Meetings: Are There Alternatives?

Before deciding who to invite to your next meeting, ask yourself whether you can avoid holding it in the first place. A radical proposal, but only if you accept the current orthodoxy that meetings are an essential, most are dispensable. There is credible evidence to suggest that communication and follow-up actually improve without meetings. Put another way, meetings are often counterproductive. Why is that? To start with, so rarely is staff sincerely asked for a real contribution to a meeting that they have stopped giving any meaningful input into it. Even worse is the tendency to acquiesce in whatever idea appears to have been adopted by others.

This is the origin of so-called “group think”; ideas that are not privately supported by an individual presents, but they take on a life of their own as the apparent will of the group. For instance, everyone in the room is skeptical about a new training proposal but no one has the courage to challenge it. But are there alternatives to meetings, and would they work any better?

Yes and yes, according to Stop the Meeting, I Want to Get Off, by Scott Snair. Like several other experts on group dynamics, Snair argues that one-on-one conversations are more efficient. How could it be faster to talk to 10 people in succession than to talk to 10 people at the same time? Meeting with 10 people at once is likely to be largely ineffective for the reasons discussed earlier, whereas shorter conversations with each of the 10 people will achieve higher levels of communication. The one-on-ones are therefore more “efficient” than the meeting with 10 people. And why are one-on-ones more efficient? When someone speaks with you personally, you listen. You don’t tend to drift mentally, because you assume that the information is tailored to your needs. And, by default, you are also being made individually accountable. The other reason has to do with the listener’s contribution to the conversation.

The first point about their contribution is that they have to make one. If asked a question the listener has to engage with it mentally (by thinking) and physically (by articulating their thoughts). Contrast this with the typical meeting. If asked a question, each member of the group of 10 can remain silent without an obvious breach of social etiquette. Also, in a one-hour meeting involving 10 people, only around 10 minutes is directly relevant to each person present. The person calling the meeting may like to think that everyone present should know everything being discussed, instead of giving each person only the information that is narrowly relevant to their personal role. After all, a general awareness of what others are doing would certainly be helpful, wouldn’t it? But that’s not how our brains function. We all specialize all of the time; that is, we constantly filter out the 99 per cent of information that we don’t really need to know. Ironically, this is one of the reasons meeting are called so often.

There’s a final challenge: if we are going to consult with staff individually, or perhaps in terms, how do we make there one-on-ones effective? First, before meeting with someone, decide what issues need to be discussed, and precisely what feedback or commitments need to be made. Second, send the person a short note before the conversation outlining its purpose, the issues to be discussed and the documents that need to be brought. Third, keep each meeting short. Doing so consistently shows that your consultations are efficient. And, in your one-on-ones, quickness, focus and efficient has an incidental benefit, as others will start to be focused and efficient when they approach and consult you.