A dense Lodgepole Pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) stand in Yellowstone National Park in the United States. Note the absence of other species of trees, and the near-absence of any other plant varieties. They are all kept at bay by the litter of needles on the forest floor. The needles are highly acidic, and the litter is a most inhospitable environment for most other plants. Other trees just can't sprout. Even when they do, they can't get much light.
In some ways, pines are a despotic species. They set the agenda for the land where they reside, and exclude attempts by others to contribute to that agenda. Diversity plummets. This places the ecosystem at risk, because any organism that finds a way to exploit or compete with the pines can severely reduce their population. Unless some other species replaces the pines, the area is vulnerable to weathering and erosion. This is now happening in the western U.S., where the Mountain Pine Beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae) is attacking pine forests in what might be the most widespread infestation in the history of the area.
A similar vulnerability can afflict organizations that tolerate Agenda Despots. Their despotic behavior limits diversity of opinion within the portions of the organization where they dominate. Loss of diversity of opinion increases the likelihood of bad decisions.
Photo by J. Schmidt, courtesy U.S. National Park Service.
Incompetent managers abound. They let problems and toxic conflict fester. They provide little clarity of vision, or what is worse, conflicting visions. They favor some subordinates, abuse others, delegate responsibility to the irresponsible, and add load to the overloaded.
They can usually get by from day to day, managing somehow to surf the waves of chaos their incompetence creates. But one venue is especially challenging for these incompetents: the meeting.
In meetings, the people they manage — and supposedly lead — can sometimes raise issues publicly, which can remind everyone of long-standing problems, inconsistencies, and troubles looming inevitably but not yet arrived. To the meeting chair who wants to let sleeping dogs lie, meetings threaten to wake the dogs. And we can't have that.
The techniques of the Agenda Despot give these managers methods for keeping the sleeping dogs asleep and the growling dogs at bay. Here's Part I of a short catalog of techniques Agenda Despots use to control meeting agendas.
- Keep the agenda secret
- One very common technique of agenda control, and perhaps the least sophisticated, is secrecy. Secrecy often prevents all attendee topic contributions, because people assume that the agenda is filled and no time remains for any topics that might otherwise be addressed. Secrecy also limits the ability of attendees to prepare for the meeting, which provides the meeting leader further advantages.
- Don't publish allotted times
- In a well-formed agenda, all topics have time allotments. This enables the timekeeper (often the meeting lead) to determine whether the meeting is on schedule. By failing to publish time allotments, the Agenda Despot gains the freedom to permit expansive discussion of early items, which can consume time that might otherwise be available for later items. Since the time allotments are unpublished, most attendees are unaware when the meeting is running late. If the Agenda Despot views some of the later items unfavorably, they can be excluded from the meeting because "we ran out of time." In some cases, the Agenda Despot will have asked someone to prepare a presentation for one of these later items, all the while planning to run out of time. In this way, the Agenda Despot can intentionally The behavior of Agenda Despots
increases the likelihood
of bad decisionsburden the presenter, which limits the presenter's opportunities to attend to other responsibilities. - Engage in agenda conspiracy
- An agenda conspiracy is a collaboration among a subset of meeting attendees, usually including the meeting lead, with a goal of developing the meeting agenda before anyone else can suggest topics. One common approach involves packing the agenda so full that there is little time left to allocate to topics suggested by anyone other than the conspirators.
Next time we'll explore more techniques for managing topic contributions from attendees. Next in this series 
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
Allocating Airtime: I- The problem of people who dominate meetings is so serious that we've even devised processes intended
to more fairly allocate speaking time. What's happening here?
The Opposite of Influence- The question of why some people are so influential has a partner question: why are others largely ignored,
or opposed, even when their contributions are valuable?
Playing at Work- Eight hours a day — usually more — of meetings, phone calls, reading and writing email and
text messages, briefing others or being briefed, is enough to drive anyone around the bend. To re-energize,
to clarify one's perspective, and to restore creative capacity, play is essential. Play at work, I mean.
Pre-Decision Discussions: Facts- The purpose of some meetings is reaching decisions. Because decision making can be difficult, familiarity
with the forms of contributions that can occur in such discussions is helpful. Their connection to facts
is critical.
Why Meetings Go Down Rabbit Holes- When a meeting goes "down the rabbit hole," it has swerved from the planned topic to detail-purgatory,
problem-solving hell, irrelevance, or worse. All participants, not only the Chair, contribute to the
problem. Why does this happen?
See also Effective Meetings and Conflict Management for more related articles.
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And on May 1: Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: 2- Recognizing just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can reduce the incidence of problems. Here is Part 2 of a collection of antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure, emphasizing those that depend on content. Available here and by RSS on May 1.
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