like Wagner operas, are meant to be long. The longer they are, the more important they seem. Which is why they go on and on. Think Italian roadworks. No ‘work’ is actually happening. They are a way of avoiding work. The whole idea is to drag things out as long as possible and then retire on a good pension before anyone notices.
Where did my day/week/year go?
Mushroom Meetings. They propagate in your diary like fungus on a rotten tree stump. Is it an airborne spore? Is it a virus? Who knows? But turn away and there they are when you open your Outlook in the morning. There are so many of them that there doesn’t seem to be any room for actual work. This is particularly true in business, where any and every issue needs to be marked by a meeting. It becomes an addiction. A variation of this phenomenon is the Stonehenge Meeting. Like the stones on Salisbury Plain, they have been there since the dawn of time but no-one really knows what they are for.
Is this work, or politics?
If you are wondering this, you are probably in what I call ‘The Party Political un-Broadcast’. These meetings are like those short promotional promos that are inserted into the TV schedule during election periods. With three important differences. These meetings are all about politics but have no warning sign at the start. They aren’t short. And very often the politics is not broadcast. On the contrary, it’s never mentioned. But everything in the meeting is actually about political leverage and personal power-play. Oh, and one important extra difference. You can’t vote these people out.
Is someone – anyone – ever going to make a decision?
Be very afraid. You are in what I call a DMZ. Like the demilitarised zone that separates North and South Korea, but far more scary. The Decision-Missing Zone. In a DMZ you’ll find yourself wondering – didn’t we decide this last week and why are we talking about it again? Or why is it that we decide things in meetings and then un-decide them outside the meetings?
What am I doing here?
Welcome to the disorientating and very common Lilliput Syndrome that kicks in when meetings just aren’t relevant to you. I named it after the scene in Gulliver’s Travels where the hero (in this case you) wakes up in an alien land. It’s full of little people, speaking a weird language. This world has nothing to do with you, but when you try to leave you discover you are tied down and unable to move. You’re a prisoner!
This syndrome is equally common when the meeting isn’t relevant to you and when you are not relevant to it!
If I covered myself in petrol and lit a match would anyone notice?
Ah, yes, Invisible Man syndrome. They don’t see you. And you cannot get your voice heard either. Partly because there’s no gap in the conversation. Beware, you may be stuck in a GabFest. These are particularly popular in organisations which confuse airtime with importance and complexity with cleverness.
Are you there? Can you hear me? Hello?
They discouraged you from travelling. They increased the workload. And then they proudly introduced you to an integrated, multi-nodal tele-presence system with lots of buttons and half a mile of cable sprouting from it. Now they expect you to do real business across time zones and languages with people you’ve never met. But you spend your time staring into a blank screen or listening to telephone hiss …
Did I drift off?
One client I worked with confided guiltily that he fell asleep in a meeting. I told him that was common and nothing to be ashamed of. ‘You don’t understand,’ he continued. ‘It was a one-to-one meeting. And I was leading it!’ You may not have actually bored yourself into a coma recently but, let’s face it, meetings can be exceptionally and unremittingly, unremarkably, unspeakably DULL.
You wouldn’t invite people to your house and bore them to death. This is partly because if your friends found you dull, they’d tell you. Or avoid you. For some reason, dullness is entirely accepted in business meetings. In some places it even passes for professionalism. It’s like a piece of spinach stuck in the front teeth of Enterprise that no-one’s talking about. John Cleese memorably pointed out that in business people tend to confuse sombre with serious – the more tedious you are, the more worthy of respect. It’s an old-fashioned idea. And from what I’ve seen even the most serious businesses have had enough. At an event I recently organised, we asked a leadership team to help a social eco-activist clear a children’s park of rocks. When I looked in on them mid morning they were happily tossing chunks of granite to each other with their bare hands. And singing! As the CFO confided to me later, ‘We’d rather be in a chain gang than in a meeting.’
My meetings are fine, but could they be amazing?
Well, hello there. If this is on your mind, you may be one of those rare people who don’t try to correct their lives, but just make them even better, more effective/engaging/value-creating. You’re not a Fixer but an Enhancer. Someone that goes to the doctor not because you are unfit, but because you want to be fitter. In a hypnosis course I once took, everyone (including me) had gone there to solve some life problem or other. All except one man. When the time came for him to state why he’d come, he blinked once or twice through his pebble glasses and asked the instructor, ‘Can you hypnotise me so that every time I see my wife I love her even more?’ This is an Enhancer’s answer.
If one or more of these situations seems familiar, I wrote this book for you.
You’ll learn (in section 1) that you are not alone. Millions of people are suffering, often in silence, as poor meetings – I call them ‘nearly meetings’ – compromise their working lives.
In section 2 we’ll flip the coin and see the value of really meeting. Equipping you to really meet is what this book is about. That includes helping you understand the Anatomy of Meetings and how to design them better (in section 3), the seven essential meeting types and how to have them (section 4), and then, in section 5, we’ll look at how you change meeting culture in your business and get the changes to stick without losing friends – or your job!
This is not a how to book in the normal sense. We already know how to meet. As you’ll see, it’s an inherent human skill. I like to think this is more of a how NOT TO book, reminding us to stop doing things which get in our way.
Like most smart working, better meetings are about doing less of what you know doesn’t work but keep doing anyway.
Ethan Hunt: This is going to be difficult.
Mission Commander Swanbeck: Mr Hunt, this isn’t mission difficult, it’s mission impossible. ‘Difficult’ should be a walk in the park for you.
Mission: Impossible II (2001)
I love those movie scenes where the unlikely hero, or even better a group of misfits, discover why they have been called to adventure and what their mission is. A chap from the ministry with a pipe points at a map or model explaining why this has never been attempted before. Or a shadowy spymaster describes a new target on grainy film as a cine projector whirs in the background.
I feel we are at that point as we gather for our adventure into, around, over and under the Weird World of Meetings.
Here is a bit of a preview of what awaits us, how to prepare and what essentials to pack.
It’s a Jungle Out There, So Stay Alert
There are lots of books on meetings which are duller than the meetings they are trying to improve. I have no intention of adding to that list.
It
