The brightness of my monitor jolts me awake, reflecting my groggy morning look. It’s 8 a.m. here in Minneapolis, and we’re starting a video meeting with our Nordic client. It’s 4 p.m. in Helsinki, and they’re fully caffeinated. They’ve had all day to prepare, armed with their sharp Nordic good looks and the intellectual energy of first-year marketing students.

This is where we practice what our Finnish friends call “sparraus,” or sparring, for those of us with clumsier tongues. It’s a constructive debate where one person challenges, refines, and sharpens ideas, strategies, or approaches to a problem. The technique works well in a fast-paced environment where everyone seems to walk around like italic typefaces—always leaning forward, always in motion.

When sparring starts in a meeting, the tone shifts. It doesn’t turn into an all-out brawl, but the feedback loop speeds up, and the “leader talks last” rule is thrown out the window. I find myself thinking, “I need to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” But it’s not about throwing knockout punches. It’s about working the challenge and shedding as much hierarchy in the room as possible.

After working with this client for a while, these sparring sessions have become more interesting. Our methods and ideas are challenged, requiring us to defend them in the ring—and they often emerge stronger. Buzzwords and jargon are just fancy footwork, for show only, distracting from the real work. Brush-off answers like, “That’s how we’ve always done it,” or, “That’s how it’s done in our industry,” are like sticking your chin out, inviting a knockout punch.

Finnish culture is deeply influenced by sisu—a blend of resilience, determination, and grit. Paired with their reserved nature, it creates an environment where opinions are best brought out through sparring, in which participants are tested and pushed into a sisu mindset. Teams in any culture aren’t effective if everyone is waiting for the leader to speak, and they’re not valuable if the leader never has a point of view. This microculture within meetings is where sparring becomes essential.

Recently, someone commented to me about a local retailer: “We have meetings to prepare for meetings, then meetings before meetings, then the actual meeting, followed by meetings to discuss what happened in the meeting.” This slow descent into meeting death is often tied to sentiments like, “We need everyone’s input,” or, “We don’t want to step on toes,” or my favorite: “We want to make sure everyone feels included.” Cue massive eye roll.

Why is this important? For us, we sell our experience, methods, ideas, and time. Large retailers may care less; they sell products and experiences. An individual at a large retailer might not know their effective or billable rate for the month, so wasting time isn’t a big deal. But for entrepreneurs, time takes on a different value—you start questioning where it’s best spent.

Meetings can be better designed. Think about the exchange between system one and system two thinking—Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s concept from Thinking, Fast and Slow. System two is the slow, deliberate brain, while system one is fast and intuitive. In a good dialogue, there’s an exchange of knowledge, like Kelsey from Midfit Media Agency puts it, “My system one is your system two.” That’s the essence of consulting or advising. When knowledge flows both ways, creativity happens.

In the retailer example, spending time rehashing the same topic sounds like torture. The same goes for writing or editing in a meeting—if that starts, I leave. It may seem odd, but once a meeting no longer needs me, I’m out, regardless of the time. That’s why this idea of better meetings fascinates me.

Here’s what sparring does:

• It respects the elders without putting them on a pedestal.
• It doesn’t favor the most vocal or articulate, but those making the strongest points.
• It’s not a free-for-all; boundaries exist, but it filters out the fluff.
• It fosters creativity in a space (meetings) where it’s been absent for far too long.

You can declare sparring as a practice in meetings—or just insert it the next time an agenda looks too dull. It takes some practice, like riding a bike, because of the social norms we’ve built around “dealing” with people. But if you have a small group with the right intellectual curiosity, you can weave it in. And if you need a ringside coach, I’m happy to help.