
Aerial view of the Charley River at its confluence with the Yukon. Meanders (bends of alternating curvature) create complexity in the flow of water in a river. One result is asymmetry in the channel profile, which causes erosive cutting at the outer bank of the meander, and deposition at the inner bank. Although these processes are relatively continuous, most of the changes in the river's course result from the periods of bankfull flow — those times when the river is full to its banks. In bankfull flow, the channel is at capacity, but not at flood. [Mount 1995] Something similar happens in human relationships at work, and probably elsewhere. Change is more or less continuous, but probably the bulk of the dramatic changes in relationships happens at those times when "we need to talk." Changing the behavior of a monospeaker could happen in increments, but substantive change — ending the meandering monologue behavior — is more likely to occur as a result of a dramatic incident.
Photo by U.S. Geological Survey, courtesy Wikimedia.
If you work in a typical knowledge-oriented organization, you collaborate with colleagues in teams — or in groups we often call teams. You probably know many people who feel that meetings are painful wastes of time and energy. One of the more nerve-racking elements of meetings is what I call the meandering monologue. Meandering monologues are usually delivered by repeat offenders who repeat the offense so often that whenever they begin to speak, three fourths of the rest of the attendees think to themselves, "Here we go again," while the rest first check that their cameras are turned off and then go for coffee.
The purpose of meandering monologues
Even though meandering monologues aren't worth the time required to get that cup of coffee, they do support and enhance the self-esteem of the person who delivers the monologue, whom I'll refer to here as the monospeaker.
For example, consider monospeakers who are convinced that they haven't been heard. They're trying to use every technique they know to achieve one goal: having their thoughts matter to the rest of the meeting attendees. By decorating a central idea with myriads of partially connected thoughts, these monospeakers hope to finally gain recognition.
But past A meandering monologue in a meeting is
a long, complex, and difficult-to-follow
speech by one person that takes up way
more time than its content is worthfailures to accomplish this feat weigh on them. Under self-imposed pressure, and in the face of the sometimes-obvious impatience of their fellow meeting attendees, these monospeakers struggle to communicate their ideas to the others. Only for moments do they glimpse any evidence of success. Finally, when they've repeated themselves so many times that even they recognize it, they yield the floor.
Costs of meandering monologues: time
The problem with meandering monologues in meetings isn't merely that they're overly long compared to the small positive value they contain, though they certainly are. The problem with meandering monologues is that considering all costs and benefits associated with them, they provide net negative value by interfering with the team's efforts. In this post and the next, I explore six characteristics of meandering monologues that can account for the monologues' ability to prevent teams and groups from accomplishing their missions. In next week's post I explore how meandering monologues affect the degree of engagement of group members.
For now, though, I consider how meandering monologues have the effect of reducing the perceived value of meetings by wasting time.
- Repetitiousness
- To keep possession of the floor, monospeakers tend to feel a need to speak at as high a rate as they can maintain. This can lead to their outrunning their ability to recall or generate thoughts to convert into speech. When that happens, they repeat what they've already said, sometimes verbatim, but more often with minor revisions.
- Repetitions can be lengthy passages of 50 to 100 words or more. The longer repetitions might not be recognized as repetitious by everyone, especially if the monospeaker changes the order of major elements. But the shorter repetitions are inescapable. For example: "I told them we needed it yesterday. I told them we needed it yesterday."
- The most direct effect of repetitiousness is waste of time. Very little new value is generated by the monospeaker's repeating what has already been said, except perhaps for late-arriving meeting attendees, or attendees who haven't been paying attention, or virtual attendees experiencing technical difficulties.
- Formulaic utterances
- As the monospeaker exhausts his or her mental cache of meaningful things to say, formulaic utterances (previously known as automatic speech or embolalia) can serve the purpose of keeping possession of the floor. Examples: "Again,…", "I will tell you that…", "So I asked myself,…". [Brenner 2022.3]
- Formulaic utterances are another source of dilution of value of meetings. For people who use voice recognition to produce meeting notes, formulaic utterances cause production of yet more useless text to read.
- Pointless stories
- Before conveying point X, the monospeaker provides a tale that explains how the monospeaker acquired information about X. Typically that tale provides no value beyond the value of X, and the monospeaker might even forget to return to X to explain the significance of the whole tale. So the meeting is compelled to listen to a long tale that adds no value to the monologue.
- Example: In talking about the informant who provided X, taking time to explain that the informant and monospeaker met by chance in a small curbside café adds no value to the monologue.
Last words
I'll continue this exploration of meandering monologues next time, with a focus on their effects on attendee engagement. Next issue in this series
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
Mastering Q and A
- The question-and-answer exchanges that occur during or after presentations rarely add much to the overall
effort. But how you deal with questions can be a decisive factor in how your audience evaluates you
and your message.
Characterization Risk
- To characterize is to offer a description of a person, event, or concept. Characterizations are usually
judgmental, and usually serve one side of a debate. And they often make trouble.
Favor Symmetric Virtual Meetings
- Virtual meetings are notorious for generating more frustration than useful output. One cause of the
difficulties is asymmetry in the way we connect to virtual meetings.
How to Hijack Meetings
- Recognizing the tactics meeting hijackers use is the first step to reducing the incidence of this abuse.
Here are some of those tactics.
Virtual Blowhards
- Controlling meeting blowhards is difficult enough in face-to-face meetings, but virtual meetings present
next-level problems, because techniques that work face-to-face are unavailable. Here are eight tactics
for dealing with virtual blowhards.
See also Effective Meetings for more related articles.
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