In "Recapping One-on-One Meetings," Point Lookout for August 9, 2023, I described a practice that can make agreements reached between two people more effective and durable. Immediately after the meeting, recapping the agreements in an email message from one party to the other clarifies the points of agreement. More than that, it serves as a future reference, and it can be a basis for future negotiation if either party later recognizes a need to amend the agreement.
The practice A factioned team is one in whichthe participants identify not with
the team as a whole, but with
factions within the teamof recapping agreements can also be helpful after small, focused meetings of more than two people, especially when the meeting is what I call "factioned." Since the term factioned meeting isn't standard, let me first explain what I mean by it, and then describe the practice of recapping factioned meetings.
Factioned meetings defined
A factioned meeting almost always results when a factioned team comes together for a meeting. A factioned team is one in which the participants identify not with the team as a whole, but with factions within the team. For example, consider a group of hardware engineers and software engineers who are developing a control panel for a new washing machine. The control panel consists of both hardware and software components. Suppose that the members of the software team consider their first allegiance to be the software team, and the members of the hardware team, likewise, consider their first allegiance to be the hardware team. So no member of either team considers their first allegiance to be the Control Panel Design Team. When the Control Panel Design Team meets to search for solutions to shared problems, the meeting is factioned, because the team is factioned. Factioned teams need not be divided along technological lines. Cleavages can occur across sites, professions, and positions in the org chart. For the present, though, I'm considering only those factioned meetings that satisfy two constraints. The first constraint is that there are only two factions, and no neutral parties. This simplifies the exploration with little loss, because although more complicated situations do exist, they're less common. The second constraint is that the two factions are more or less equal in political power. When one faction is significantly more powerful than the other, their interaction is more accurately described as a transmission of commands followed by acknowledgment, rather than a negotiation of an agreement. With those two constraints in mind, whatever agreements a factioned meeting might reach are at some risk of instability after the meeting, as members of the factions maneuver for advantage. It is this source of instability that recap messages can address.Recap messages for factioned meetings
A recap message is a message sent by one faction to the other following a meeting in which they reached an agreement. It summarizes the terms of the agreement. Recap messages can more effectively stabilize agreements if their authors follow four simple guidelines.- Act quickly
- Distribute the recap message as soon as possible after the meeting, while the details of the agreements are still fresh in the minds of all participants. As time elapses after the meeting, due to phenomena like the Mandela Effect [Dagnall 2018] and others, recollections of what was agreed can morph towards more preferable agreements, and away from the actual agreements.
- Compose the recap message jointly
- If the gulf between the factions is deep and wide enough, any recap messaging can entail a risk of exacerbating the division. To manage this risk, delegate the task of composing the message to just two people, one from each faction, to compose the recap message jointly.
- Treat compound agreements with care
- A compound agreement is a package of actions that each faction agrees to execute. The factions agree to two elements. First, they agree to execute all actions in the package assigned to them. Second they agree that any amendment to any element of the package triggers a renegotiation of the package. The renegotiation protects the parties from unanticipated consequences of change, and it therefore enables everyone to relax a bit.
- Manage previous recap messages
- As time passes and events unfold, any recap message can potentially be overtaken by those events. Whenever the parties meet, they would do well to review past agreements and reconfirm, revise, or retire previous recap messages.
Last words
In whatever way you compose the recap message, it's most important that everyone involved in either faction have an opportunity to review the recap message. You might not want to seek approval by consensus, but if everyone has a chance to review the message, any errors of recollection are likely to be discovered. Top Next IssueDo 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!
Footnotes
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
- Discussus Interruptus
- You're chairing a meeting, and to your dismay, things get out of hand. People interrupt each other so
often that nobody can complete a thought, and some people dominate the meeting. What can you do?
- Contributions, Open and Closed
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The more open they are, the more they stimulate new thought. How can we encourage open contributions?
- A Pain Scale for Meetings
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is that we don't realize how much we do to get in our own way. If we track the incidents of dysfunctional
activity, we can use the data to spot trends and take corrective action.
- Toxic Disrupters: Tactics
- Some people tend to disrupt meetings. Their motives vary, but they use techniques drawn from a limited
collection. Examples: they violate norms, demand attention, mess with the agenda, and sow distrust.
Response begins with recognizing their tactics.
- Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: III
- Recognizing just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can reduce the incidence of problems.
Here is Part III of a collection of antipatterns that arise in technical communication under time pressure,
emphasizing contextual factors.
See also Effective Meetings and Effective Meetings for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
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- And on December 18: Subgrouping and Conway's Law
- When task-oriented work groups address complex tasks, they might form subgroups to address subtasks. The structure of the subgroups and the order in which they form depend on the structure of the group's task and the sequencing of the subtasks. Available here and by RSS on December 18.
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