taking out a contract on me. He has a great example of a client that has become exquisitely efficient and wildly ineffective at the same time. It’s all to do with paper. The client generates hundreds of thousands of sheets of contracts and agreements at each of their branches every week. The company has had to become supremely talented at moving all this paper around as well as storing and retrieving it. They have invested in ergonomically designed paper-carrying equipment (I think this means strong suitcases), transport systems and document logging. They were thrilled with themselves until Ron asked the unasked question: ‘Why do you need all this paper?’ They were ready for this. ‘Because the regulator requires that we get our customers’ signature.’ Ron pressed on: ‘Yes, but why does that signature have to be on paper?’ he asked, no doubt making a lifelong enemy of the Logistics Director. In this digital age there are many legally acceptable forms of signature, of which a mark on paper is only one. There’s a tick on a form, a digitally scanned signature, a thumbprint, even the iris in your eye. Ron’s point was that while the paper is being dealt with efficiently, the more effective course of action would be to invest a tiny fraction of the time, energy and money into talking with the regulator and finding a paperless solution. Efficient, yes. Effective, no!
I have seen efficient meetings – meticulously planned, immaculately laid out and run perfectly to time – that had no positive effect whatever. (We’ll look a little later in the book at how to redesign meetings so that they are both.) These are classic ‘nearly meetings’. And they are going to be happening all over the world today and every day. The people are present, or appear to be; the room or the call/video conference suite is booked, the agenda prepared, and yet no connection in a true sense actually happens.
We nearly meet because … we forget there’s an alternative
Finally, the most pervasive reason of all, we nearly meet so much because we don’t realise, remember or believe we can really meet.
I am reminded of a leadership programme we were involved in delivering to the top echelons of a major European financial services company. It was held in a spectacular castle on the outskirts of Paris. At the end of our three days together the participants were talking about what they had got out of the experience. One man was asked what he had learned. I knew that this self-confessed ‘numbers guy’ was earmarked for great things, but he looked terribly awkward as he said his piece.
‘Every Monday I have a meeting with the people who report to me and I usually just like to get on with it. I don’t see any need to talk to them about themselves, how they are or what they’re up to. I am a doer and I see this kind of thing as a waste of time. What I didn’t realise until now, though, was that there was a real person sitting opposite me.’
He then sat down, looking somewhat apologetic and puzzled by an insight that was at once so mundane and yet so far-reaching – not just for his career but beyond.
I think this client spoke for all of us who crash through the day, intent on getting things done, and forgetting to connect with the people around us. We forget they are people, not just ‘functions’.
It’s because of stories like this that I’ve become curious about meetings. We go into meetings disconnected not only from others but also from our own thoughts, feelings, bodies and our true nature.
Realising that nearly meeting is mostly what you are doing is a great first step to start really meeting.
The True Cost of Nearly Meeting
Nearly meeting is exacting a huge cost not just on us and our businesses but on our planet.
Great meetings can save the world. Bad ones can really harm it. I can think of no better opportunity of a world-sized missed opportunity than the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard from friends who were that it was a fiasco. A nearly meeting on an epic scale. With epic consequences.
The problems started even before you got into the conference venue. Thanks to inadequate – or wilfully negligent – planning, entry queues stretched for hundreds of yards and required ticket holders to stand in the open air, sometimes for several hours, in polar conditions, without the comfort of heating, refreshments or even a coffee. Coffee sellers wanted to set up concessions but were not allowed to. It was as though the Danes, normally quite welcoming folk, wanted to discourage people from attending.
There wasn’t even a fast-track entrance for VIPs. Ashok Khosla, Chairman of the New Delhi-based social enterprise, Development Alternatives, who is also the current President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found himself grid-locked in a non-moving mass of humanity and was clearly about to miss his speaking slot. If you know sustainable development, you know of Ashok. He’s been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as ‘a legend in the realm of sustainable development, and an individual who personifies the hopes and dreams of billions trapped in the indignity of acute deprivation.’ This didn’t impress the slab-faced security guards. He only managed to queue-hop by distracting one of them by making a comment on her guard-dog’s condition.
Once inside (and many people gave up before they ever managed to enter), the problems were worse. The unlovely venue, wonderfully misnamed as the Bella Centre, seemed custom-designed to make you lose your way – a maze of small committee rooms and misleading signs.
There is a well-known YouTube film of the then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, sweeping confidently into what he thinks is a meeting room only to find himself in a cupboard. President Obama likewise had to go on a peek-a-boo treasure hunt through the corridors to find that his meeting with the Chinese delegation was already underway without him.
The Chinese premier was in the building (like Elvis) but famously refused to meet his US counterpart face to face. Brinksmanship? Diplomatic theatre? Or an unwillingness to have a real meeting?
Guardian journalist Mark Lynas was in no doubt: ‘The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.’
This was pure power politics – nearly meeting at its most blatant. Clearly at a meeting like this, each nation will have its own agenda to pursue. In some cases, minimising perceived threats to their economic growth; in others, like the Maldives, literally keeping their heads above rising seawater.
This need not have been a problem, had the participants really wanted to use this meeting to make the world a cleaner and safer place. But they did not. China and others clearly had no intention of playing anything but their own game. And as we are going to see a little later, intention is all.
The power plays of Copenhagen set the precedent for COP 17 in Durban in 2011, where we were treated to the unedifying sight of Saudi Arabia’s oil sheikhs holding the meeting – and the world – to ransom by insisting that they be compensated for losses they would suffer if the world stopped burning fossil fuels. As the Economist reported:
Most of the scores of diplomats present were appalled. Not least those from small island nations, like Kiribati and Tuvalu, which are likely to disappear beneath the rising seas long before the Saudis have drained their last well. But it mattered naught … After a fraught few hours of bickering, the Saudis got their wretched commitment.
That’s nearly meeting. In place of collaboration there is bargaining. An opportunity for joint action descends into a clash of competing ideologies. I was in a meeting recently where Trevor Manuel,
