Meeting Troubles: Collaboration

Meetings are persistent objects of complaints and disdain. One source of trouble is a set of counter-effective patterns in which several people — and in some cases, all who are present — collaborate. Their behavior isn't necessarily conspiratorial, though it can be. The effect of their joint behavior is to prevent achieving the objectives they say they want to reach. Here are three examples of collaborative counter-effectiveness.

Bikeshedding

The term bikeshedding applies when groups charged with attending to very important matters attend instead to somewhat-related trivialities. The more formal name for this phenomenon is Parkinson's Law of Triviality, first enunciated by C. Northcote Parkinson in 1957. Parkinson cited as an example a committee tasked with approving plans for a nuclear power plant. He compared the time spent on examining the reactor design to the time spent on examining the plans for the power plant's bike shed, and used that comparison to illustrate his Law of Triviality: "The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved."

If you already record the time spent on each agenda item, use that data to determine the incidence of bikeshedding. If you don't collect such data, address that very serious deficit first. See "An Agenda for Agendas," Point Lookout for May 25, 2005, for more.

Laptop walls

If the meeting room has a long rectangular conference table, and everyone sitting on one side of the table pops open their laptops, the result is what my colleague Steve Ropa calls a "laptop wall" — possibly one for each side of the table. The laptop users might be taking notes, but they might also be doing almost anything else: playing games, updating Facebook pages, or checking on their family pets.

Most Most meetings need only
one note-taker, or
perhaps one per languagemeetings need only one note-taker, or perhaps one per language. If distrust is so widespread that people want note-takers of their own, then deal with the trust issue directly, instead of trying to circumvent it with multiple note-takers.

Attendance bloat

When only one representative of each team, profession, department, or unit has been invited to a meeting, and their immediate colleagues experience that selection — and their own exclusion — as an offense, those not invited might advocate a boycott in which even the invited representative elects not to attend the meeting. The result for the meeting in question is lack of access to important perspectives and possibly essential knowledge. If the meeting organizer succumbs to this pressure tactic and invites those not initially invited, the result for future meetings can be "attendance bloat" and longer, drawn-out discussions, as the previously snubbed but now-invited attendees desperately try to prove their importance.

Redundant representation of professions or organizational units is an expensive waste that makes meetings less effective. Deal with the resentments the created the boycott, rather than expanding attendance and letting resentments persist.

The meeting troubles described above generally require cooperative dysfunctional behavior. Next time, we'll examine systemic troubles in which nearly everyone feels entangled.  Next in this series  Top    Next Issue

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Being "judgmental" is a stance most people recognize as transgressing beyond widely accepted social norms. But what's the harm in judging others? And why do so many people do it so often? Available here and by RSS on January 23.

And on January 30: Conway's Law and Technical Debt

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The Power Affect: How We Express Our Personal Power

Many people who possess real organizational power have a characteristic demeanor. It's the way they project their presence. I call this the power affect. Some people — call them power pretenders — adopt the power affect well before they attain significant organizational power. Unfortunately for their colleagues, and for their organizations, power pretenders can attain organizational power out of proportion to their merit or abilities. Understanding the power affect is therefore important for anyone who aims to attain power, or anyone who works with power pretenders. Read more about this program. Here's a date for this program:

• A recording of a program presented 6:00 PM June 29 (Eastern Time), Monthly Webinar, Technobility Webinar Series. You can earn 1.0 Category 'A' PDU by viewing this program. View this program now.