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 issue in this series Top Next Issue
Do you spend your days scurrying from meeting to meeting? Do you ever wonder if all these meetings are really necessary? (They aren't) Or whether there isn't some better way to get this work done? (There is) Read 101 Tips for Effective Meetings to learn how to make meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot more rare. Order Now!
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
- FedEx, Flocks, and Frames of Reference
- Your point of view — or reference frame — affects what you see, and how you experience the
world around you. By choosing a reference frame consciously, you can see things differently, and open
a universe of new choices.
- Meeting Bullies: Advice for Chairs
- Bullying in meetings is difficult to address, because intervention in the moment is inherently public.
When bullying happens in meetings, what can you do?
- When the Chair Is a Bully: III
- When the chair of the meeting is so dominant that attendees withhold comments or slant contributions
to please the chair, meeting output is at risk of corruption. Because chairs usually can retaliate against
attendees who aren't "cooperative," this problem is difficult to address. Here's Part III
of our exploration of the problem of bully chairs.
- Newly Virtual Politics: Meetings
- Pandemic or not, workplace politics marches on. But with the pandemic and the prevalence of formerly
co-located teams becoming more virtual, workplace politics takes a new form, especially clearly so in
meetings.
- Self-Importance and Conversational Narcissism at Work: II
- Self-importance is one of four major themes of conversational narcissism. Knowing how to recognize the
patterns of conversational narcissism is a fundamental skill needed for controlling it. Here are eight
examples that emphasize self-importance.
See also Effective Meetings and Effective Meetings for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming January 1: The Storming Puzzle: II
- For some task-oriented work groups, Tuckman's model of small group development doesn't seem to fit. Storming seems to be absent, or Storming never ends. To learn how this illusion forms, look closely at Satir's Change Model and at what we call a task-oriented work group. Available here and by RSS on January 1.
- And on January 8: The Storming Puzzle: III
- For some task-oriented work groups, Tuckman's model of small group development seems not to fit. Storming seems to be either absent or continuous. To learn how this illusion forms, look closely at the processes that can precipitate episodes of Storming in task-oriented work groups. Available here and by RSS on January 8.
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