Backscatter

Meetings Madness

by Donald Christiansen

Why is it that whenever I want to talk to real people instead of sending e-mail, they're in a meeting? Everyone talks about how to have better meetings. My question is, is there a way to have fewer meetings? Could it make us more productive?

Nowadays, more reasons exist to hold more meetings. For example, the IT people hold frequent meetings to bring everyone up to speed on updates (or idiosyncrasies) of the corporate IT system. With nearly every employee a user (or a victim) of the IT system, no alternative is clear. But extra meetings further limit the time available to do one’s job. And it disconcerts the customer or colleague who must be told “I’m in a meeting just now; please leave a detailed message.” What detailed message? Callers want person-to-person dialogue, not an exchange of detailed messages.

Meetings seem an endless source for horror stories. Take, for instance, the marathon meetings, in which a whole day is dedicated to a series of meetings. To survive such an ordeal, an engineer I know learned to doze off with his eyes partly open. But when he woke up he was sometimes befuddled. Once he made a comment to which his boss replied, “Jim, we finished that meeting 10 minutes ago!”

One of my bosses would hold noontime meetings to critique projects. His secretary would order in sandwiches that we were expected to devour quickly so we could actively engage in critical comments on one another’s projects. Some of us would have preferred a more leisurely lunch in the cafeteria, with shop talk interspersed with discussions about breaking news and sports. Or a game of pinochle with our colleagues as a warm-up to the afternoon’s creative engineering challenges.

Conference calls are supposed to be a good substitute for face-to-face meetings. While waiting for everyone to join the call, you’ve got an opportunity to talk to someone already on the line about some problem unrelated to the meeting, or about your daughter’s wedding. But problems abound there, too. Have you noticed that two or three key people might excuse themselves because they’ve been called into “real” meetings by their bosses? Have you then been tempted to say something like “Oh, excuse me. I’ll be leaving the call. My boss just beckoned. They’re having a birthday party for the department’s newest employee, and I don’t want to miss it.”

I wasn’t even going to mention the motivational meetings, for which you and a group of colleagues are dragged away from your computer terminals to spend a day or so folding paper airplanes, or driving a BMW through a cone-filled obstacle course while blindfolded. In the latter, a seeing-eye colleague informs you of oncoming hazards. These types of exercises are intended to make you more of a team player — and thus a better engineer...

Some Good Meetings

I like meetings that have not only an agenda, but also a point. As a young engineer assigned to a production engineering job, I encountered just such a meeting. At the end of each day, the plant manager would hold a meeting of all engineers and production supervisors. He would want the answers to three questions from each engineer. “How were the yields today?” If any were low, “Why?” And finally, “What is your program to increase yields tomorrow?” The meetings were short — one half hour at the most, and, by dictate and practice, to the point.

Design review meetings are important and can be productive. If they are held too often, however, you may find that a lot of the agenda issues get labeled “no change” in the post-meeting report. Unfortunately, a string of “no changes” may be erroneously interpreted as “no problem,” and a critical issue may be dropped from further consideration, foreshadowing disastrous consequences.

Some MBA is always telling us 10 ways to run a good meeting. I’m sure MBAs spend a lot of time in meetings, so maybe they know how to run them. But perhaps we are looking in the wrong place for such advice. Consider the New England town meeting. A small town of, say, 5,000 people can make its major decisions in just one evening per year. All interested townspeople are invited to attend, one of the selectmen runs the meeting, and it is over before midnight. Has a selectman ever written an article for the Harvard Business Review on how to run a meeting?

Despite the MBAs who say they know how to run a meeting and the New England selectmen who actually do it, I admit to being dubious about my own meeting-running qualifications. With competition from cell phones, laptops, the arrival of the coffee wagon, and conflicting meetings you’d rather be in, is it even possible to run an efficient meeting in today’s business world? I’d like to hear from you. More horror stories are welcome, but I’d really like to hear something about the best meeting, or series of meetings, that you have attended or led.

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Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.