What do you get when you cancel all company meetings, practically eliminate PowerPoint from your company and start prototyping all of your new ideas. Oh, and you actually need to be back in the office five days a week? Well, you get Instagram's organizational redesign. Instagram, a division of Meta, who also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, are calling people back to the office with for five days a week, but with some big changes.

Now, some will call it a return to office mandate, but I don't see it as that at all. I see it as a full on organizational redesign. So yes, core for many people who are watching this play out and unfold, especially those in the high tech space, is the fact that leadership is asking people to come back to the office five days a week. Now this doesn't apply to those who are hired to be full time remote workers or those in some specific locations like New York City, where they currently don't have enough commercial real estate in their footprint at Instagram to accommodate everybody. So those folks will be called back to the office later once the commercial office real estate footprint has expanded.

But for others in their other locations, like Silicon Valley, it is back to the office five days a week starting in early 2026. I believe the date is sometime in February. So let's explore what's going on here. Not just the return to office, but all the other changes they're making that are going into this. Because I think it is absolutely fascinating. Fascinating. So let's start of course, with the biggie that is the return to office.

Now, most companies who have a return to office mandate or a big return to office project going on, push that out first and then they clean up whatever cultural ramifications or mess they've made afterwards, if at all. But Adam Massari, head of Instagram, he is totally flipping the script on this one and I love it. So before bringing everyone back, they are absolutely redesigning the operating system of Instagram so that being back in person actually adds value. And it's, they're coming back, employees are coming back to a totally different animal than Instagram or really any company as you know, you would particularly expect it to be. So they're doing some things that are really going to add value, to have people, having people be back together, rather than having it just be a drag.

Okay, so there is a UX thinking principle at play here. And that is the idea that good experiences are designed, not mandated or forced on people. Now, if you ask people to come back to the office just to sit on teams calls, all day and build slide decks. Well, you've created a worse experience than people working from home. So there is no mandate that is going to fix a broken system. But if you redesign a system so that the in office experience actually gives people faster access to one another, better collaboration, richer idea exchange, quicker validation of ideas, and quicker validation of business cycles and bureaucratic rituals, well then you're onto something. The office becomes a tool again, a place for collaboration, a strategic business decision, not a compliance requirement. So let's just think about this for a moment. Instagram may have accidentally stumbled onto a fantastic secret. People don't resist the office. They resist the pointless things that happen at the office, like being in cubicles where they are again on back to back teams meetings all day long and could be doing so more comfortably from home.

But here's the thing, they're bringing people back in a way that changes the organizational culture and changes the expectations of how people work together. So there's this, there's just a number of different things that they are going to be rolling out, which absolutely is going to make return to office a completely different experience. It's not just about the physical space. So let's get into what some of those specific changes are that they are rolling out along with coming back to the office. Because again, this is what makes me think of it as a total redesign, not just a return to office mandate. So the first thing they're doing is they are eliminating meetings. And you've probably heard me talk on this podcast about meetings and about how when they are not well executed, they are a colossal waste of time. So most organizations collaborate.

Most organizations equate collaboration with meetings. But when we put a UX thinking lens on this and we think about the users who are in the meetings, like the participants in the meetings, we know that simply being in a meeting together does not necessarily make for good collaboration. Meetings often represent high cost, low yield activity where there is a lot of cognitive switching, especially for those who have back to back meetings all day, it's 30 minutes on this topic, then 90 minutes on this topic, then 60 minutes on this topic, and then another 30 and 30 and 30 on other topics. And you're switching constantly back and forth between different topics, different people in the room, and it's just not a good use of people's time. So removing meetings, as Instagram is doing, isn't about less communication, it's about designing better experiences for their employees. So here's what they're doing. They're saying all, all standing meetings are being canceled. And they're saying meetings, one on one meetings with your supervisor or your manager should happen every other week.

So at that cadence. And again, if you've been a longtime listener of this podcast, you've heard me talk about meetings on the podcast before, in fact on in episode 167. And we'll link that and the other episodes I've done recently on meetings. We'll link those up in the show notes. And you can find the show notes for this episode @janelanderson.com/246 for episode 246. But in episode 167, I talked about a study that showed that 60% of work is about the work.

Now, of course, there are times when project managers are going to hold project management meetings about the project. That would be an example of work about the work. And that's okay from time to time. But we can't have 60% of our work being about the work because then there's no time to actually get the work done. Now, where does most of that extraneous work happen when we're doing 60% of our work about the work? Well, in meetings. So of course, I'm all in favor of removing meetings and for the ones that are kept, training meeting facilitators on how to run meetings. This is one of the things that I do in my business is I train people on how to run an effective meeting. And no one teaches you that in school, whether that is in an undergrad technology program or even in a master's level program. Nobody teaches how to run effective meetings. So that session that I do on meetings, it's a half day training.

In most cases. We can do it in less time. We can do it in more time, depending on what the organizational needs are. But that is one of the perennial favorites of the corporate training sessions that I do with my clients, because they come out of the participants come out of this session going, nobody told us this. Nobody told us how to facilitate a good meeting. Or even as a participant in meetings, if you don't facilitate a lot of meetings, you yourself how to be a better participant in meetings. Because my philosophy is this. If you're in the meeting, whether you are the facilitator or whether you are an attendee, everyone in that meeting is responsible for driving outcomes, for getting more agenda items across the finish line, for having better deliberation and better discussion and better decision making, all of that.

Okay? So again, what Instagram is doing is as they bring people back in February, they're saying all Standing meetings are off the calendar. We're only bringing back the ones that are absolutely necessary. And you need to have a business case for why you're bringing people together to have a meeting. Now, of course, one on ones are, are not part of that. You still get to have one on ones, and you should have one on ones with your manager. And the cadence that they are putting out the expectation for is every other week, which I think is perfect in most cases. Sometimes if you have a brand new employee, they might need to meet with you once a week, just until they come up to speed, learn the ropes, whatever metaphor you like for that. Now, in 2023, McKinsey did a study that showed that the average knowledge worker spends two full days a week in meetings on average every week.

And 70% of those meetings, the employees who are attending those meetings say are unproductive. So two full days out of five. So that's like 40% of your time. And again, I've seen stats that say it's even higher than that. But again, when you look at that two full days a week and then percent of that time that's over a full day of work per week is ineffective and unproductive. So this internal redesign at Instagram signals a reclaiming of time for creative problem solving, for focus work, for really getting the work done instead of meeting for meeting's sake.

Okay, now, the second big change that they're making is they are, by and large, eliminating PowerPoint. Now, PowerPoint can be a very effective business tool, but too often it is used internally as a polished artifact within an organization that really discourages conversation. Now, you have probably heard people say, and maybe you've even said this yourself, oh, I just got to polish up this PowerPoint. I've got to polish up my slide deck. So eliminating PowerPoint helps eliminate some of the organizational sludge that happens in organizations, whether you're working from home, working from the office, or in a hybrid work environment. So I just love that they're doing this and doing it in conjunction with bringing people back into the office, because making some of these bigger, more radical changes, along with the return to office signals, hey, this is not business as usual. We are not going back to the way things were. We are creating a new kind of workspace where we can work better together. Now, PowerPoint, again, is less often about clarity and more often a performative act. The ritual of looking polished, prepared and buttoned up and spending all this time making your slide deck look perfect.

And when slide decks look perfect, well, the whole enterprise of doing that encourages people to craft this story around their project or their idea where they are over editing and adding on these bells and whistles and creating the illusion of alignment with their coworkers and with their business sponsors and so on, instead of actually creating alignment. Because how we create alignment is through deliberation, through poking holes in each other's ideas and really exposing.

Exposing faults in design. That's when work really happens. And when we're overusing PowerPoint, that's where we start getting work about the work. Because again, imagine if you are a person who, and I know somebody who, who has to do this all the time, not, not at instag fact, not even at a high tech company, but this person has to very regularly present in meetings to their superiors. And as this person tells me, they need to polish their deck, they need to polish their deck and their deck needs to be bulletproof because they know that when they get into that meeting, their boss and their other superiors in this meeting are going to try to poke holes in the deck. Now that's a cultural norm where my deck has to look perfect because I don't want people poking holes in it. And that, you know, and that just kills productivity. It kills, it kills productivity because you're spending an inordinate amount of time making this deck look super polished so that there's no holes to poke into it.

But then the other thing that it does is it eliminates this whole idea of deliberation and improving upon things. And you know, when you kill PowerPoint, you kill off hours per week of polishing one's deck. You kill off endless revisions to formatting. Now these are good kills, right? These are good things because we're eliminating these things. It eliminates endless, endless revisions. And all this time spent formatting, it eliminates debates and decisions about colors and formatting and slide order. Because again, going back to my friend whose boss often wants to see the deck before it gets presented by my friend at this meeting. And again, there's all this back and forth about polishing the deck.

It eliminates hours and hours of preparation for the meeting rather than thinking strategically about what might happen in the meeting and how to drive a good conversation in that meeting. So you get an instant productivity dividend by taking PowerPoint off the table. And again, PowerPoints are also going to structure information in this linear side by side sequence, which sounds nice and tidy, but ironically, ironically, it constrains thinking, it hides complexity, and it really reduces the depth at which we discuss topics in meetings when they are driven by PowerPoint. So it also forces better thinking. So this is the flip side. We just talked about all the cons of PowerPoint and how taking those off the table buys us back productivity. But it also forces better thinking because you can't hide behind pretty slides. So PowerPoint often lets weak ideas skate by because the deck looks so good, because you've done all that polish.

So no slides, no hiding. Without the crutch of graphics and animations and beautiful slides, people have to actually clarify the idea. They have to simplify the argument. They have to articulate the value of their ideas with their words, not with their pictures. So again, I love that Instagram is taking PowerPoint, for the most part, off the table. Now. They're not saying you can never use it as a business tool. They're just saying it should not be the default business tool for every meeting.

Now, again, a lot of those meetings are going off the table, but you could still send a pretty slide deck to all your colleagues in place of a meeting, but they're saying, no, no pretty slide deck. You have to articulate the value of the thing, the idea, whatever it is that you're bringing to the table. So in so doing, Instagram is really rejecting this whole tyranny of performative alignment through a pretty slide deck in favor of collaborative decision making and just making things in general. Which leads me to their third big change, which is they want massively more prototyping happening inside the company now. So if you're not allowed to make a slide deck, what's your next best option? Well, make something that's real or realish. So a sketch, a wireframe, a rough mock up. Again, a prototype.

And they want lots and lots of prototypes. A user flow. So boxes and arrows, diagrams that show how a user might walk through a new feature, a scenario, a user story, a script, a storyboard. Again, sort of a comic book type structure of how a user is going to walk through using a product, using a new feature, that sort of thing. And there is a huge, I mean, this is UX thinking writ large, underscoring all of this. So this is all about show, don't tell. So when we prototype a lot and prototype early and often, it shifts the culture from discussing ideas to actually interacting with those ideas. Now, research from the company Ideo and also from Stanford's D School, that is their design school at Stanford, show that even crude prototypes increase engagement and they surface hidden assumptions that people have about how their idea might work.

It also creates shared understanding dramatically faster than a Simple slide deck. So again, we're going to prototype those things out, we're going to interact with them, we're going to find out where they don't work, we're going to find out the friction points, we're going to find out what does work, and then we're going to be able to take a new idea, a new product feature, a new product entirely to market way, way faster. So prototyping is going to surface assumptions that you did not realize you were making. Again, when we bump up against, well, where would you click to get to the next screen? Or what happens next? Like, those are the kinds of questions we ask when we are interacting with a prototype. On the other hand, if you were in a meeting and somebody showed you, oh, the first screen looks like this, and it's on this pretty slide deck, and then the second screen looks like this, if you're not actually interacting with it, you're not going to find out where it doesn't work. So ideas can sound flawless in conversation, and they can look beautiful on a slide deck. But the moment that you sketch it, moment that you mock it up or prototype it, testing out even the roughest version, those hidden assumptions jump out. Like, oh, that button doesn't actually make sense there.

Or wait, this flow assumes that the user knows how to do X, Y or Z. And then, you know, the biggie, oh, this is way more complicated than we thought. So again, when we prototype those interactions and those workflows, it's going to surface those hidden assumptions way faster. So Ideo's research shows that prototyping uncovers misunderstandings 10 times faster than discussions alone. And I think when we, when we put those discussions hidden behind pretty slides, it probably makes that number even bigger. But again, we're going to uncover those misunderstandings ten times faster through prototypes. So prototypes, you can think about prototypes as like a flashlight. They're going to reveal what is hidden in the dark.

The other thing, too, that prototypes do is they turn debate into discovery. So instead of saying somebody, like somebody saying something like, oh, I think we should try this, or I think it would look better that way. Or no, I disagree. Let me explain it again. When we have all that posturing, we're not getting anywhere, but when somebody is showing you a prototype, again, even if it is literally, I mean, the way prototypes used to be done, and we can do them a lot faster now with technology. But it used to be like a piece of paper that showed this is what happens on this screen. And then you flip the paper and then this is what happens on the next screen. You flip the paper like, this is literally how prototyping was done back in the early days.

I'm dating myself here, but this is how we did prototypes in the early 90s. Okay, but so prototyping shifts the energy from argument to exploration to engagement. And when it's so much easier to react to something that's concrete, something that you can point at, something that you can question, something that you can manipulate or try. And this really moves the conversation from who's right and who's wrong to actually what works. And when you're a tech company and you're making stuff for your users, you really need to be focusing on what works and how does it work. And that also goes not just for the user facing products and product features, but again, when you're a tech company, you need to be turning this, these same methodologies back on how things work inside the company, whether that is your leadership style. And I talk a lot about that in terms of UX thinking for leaders, but also just how back office systems run. We're designing for users.

Those users happen to be employees. So again, this moves the conversation from who's right and who's wrong to what you actually works. And culturally that is a massive upgrade. And prototyping builds shared understanding faster than anything in a meeting. Words fail us. Imaginations differ. People interpret descriptions through their own backgrounds, their own roles, their own blind spots. But when everyone's looking at the same prototype and interacting with it again, even if it's a paper sketch or a series of paper sketches, alignment is going to happen in much more in real time.

And this is again why UX teams rely on artifacts instead of explanations. They rely on prototypes and wireframes and things that we can interact with. And again, this is what Instagram is saying. We want to do this company wide, not just our user experience and our product development teams doing this for customer facing things. They're saying we're going to do this across the whole organization. And like I want you to think about it this way, a prototype is a universal language that we can all interact with. And it also just way, way, way lowers the cost of being wrong. Because if we make a prototype and we're wrong again, UX designers, we know this all the time, we make prototypes all the time.

And we, this is in part to uncover what is wrong with the product idea, what is wrong with the new feature. And we don't feel bad about being wrong. In fact, we feel like vindicated when our prototype has a fault in it, because when we fix it at the prototype level, as opposed to having to fix it as it's a feature or part of a product that's already rolled out to customers, it's way less expensive. Fix it in the prototype phase as opposed to fixing it after it's been deployed. So it lowers the cost of being wrong. Now imagine not just the product design team and not just your UX team, but all of your teams using prototyping across the organization to roll things out and discover when they're wrong earlier. It also makes people braver because you know that being wrong is part of the process, because nobody ever made a prototype that they expected to be perfect. I mean, sure, we don't make prototypes and hoping that they have design flaws in them or hoping that something's wrong about them.

But the whole point is, let's try it in a, in a quick, fast way before we try it in a full, polished way that we're rolling out to all of our customers. So prototypes carry this implicit message that it's okay if the design isn't right yet. And this creates a certain kind of psychological safety because it normalizes imperfection, it normalizes being wrong. It normalizes getting other people's input on things because the stakes are lower. And that's exactly what the research on psychological safety points to. People will take more risks and smarter risks when the cost to failure is low. All right, I was on a bit of a rant there about prototyping, but I feel really strongly about prototyping.

So there you have it. This is Instagram's new organizational redesign. Now, again, some may call it a return to office mandate, but this return to office with fewer meetings, with limited PowerPoint use that you can't hide behind, and lots and lots of prototyping, to me, this is not a return to office mandate. This is a full scale organizational redesign.

All right, my friends, so I'm curious to know, what do you think about what Instagram is doing? I'm going to start a conversation on this over on LinkedIn this week. So I want you to hit me up over on LinkedIn and chime in and let me know what you think about this organizational redesign. And we'll drop my Instagram or my, well, I'm sure my Instagram in the show notes too, but you can find my Instagram all over my website. Just scroll down to the bottom of my website. It's in the footer. So obviously we'll start this conversation on Instagram as well. But I'll also have this conversation going over on LinkedIn this week.

And again, show notes can be found @janelanderson.com/246 for episode 246 I can't wait to see what you about this organizational redesign. And for those of you who are in leadership positions and are bringing people back to the office, and I don't care if you already brought them back, you're thinking about bringing them back, or you're just staying hybrid. I bet there are one or two, or maybe all three ideas that Instagram is putting in place. Whether it is fewer meetings, less reliance on PowerPoint, and more reliance on prototyping.

I bet there's one of those ideas or more that you can start to play with and put in play in your organization. And I challenge you to do that. If you need any help with that, of course you can always hit me up. Use the contact form on my website and I will reach back out to you and we will put something together. All right my friends, be well and I will catch you next week here on the Working Conversations podcast.