Is to meet murder? Then design better meetings!

Am I unusual in being excited at the prospect of reading a paper on how to run better meetings? Perhaps I am. But surely they matter – we spend hundreds of hours a year in meetings and complex organisations can’t readily function without them. Yet little serious attention is paid to designing and running them effectively. As with managing your inbox and writing good emails, a large chunk of our working life is seemingly regarded as unimportant and unimprovable.

I disagree. Meetings can be better or worse by design. As Geoff Mulgan’s fascinating (yes) paper points out, too often we fall back on a single standard meeting format regardless of our objective. Sometimes we don’t even make the goal of the meeting explicit (perhaps we can’t remember why it was arranged…).

We regularly fail to counter the most common problems such as fuzzy objectives, or the tendency of meetings to be dominated by the views of the most senior people, the extroverts or simply those who speak first. The paper points out that the very worst designed gatherings are often large conferences, which seem to ignore everything we know about how people learn.

There are tried and tested approaches that can help you run a better meeting. Work out what you are trying to achieve: is it to reach collective agreement, to generate ideas, review what’s happened or simply to share information? Make this goal clear to everyone, and tell them how the meeting will run. If there isn’t a clear purpose for the meeting, cancel it. Some other ideas were less obvious to me, but could be worth a try:

• Hold the meeting standing up, to keep it short
• Make everyone write down their view at the beginning, to counter people simply going along with the first speaker
• Use ‘strategic silence’ to encourage people to digest information and engage seriously with the issue at question
• Modify the order of contributions, with the most junior going first and most senior last
• Force participants to take certain roles (devil’s advocate, or being positive), to ensure different perspectives are considered

There is a herd mentality to counter here and trying something different can take courage. You will have to learn as you go, so adopt a growth mindset. You don’t have to accept meetings as they are: you really can get better at them and people will thank you for it. 

I’ve been inspired by this and have decided I’m going to try regular 10 minute stand-up meetings with my team. I hope this will help us all to understand what each other is up to, and free up the lines of communication.  It’s not what I’ve done before and perhaps it won’ work, but honestly, what’s the worst that can happen?

The absurd shortness of the corporation day

I picked out an old business book from my grandmother’s bookcase and it immediately rewarded me with this wonderful quote:

One of the most important discoveries of my working life was made on April 9, 1964….

I had left the BBC after 9 years. On April 9th, I was just me. The discovery I’d made by 6pm was the enormous amount of work that could be done in a day. 9 years in a great corporation had obliterated the memory of how much time there was if you had no telephone calls,…routine meetings,…policy documents and all the endless succession of events and non-events that make up a manager’s day, year, life.

The corporation day is absurdly, ludicrously short.

Antony Jay, The Corporation Man (1975)

I think this remains the central problem for all those who work in large organisations: how to ensure that we direct our attention and energy to the tasks that matter, rather than on the endless emails, meetings and other distractions that constantly threaten to crowd them out.