Meetings that are worth the time

Meeting time has grown substantially in most knowledge organisations, and the complaints are near universal, which suggests something structural rather than individual failings.

Why they go wrong

No stated purpose. The dominant cause.

A meeting can decide something, generate options, inform, coordinate or build relationships. These require different formats, and a meeting attempting several does none well.

Attendance is a status signal. Being invited reads as being valued, which produces invitation as courtesy and rooms full of people with nothing to contribute.

Nobody has read anything. Documents circulated in advance are generally not read, so the first portion is spent conveying what was already written.

Discussion converges early. Whoever speaks first anchors the conversation, and subsequent contributions cluster around the first position.

Research on group decision-making documents this consistently, along with the tendency for groups to spend most of their time on information everyone already has rather than on information held by one person.

Nothing is decided. The discussion concludes, everyone leaves with a different understanding of what was agreed, and nobody owns anything.

The practices that help

Silent reading at the start. The document is read in the room, in silence, for the first fifteen minutes.

Associated most publicly with Amazon's memo practice, and it works for an obvious reason: it guarantees the shared basis that pre-reading assumes and does not produce.

It feels strange for the first two occasions and then does not.

Written positions before discussion. Each person writes their view before anyone speaks.

This addresses the anchoring problem directly and surfaces disagreement that would otherwise be suppressed.

Speak in reverse seniority. The most junior person first, the most senior last.

Costless and it substantially changes what is said, because once the senior view is known the range of expressible opinion narrows.

State the decision and the owner before leaving. Out loud, in the room.

The number of meetings where this reveals genuine disagreement about what was just agreed is high, which is the argument for doing it.

Default to shorter. Work expands to the time allocated, and a thirty-minute version of most hour-long meetings covers the same ground.

The invitation question

Fewer people produce better discussion, and the relationship is fairly steep.

A useful test for each invitee: would the decision change if they were absent? If not, they can receive the notes.

The obstacle is political rather than practical, and the workable compromise is optional attendance with reliable notes — which requires the notes to be genuinely reliable, or people will attend defensively.

What should not be a meeting

Status updates that could be written, which is most of them.

Information transmission with no discussion.

Decisions with a clear owner who does not need input.

The counterweight, because the anti-meeting position overreaches: some things genuinely need synchronous discussion.

Complex disagreement, anything sensitive, early exploration of an ill-defined problem, and relationship-building all work considerably better in real time.

An organisation that has eliminated meetings entirely has usually pushed the same work into asynchronous channels that handle it worse.

The one to protect

Regular one-to-ones between a manager and each person, which consistently appear in engagement research as one of the higher-value uses of time.

These are the first thing cancelled when a calendar is full, and they should be the last.

The cost of cancelling is invisible and delayed, which is exactly why the decision is made repeatedly.

The realistic ambition

Most people cannot reform their organisation's meeting culture.

What is available: run your own well, decline where you reasonably can, and send notes with decisions and owners after every meeting you attend.

That last one is unilateral, takes five minutes, and does more than any amount of complaint about meeting culture.