Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Mindless Meetings

The worst part of a worthless meeting is not the wasted time in the meeting itself.  It’s the spawn of that meeting.  It’s the meetings that it will beget.

You know how it begins.  A problem comes up, usually at another meeting.  Of course it needs to be solved asap.  Everyone looks at you because it’s probably your fault.  Paralyzed with fear, your mouth blurts out, “Oh yeah.  We have a meeting scheduled on that.”

Well, now you have to set up a meeting.  You send out desperate, emails, slacks, texts to anyone who might know something about the subject.  Some of them actually do show up, bleary-eyed and confused about the topic of the meeting.  None of them have prepared for it.  Critical people are missing.  At best you are able to explain the problem to those who remain conscious through the meeting, and then you schedule another meeting.

There is another way.  We discovered it quite by accident.

We broke the ice on the meeting vicious cycle by inserting a requirement into our calendar system that each meeting had to have an agenda.  The software wasn't sophisticated enough in those days to know whether the agenda was any good; you just had to upload an attachment labeled 'agenda'.  It didn't have to list topics, expected decisions, prework necessary...  Even a blank file would work.  

Amazingly, just getting people to THINK about the meeting ahead of time reduced the number of useless meetings.  Ironically, our stumbling effort to roll out a coherent training regimen eased the behavior change that we were seeking.  The workers saw the benefit of preplanning and became intrigued by the process. 

From there, we trained people to plan effective meetings.  For reference, here’s a short list:

• An agenda
• List of decisions that will be made
• Who’s required and who’s optional for the meeting
• What prework needs to be done
• What needs to be brought to the meeting
• Now that you’ve done the prework, do you even need to have a meeting?

Implications for Culture Change in General

This episode was also a lesson on the larger problem of culture change.  We had been nagging the workers about the importance of preplanning meetings.  So, our requirement to upload an ‘agenda’ file into the calendar system before scheduling a meeting was no surprise to them; and it was easy to upload a blank file. 

The surprising part occurred when our employees became curious and began to PULL IN knowledge about effective meetings rather than us having to push it down their throats.  This sugar coating on the pill primed the pump for our workers.  They felt the advantages of the new way of working and the culture changed itself.

How about you?  Do you have a similar story?  What has worked best for you?  Comment below.