Meandering Monologues in Meetings: Engagement

Last time I began an exploration of the nature and effects of meandering monologues in meetings. As a reminder, a meandering monologue is a long, rambling, speech by one of the meeting attendees. It is so rambling that even the person delivering the monologue can seem to lose track of the point — if they ever had a point. As I noted, wasting time is perhaps the most obvious effect of meandering monologues. But other effects might be even more costly. For example, consider the effects of meandering monologues on the degree of engagement of other attendees.

Engagement is important because it affects the quality of the meeting's output. Even more important, it affects attendance at future meetings, and thus the output of those future meetings. As in the previous post, I use the term monospeaker to refer to the person who's engaging in a meandering monologue.

How meandering monologues can suppress engagement

These next four characteristics of meandering monologues reduce the value of the meeting by reducing attendee engagement. Repetitiousness is (ahem) making a repeat appearance.

Repetitiousness

As I noted last time, repetitious monologues waste meeting time. But they do much more. Although some people can tolerate repetitiousness, those who have a low tolerance for repetition can feel compelled to alleviate their pain. They "check out" of the meeting by muting the audio, going for coffee, playing tetris, or shopping for an anniversary gift.

Repetitiousness by a monospeaker thus deprives us of participation by others in attendance. But it affects future meetings as well. Those who cannot tolerate repetitiousness might decline future meeting invitations, hoping that if anything important happened they would hear about it by some other means. If they don't feel safe enough to decline future invitations, or to skip meetings altogether, they might claim schedule conflicts to make future meetings more difficult to schedule, thus reducing the frequency of meetings.

Many different unconnected elements

The monospeaker's words might not always lead to a clear conclusion or central idea. If there is a central idea, it can be so poorly expressed that it would be difficult to understand even if it weren't awash in irrelevance.

Moreover, debates can erupt among those who were able to remain connected enough to the monologue to form conjectures about what its main point might be. Because these debates don't address the mission of the meeting, they are another source of motivation to disengage from the meeting.

Breathtaking span of issues presented

The monospeaker might digress from the main point, introducing related but not always relevant ideas. In the more complex cases, understanding the digressions can require specialized expertise or detailed recollection of past events that only a few attendees possess, and which is otherwise irrelevant to the mission of the meeting.

This kind of digression is especially useful to monospeakers whose intention is to demonstrate to the attendees their own superiority and value. While that might be their intention, reciting a disorganized litany of arcane incidents or beliefs is unlikely to produce success.

Clouds of irrelevant detail

A useful metaphor for this factor — clouds of irrelevant detail — is the needle in the haystack. By providing an enormous amount of detail, much of it irrelevant, the monospeaker compels the other attendees to dig through it all before they can determine whether it contains anything of value.

Because most people choose not to engage in excavation, the monspeaker's words largely escape scrutiny. A common response to being assigned the task of organizing the details is "No, thank you."

Last words

The behavior that I'm calling meandering monologue is essentially a performance issue. It cannot be addressed effectively on a peer-to-peer basis; addressing it is the supervisor's responsibility. Fortunately, because this particular performance issue occurs in settings in which there are many witnesses, most likely, the monospeaker's supervisor is well aware of the issue. Failure of the supervisor to take effective action is a performance issue of the supervisor.   First issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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