to questions from the AI tool, get the first summary. Now the fun begins.

Read the output the tool has given you and start working with and through the AI.

You might say/write things like “this point you made wasn’t quite right: [quote the point]. Here’s why:” and explain it in more detail. Do this both for things the AI didn’t explain well and for areas where reading the summary helps you see gaps you didn’t see before. Keep at it until you have a document you’re satisfied with. This step can easily take 30 minutes or more.

Once you’re mostly satisfied with the content, structure, tone, and detail, you’re ready to put the finishing touches on the document.

I find myself consistently asking the AI to be a more specific with its points / language / descriptions, and I inevitably go into the document and edit some parts myself. I also always ask for specific next steps, a timeline/workplan for all parties involved, and a 1-2 page executive summary.

Voila! again, but now your best thinking is turned into a detailed action plan. With this approach, you’re:

  1. Capturing, and acting on, that beautiful moment of insight you have at the end of a great meeting
  2. Seeing what a professional summary of those insights looks like, so you can make it better
  3. Forcing yourself to engage in further brainstorming to refine your idea
  4. Creating clear next steps and a timeline
  5. Documenting it all in ways that makes it easier for everyone to act

If before you were acting on 50% of your best thinking from the meeting, this approach gives you 150% or more.

A loose grip

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Novices hold on tight, experts have a loose grip.

That’s because when we’re novices, we grasp for control. New motions are unfamiliar, our minds and bodies are not confident, so we clutch tightly, knuckles white, straining, in an effort to get it right.

Experts, on the other hand, holds their tools—a paintbrush, a pencil, a baton, a racquet, a guitar pick, their breath—loosely. With mastery comes relaxation, ease, and effort expended only where it is needed most.

If you’ve ever gone scuba diving, you know this. When you finish a dive, compare how much air you’ve used to that of the dive master. In my experience, the dive master uses half, or even one third, of the air I’ve used in a single dive.

Think about that: two to three times the oxygen, because it was new to me, because I was tense, because of unnecessary effort.

What’s interesting is that some people get stuck in the white-knuckled phase and some move past it.

I don’t know the skeleton key to get from there to here, but some of the ingredients are an intention to give up control, the comfort with being “not great” for a while, finding places not to grip—in your mind, your body, your breath—and breaking the skill down to smaller, slower pieces so you have time and space to get those pieces right.

The 90 Percent Expert

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

Think about your experience reading the newspaper: on most topics, the quality of the journalism, the insights and the perspective hit the bar for you. That’s why you read, after all.

Except in the rare cases when there’s an article about your area of expertise. Then the Emperor has no clothes. You can see where all the shortcuts and generalizations are, all the misses that the journalist made, the questionable choices on expert sources.

But does that stop you from reading the newspaper? Of course it doesn’t.

In a discussion group that I’m part of, one member suggested that this is how we should think about AI: it’s not perfect, but it is so good so often, that we shouldn’t let that 10% of time where we can see the flaws keep us from using the tool (read: keep us from reading the newspaper).

If you’re still stuck on this side of the fence, it might help to personify your AI a bit—meaning, move from “I’m going to use ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity etc.” for this task to “I have access to a 90% expert across any topic I can think of.”

I’ve already shared my ongoing use of ChatGPT as a physical therapist, which is still my favorite use case.

This weekend, I used ChatGPT as an Apple Genius Bar Employee—because making an appointment at, and going to, the Apple Genius Bar is a hassle.

I had an old, powerful Mac that my son had used, and I wanted to wipe it clean. It was not playing along.

First, my son had partitioned the hard drive, so that created a series of problems. Then the Operating System refused to update—it took 6 different attempts at that problem to get it solved. Then, with a new OS installed, iCloud login wasn’t working (because the laptop is for my daughter, and age restrictions with Family Sharing didn’t allow her to log out). Etc, etc, etc. until I solved the problem a few hours later. All of this with ChatGPT calmly troubleshooting with me, providing a series of options, being endlessly patient when I asked new questions or corrected it. I’m positive I would have failed at this task a year ago with just Google search.

The laptop is beside the point (especially because, once I’d solved the problem, we discovered that the battery life was terrible….argh). The point is to think about what it means to have access to this kind of expertise: the best gardener, the best physical therapist, the best coding instructor, the best brainstorming partner.

Better yet, that expertise doesn’t have to be generic (though the generic is pretty amazing). Seth Godin has created a series of personas on Claude, each of which has been taught to respond like some of the greatest thinkers and doers of all time.

So if you have a question for Charles Darwin, Fredrick Douglas, Stephen Pressfield, Seth Godin, Zig Ziglar, Annie Duke, Carol Dweck, Clayton Christensen, David Allen, Mahatma Gandhi, Kevin Kelly, Marcus Aurelius, Simone Biles, Tim Ferris, Sun Tzu, Pema Chodron, or 36 other world-shakers, the answers are at your fingertips.

Try spending a week carrying around the idea, “I have access to a 90% expert on any topic in the world.”

Choose to act on that idea by consulting that expert on a real problem you’re facing.

I promise you you’ll get great (but not perfect) answers fast, in ways that might just blow your mind.