Meandering Monologues in Meetings: Time

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   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!

Footnotes

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