Blog: 
Jan 2008
Dec
Crush the Blackberries
Nov
Oct
Sep
Over at Adaptive Path, user experience guru Todd Wilkens has declared war on
Blackberries in meetings.
Check your email, respond to a text message, field a phone call or pop a pimple in the conference room, and Wilkens will unleash
the hounds on your tarnished multi-tasking soul. For once, he begs, please pay attention.
Things you should never do in a meeting.
As obvious as his request may sound, we are all guilty of indulging a distraction during a meeting. We all have endured long wasteful sessions
of corporate boredom. The notion of collaborative, productive work seems so fundamental to business, one might wonder how could we be
screwing this up? Is it really possible that we don't know much about meetings? Shockingly, I think so.
Why we Meet
There are exactly two reasons to have a meeting: to brainstorm or to make decisions. There used to be a third, which was to disseminate
information, but the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago has made that largely obsolete. Never hold a meeting to make announcements.
When you're meeting to brainstorm, or more formally, to collaboratively generate new ideas, all parties need to be fully
engaged. You cannot contribute anything to a session distinctly intended to create contributions if you are daydreaming or
surfing the web. So, come to brainstorming meetings prepared to focus.
If you attend a meeting to make a group decision, you must evaluate the arguments made by others and contribute your own
perspective. Again, this is not possible if you are doodling or building a castle out of spare office supplies. Group decisions
require the active participation of all members of the group.
In essence, meetings are incompatible with any solo activity. If you want to be alone, don't come to the meeting!
How to Meet
There are three parts to every meeting. Before the meeting begins, you must have distributed an agenda. No agenda, no meeting. A meeting
without an agenda is a social occasion. Logically speaking, if you are going to a meeting with no agenda, no set timeframe, and no
clear goals, then you must have beer.
The second part is the meeting itself. During this time, be sure you are either making decisions or brainstorming, preferably within the
scope of the agenda. As each minute passes, confirm that you have not slipped into either of the awful states of a bad meeting: pontificating
or ignoring. If someone is talking and someone else is not listening, you are no longer in a meeting. You are now at an awkward
social occasion (probably without beer) which bares close resemblance to a bad date.
The third part of the meeting is the summary, which must occur in writing after the meeting is over. This ensures that anyone who was
not at the meeting can find out what was decided or what was invented, and anyone who was at the meeting can confirm the record is accurate.
Without a meeting summary document, the meeting did not happen.
Meeting Mathematics
An important element of understanding meeting dynamics involves a tiny bit of arithmetic. Skip this paragraph and the next one if
small numbers frighten you. For example, if you want to measure the length of a meeting, you need to multiply the duration and
the number of participants. A two hour meeting with ten people lasted for twenty hours (2 x 10 = 20). This is also useful in
understanding the importance of promptness and organization. If someone is ten minutes late and delays the start of a meeting with
six other people, they have wasted an hour of time (10 minutes x 6 people = 1 hour).
While time in a meeting is measured by the product of hours and people, the value of each part of the meeting is square of the number
of people actively involved (Metcalfe's Law). Therefore,
a good session with three people is more than twice as worthwhile as a one between two
people (32 > 22, or 9 > 4). This might make you think you want meetings to be as big as possible! But
the effect quickly turns: if a meeting has ten people and only two are engaged in the conversation, the opportunity cost of
those remaining eight far outweighs the two. (22 - 82, or 4 - 64 = -60).
Overall, meeting mathematics demonstrates two things: even a little bit of wasted time is far more than you think, and if
a small group of people dominate the meeting they effectively make the meeting worthless. Be on time to meetings, keep meetings
small, and don't talk too much.
To Attend or Not Attend
If you are going to a meeting, show up with nothing but your commitment. Do not bring even a pen and paper to take notes; the
forthcoming meeting summary ensures you can devote your full attention to the meeting itself. Review the agenda in advance of
the meeting to determine whether you will attend. If there is no agenda, there is no meeting, and no reason to come except to socialize.
Above all, do not come to a meeting with electronic accoutrements. Do not hamper the meeting with distractions, and do not allow the
distractions of others to waste your time. Meetings, when used effectively, have the power to combine human intelligence and
creativity to achieve incredible feats. When goals are undefined and Blackberries dominate, a meeting is the worst possible waste
of collective time.
Further Reading:
Would you like to leave a comment?
Read this.
###
Really, do not make announcements out loud in a meeting. Send an email.
Print out a memo. Put it up on the corporate intranet. Try stone tablets. Anything you
say aloud takes longer than reading it to yourself, has to be repeated for people who were not there,
could be misunderstood or garbled, will never be as elegant or well-said as if
you wrote it down, and will be quickly forgotten. Never use a meeting
to announce anything!
