If your corporate experience is anything like mine, you have spent a tremendous amount of time in meetings over the years. Hundreds or maybe even thousands of meetings, ranging from highly productive to a virtual waste of time. A couple of recent surveys I have been reading suggests that unproductive meetings waste more than $37 billion yearly in corporate America. That’s partly because we spend so much time in meetings. The same survey reports that there are 25 million meetings per day in the United States which represents 15% of an organization’s collective time, with middle managers spending 35% of their time in meetings and upper management spends 50% of their time in meetings. The survey also reports that most people in corporate America spend about four hours per week just preparing for potential status updates that they might be asked to give in a meeting they’re attending.

All of us have personally had the unfortunate experience at one time or another of either spending that four hours getting prepared in case you are asked a question and the question never comes, or even worse, not spending the proper amount of time to prep for the meeting and you’re the first to be called upon.

From my perspective, most meetings fall into one of two categories. They are either “Crystal Ball” meetings where the primary objective of the meeting is planning, forecasting, or sometimes even strategizing. The second type of meeting that is far less common than the Crystal Ball meeting is the “Rearview Mirror” meeting. This type of meeting is more commonly known as a debriefing, and unfortunately, in my experience, Crystal Ball meetings outnumber Rearview Mirror meetings about 4 to 1. I say unfortunately, because there’s no comparison between what you can see in the rearview mirror versus what you have to struggle to discern in the crystal ball. We all know and believe in the “hindsight is 20/20” idiom, probably because it’s easy to relate to, and it’s pretty accurate.

Using the rearview mirror or debriefing effectively requires just a few simple best practices. I learned these powerful debriefing steps in my military aviation career and still use them effectively both in the corporate setting and on the airshow circuit when I’m demonstrating the flight characteristics of the vintage fighter planes. No flight is complete until the debrief is complete.

Start by acknowledging this tool’s power and pledge to make it an integral part of your organizational culture. A reasonable goal is to try to reach parity in the number of debriefing meetings you hold versus the number of planning meetings. Next, you need to establish a systematic structure for conducting your debriefings. Decide in advance when you will reconvene for the debrief, commit to a safe environment that allows everyone to speak freely without fear of retribution or reprisal, create review objectives that will be used in each debriefing in advance and put them in writing, comprehensively recap the events that had taken place since the last meeting and then refine and optimize your future actions accordingly. Think of the process in terms of the 5R’s, Reconvene, Reset the tone, Review the objectives, Recap the actions, and Refine the process.

Using these five simple steps has helped me greatly enhance productivity in the corporate setting and, over the years, has literally been a lifesaver in my aviation experiences. They can do the same for you. If you really want to supercharge your organization and magnify your competitive advantage, learn to use the rearview mirror to its full effect.

Oh, and if you have one of those Crystal Balls lying around that does show the future…call me. I’m pretty sure we can put it to good use.