“Every Meeting I Have Ever Attended..”

Ivan Moscoso, Sunday, January 6, 2008 @ 11:12 pm

A few months ago, I started writing down some thoughts on the purpose of meetings, spurred on by The Laptop Herring.  I went back and re-read my initial comments and realized that I must have just walked out of a particularly unsatisfying meeting when I wrote them down.  My words started out like this:

The purpose of any meeting involving three or more participants falls into one of two categories:

    1. The dissemination of nuanced information    2. The agreement on a given course of action

[...]

I then go on to describe what I mean by 'nuanced information'.  I'll spare you the original brain dump, but I think I was on to something here.  Let's tackle that first category, 'the dissemination of nuanced information', as category #2 is really implied in #1 (after all, if you are not all in agreement over something, that should become apparent right away).

Put simply, meetings are not the place to recite facts that can be referenced elsewhere.  They are also not the place to expect attendees to collectively remember things in the hope that something great will eventually come out of it.  They are also not good brainstorming sessions(*).  Instead, meetings should be used as a place to describe things whose usefulness depends entirely on nuance.

nu-ance |ˈn(y)oō,äns|
noun
a subtle difference in or shade of meaning, expression, or sound : the nuances of facial expression and body language.

ORIGIN late 18th cent.: from French, ‘shade, subtlety,’ from nuer ‘to shade,’ based on Latin nubes ‘cloud.’

For example, I always take it as a bad sign when the last words spoken after a presentation are some variant of "can you put this up on the wiki for those who weren't here?"  This tells me that the pertinent information, in electronic format, can be fully understood without the group being present-- and therefore that 90% of the meeting was not necessary in the first place.  It would have been better to write up the reference portion directly on the wiki before the meeting, and meet to cover only the more nuanced parts of the material in question.

Take stand up meetings as another example.  There are a few reasons why I work to keep these as short as possible in any team I am part of, but the most important reason is to help discipline ourselves when it comes to valuing other people's time. Productive meetings don't just happen when you want them to happen.  Timing them is an art, and knowing what bits of information are worth discussing in front of the entire team, and what can be pushed off or condensed down to three words or less requires a few different skills.  A daily ten minute stand up meeting eventually brings that out of you, and if you do the math, you will choose your words carefully in a five person team when you have only two minutes of everyone else's time to say them.

A well-run stand up provides some additional benefits.  A few team members (particularly the ones who learned to hate all meetings early on in life) start wondering how to make other meetings as short and concise as those daily stand up meetings-- good things can come out of this too.

(*) Everything I wrote above applies to what I call large meetings (i.e., more than three participants).  I'm much more flexible when it comes to smaller groups, mostly because I feel that there is less likelihood of wasting time in a group of 2-3 people, and greater "shared responsibility" to keep things on track.  This is why brainstorming sessions or design sessions are best in smaller groups.

agile ajax

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1. 

   Somewhat along the same lines, I once attended a Tufte seminar where he compared the rate of verbal communication to the rate of written communication. I forget the exact numbers, but I wouldn’t be far off if I said that people comprehend written text two - three times faster than if that same text is read aloud to them.

   He suggested that one way to make meetings more efficient would be to ditch powerpoint and have the main presenter to write a comprehensive memo. At the start of the meeting, distribute it and say “OK, everyone take 10 minutes to read this thing. Once we’re all done, we’ll talk it over.” And you just saved 20-30 minutes of every attendee’s day.

   Of course, that would represent much more work on the part of the presenter — writing clearly is pretty time consuming for most. Which gives you a clue as to the real source of Powerpoint’s popularity. It makes communication easier for the presenter, not more efficient for the listener.

   Comment by Matt, Wednesday, January 9, 2008 @ 7:42 pm

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