Meeting
“Any simple problem can be made insoluble if enough meetings are called to discuss it.” — Mitchell’s law of Committees
The marketing guru Seth Godin describes three types of meetings which occur in business – Information, Discussion, and Permission meetings. I found this very interesting and somewhat of a parallel universe.
In the business world that I am familiar with, management of Information Technology, I am used to four primary types of meetings, and a different set than Seth describes.
Status Meeting. IT can be a highly structured department based on highly structured processes. Defining and adhering to a schedule are critical to the success of several aspects of information technology. Status reports are the periodic report cards which everyone gives and gets. As collaborative technologies are moving more into the mainstream, and the workforce becomes very comfortable in using these technologies, I see these formal meetings become a relic of another age. Gone will be the traditional (and surprisingly painful for many people), hierarchical reporting of status from those doing the work up to succeeding levels of management who summarize and spin information for their audiences. Replacing this process will be collaborative and on-going reporting of progress. As this takes place the formal meeting will either go away of morph into a formal or informal presentations.
Decision Meeting. Frequently decisions need to be made by senior management, steering committees, or leadership teams. Successful organizations will have worked out the process for making decisions quickly and effectively. Successful organizations also have a means of recording the request and result of the decisions being made. At the heart of this process is a meeting where alternatives are presented with recommendations. Unfortunatately most organizations do not have a means to make decisions and as a result. In a prior post I discussed the anatomy of a decision.
Working Session. These are held by a small group of people who are working through a particular issue, concern, deliverable, or objective. These are the essence of collaborative action. Preparation for these meetings will typically be sent out a few days before hand and each individual will, unfortunately, not be reviewed to the extend desired or expected. A variant of the working session is the Planning Session.
Presentation. There are two primary types of presentations which often fill my calendar. At the heart of each presentation is communicating information to an audience. At one end of the spectrum is communication for the sake of informing. At the other end of the spectrum is communicating for the sake of selling. While the both have their place and I don’t mind using a reasonable percentage of my calendar to participate in these presentations, I do look forward to the day when the Garr Reynold’s and Nancy Duarte‘s of the world will have weaned presenters off of the traditional PowerPoint “sliduments” and on to the next generation of presentations based on integration of presenter and topic with supporting slides. Looking forward, this type of meeting will begin to incorporate many new forms of technology as it moves to the mainstream of corporate life. Everything from how presentations are delivered (on-line and in-person, integrated multimedia), when and where (immediate in-person, on demand) will change in order to better communicate with the audience.
What is clear to me is that the type work to be completed drives the way work is performed and how people interact. Marketing clearly is different than IT and the nature of this is reflected in the types of meetings being held.
Good overview of meeting types in our profession. All this may seem obvious, but I do see a great deal of time wasted through meetings – poor agenda, people starting late, running over, lack of good facilitation, lack of minutes and follow-up, etc. I worked with one of the big oil companies many years ago who had got very serious about running better meetings – and it really showed! They had researched then implemented an internalized a globally common approach to great meetings – used it to great effect! I reengaged with them a little while back – they still follow it religiously.
Well written article. I read Patrick Lencioni’s book “Death by Meeting” and it reflected something very similar thoughts.
In my view, people are booked solid in meetings every working hour and have laptops open during those meetings to catch up on action items from prior ones! The lack of “white space” in calendars leads to a situation where everyone is overworked, lacks attention and getting overwhelmed with action items.
I’d appreciate thoughts on this as well.
I agree Raj, our calendars have lost all white space. I am used to fifty meetings a week. Add preparation and resulting action items and the math points to a dysfunctional situation. I also see this as symptomatic of a lack of thought towards meeting purpose, structure, and desired outcomes. My guess is that half of all meetings are unnecessary in that they are a.) have many more attendees than required, b.) have no clear purpose, c.) have no outcomes, and d.) do not allow for adequate preparation.
Imagine how much more productive we would all be if we had an additional 25 hours a week to work with. In many cases, this equates to 500% more time! Let’s do the math across the entire organization and see what the ROI might be if we took a step back to look at the form and function of our meetings and re-calibrated accordingly.