Our Mission
We make it easy for teams to run successful meetings every day.
Meetings are where the action is. The way a team meets determines what ideas they consider, whose voices they hear, the decisions they make, and the actions they take.
Teams that meet well accomplish more and have more fun. There are many, many ways to meet well.
At Lucid Meetings, we continuously seek great ways for teams to meet. We innovate to find meeting solutions for different kinds of teams doing different kinds of work in different environments, then deliver those solutions in the easiest, most efficient, most reliable, and most sustainable way possible.
With our focus on innovation, those solutions are always evolving.
When we began this work in 2010, we focused on enabling technology. As we learned more, our solutions grew to include educational material, diagnostic tools, and training. And now, we’re building a community of practitioners who can work directly with teams as they develop a rewarding meeting culture.
Today, we know there are teams around the world enjoying successful meetings every day. Great everyday meetings are achievable. This way of working can be learned and created in your team, and we have proven programs that will help you get there.
Looking ahead, we envision a global network of researchers, technologists, practitioners, and teams innovating together in pursuit of ever better ways to meet. As we learn more, we’ll add these solutions to our products, services, and free resources.
We envision a future where meeting well is the status quo. The programs we provide today will have evolved, because teams around the world have embraced a successful everyday meeting practice. Our future innovations will instead seek to increase the delight, meaning, and value teams gain from their already good meetings.
We innovate in pursuit of a way of working that teams find routinely wonderful.
Our Core Values
Our values provide guardrails for our innovation journey, helping us know what to expect from one another, and steering us back on the right path when circumstances begin to push us out of integrity. When you work with or for Lucid Meetings, expect us to act in accordance with these values and help us recognize when we falter.
Love
Lead with love. We often face complex decisions that have no single right answer. When that happens, we take a deep breath and reflect: is the action we're about to take coming from a place of love?
We lead with love. This means you can expect us to:
- Seek opportunities to lift all boats and provide an equitable exchange of value.
- Nurture sustainable well-being for us and those we serve. We take care of our health, our families, our spirits, and our communities.
- Speak with honesty, courage, and candor directly to those we work with - but never cruelty.
- Bring forward questions and problems quickly and directly, so they can be resolved before they turn poisonous.
- Grant wide margins of grace.
- Intervene if someone else is being marginalized, dismissed, abused, or undervalued.
- Revel in the joy of doing good work with and for good people.
Openness
The work we do is only possible because we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us. The world we experience refuses to conform to tidy, prescriptive ideologies. To achieve our mission, we must be free to experiment and learn, and we must champion that freedom for all around us.
We embrace the responsibility required to maintain this freedom. This means you can expect us to:
- Collaborate openly and often with people of diverse backgrounds and cultures. "Not invented here" has no place in our work.
- Seek to include differing perspectives so we can make decisions that are better for more of the people more of the time.
- Operate with a shared commitment to our mission and values, but very few rules. We only establish strict control or rules when necessary to protect the safety of our community and to comply with the laws governing our business.
- Make mistakes, admit when we make mistakes, then take responsibility for improving based on what we learn from those mistakes.
- Share information transparently and freely. For our community, we provide our frameworks under the Creative Commons license, host free public workshops, and publish freely available resources. Within our company, we openly share our strategies, our finances, and all non-confidential business information.
Service
Service is baked into our mission and into the definition of facilitation. We make it easy for other people to run the meetings that help them achieve their goals.
We are here to serve. This means you can expect us to:
- Respond promptly to problems, identify root causes, and deliver solutions that address both the symptoms and the underlying issues.
- Use data to infuse our work with evidence-based practice.
- Prioritize long-term solutions over quick fixes.
Curiosity
People believe working on meetings is a niche activity, but we know that meetings are where the action is. This brings us an infinite variety of scenarios to explore.
We must always be learning. This means you can expect us to:
- Learn rapidly and eagerly from a wide variety of sources, seeking connections that others miss.
- Invite and promote new perspectives that can expand what we know.
- Seek to understand and support meetings in different cultures, recognizing that culture emerges from both within teams and from the larger societies in which they operate.
- Listen to understand, paraphrase to check our understanding, and ask questions to improve our understanding before we reach a conclusion.
- Experiment to find better ways, even when these experiments challenge our comfortable habits.
- Hold our expertise lightly and with humility, knowing that there are always more good ideas to discover.
Craftsmanship
How might we create more joy, more freedom, and more success for our team and the teams we serve? Only with attention to detail and by doing those things that others know they should do, but don't.
We invest effort and care in crafting excellent products and services. This means you can expect us to:
- Sweat the details.
- Deliver authentic value.
- Continuously improve our research practice, products, services, resources, and the processes we use to do our work.
- Prioritize quality relationships with those we serve over volume.
The Business of Lucid Meetings
Lucid Meetings is a proudly remote-first, certified woman-owned small business that delivers the training, services, and technology to improve everyday business meetings. We also contribute to the growing body of knowledge about the science and practice of running excellent business meetings through our freely shared resources, online events, and global community. We welcome everyone into the conversation.
J. Elise Keith, Founder & CEO
J. Elise Keith is the founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, where she leads the research, publication, and product management efforts, constantly seeking the best ways to make it easy for people to enjoy meetings that get work done. Leaders call her work “a treasure trove of valuable info and guidance” and “a game-changer for our organization.”
Elise Keith’s highly praised book, Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization has been described as “golden. It’s deep, well-researched, and a joy to read,” and “Of all of the books I’ve read on meetings, this is the best by far.”
Elise writes the Ask the Meeting Maven column on Inc.com, and is regular contributor and expert commentator on all things business meetings (as seen in BBC News, Harvard Business School, SHRM Magazine, Industry Week, and Forbes.)
Elise is a frequent speaker and guest lecturer at corporations, industry events, and universities, where she shares her meeting expertise in presentations and workshops that audiences say are “inspiring,” “full of practical methods we can apply,” and “fill in all the gaps I didn’t even know I had!”
Elise currently lives in Portland, OR with her husband, three children (depending on who's home at any given time), and a rotating cast of extras. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, action movies, travel, and listening to people tell stories about their meetings. Seriously.
