genuine and fake—is about the quality of the lives we want to lead.
They say the quality of your life reflects what you are prepared to tolerate. If you can put up with lousy, endless meetings then you are certain to get more of them. I recommend clients become intolerant of “nearly meeting.” Allergies are trendy these days. Everyone has one. So why not become allergic, as an entire organization, to junk meetings? The thing about allergies (to gluten, peanuts, the fabric inside airline pillows) is that your body will let you know—in no uncertain terms—when any of that unhealthy stuff comes near. If we sneezed or broke out in a rash when someone suggested “nearly” meeting, we’d quickly train ourselves to seek out “really meeting” instead.
When McDonalds caused uproar by moving into the southern Italian town of Altamura in Apulia in 2001, local baker Luigi Digesu decided to take a stand. Five years later the juggernaut food chain admitted defeat and withdrew. They weren’t beaten back by protest, but by quality. Luigi had not set out to force McDonald’s to close down in any “bellicose spirit.” He had merely offered the 65,000 residents tasty panini filled with local ingredients like mortadella, mozzarella, basil, and chopped tomatoes, which they had overwhelmingly preferred to hamburgers and chicken nuggets. “It is a question of free choice,” concluded the baker.
When you try to change meetings in your company you may well face the same sort of arguments that Luigi and his slow-food companions faced. “Poor quality is cheaper” … “It’s not ideal but it’ll do” … “There isn’t enough quality to go around” … “We’re too busy to make the change” … “A whole industry is set up for low quality, high volume. High quality would be nice, but it’s not practical.”
The answer, as it was for Luigi, is to make your meetings so mouthwatering and wholesome that those unhealthy nearly meetings don’t stand a chance.
And how do you create meetings “to die for,” not die from? Read on!
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Silver Blaze
This section is about giving you a map of what’s really happening in meetings, not just on the surface but behind the scenes and beneath the waterline. With this insider knowledge of meetings you can design them better, and next time things start going awry you’ll know where the problem is and how to fix it.
Fix is probably the wrong word, by the way. If this laptop goes wrong I can fix it. Actually Carlo or Guy can fix it—I can just curse at it. You can fix objects, but people aren’t objects. They are complex living organisms. And when they get together in meetings, things get even more complex.
Some aspects of meetings are clear to see and hear. Others are invisible and have to be sensed. To really understand meetings you need to keep track not only of what is happening but also, like Sherlock Holmes noting the dog that didn’t bark, what isn’t happening and should be.
Meetings don’t come with a manual and can’t be “fixed” like a leaking pipe or wobbly shelf. I mention this because, in these mechanistic times, we tend to forget.
It’s a material world we live in, particularly the business world. Just look at the language businesses use to flat-pack lots of messy human stuff into neat-sounding concepts like “process” and “mechanism,” “resource” and “management.” It’s like linguistic IKEA. When we tidy up our language the world seems so much more more ordered and easy to handle.
Businesses also like to make uncomfortably invisible things reassuringly physical. So, organizations are described as if they were solid objects, with a top and a bottom, breadth and depth. There’s a back office and a front line, internal zones and external ones. There’s even a temperature gauge, with burning platforms and perma-frost. Metaphors are very useful. They help us make the abstract more real or “put a tea-cup handle on a cloud,” as someone deliciously described them. Using this metaphorical language about business can be very helpful provided we remember that organizations are not machines, people are not resources, and meetings, unlike wobbly shelves, cannot be fixed with a tool.
If you are a tool-lover, I offer these two pieces of advice.
Giving people a tool is no guarantee they’ll use it.
I know businesses that have more tools than a giant hardware store but where no one ever picks them up.
Don’t give people a more powerful tool than they can handle. They could take their leg off.
I am thinking, for example, of the people I have seen who have just discovered MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—a psychometric test) or some other personality typing “toolkit.” Like any born-again convert they’ll stop you in the corridor with that faraway look to ask if you are “a T or a J, a Red or a Yellow, a Summer or a Winter.” I did once know a performance coach who became a little zealous about “appreciative enquiry.” When his wife phoned from a distant airport to say she had missed her plane and was stranded there with their one-year-old daughter, his reaction was to ask, “And what do you learn from that?” Like I said, you could lose a leg. Or worse.
When I tried to buy a chainsaw from my local Italian hardware store, the owner looked me carefully up and down. Clearly English. Clearly no idea about the havoc a “moto-sega” can inflict. He thrust some chain-mail reinforced trousers across the counter and made it clear he wouldn’t sell me a power tool without the power protection. It was a case of “No chain-mail? No chainsaw.”
So, people are not objects. And meetings are not collections of objects. Which is why I want you to start thinking of meetings not as things at all but as living beings. Clients often find that a strange idea at first—especially given how inert many of their meetings are. But it’s a powerful one.
When we think of a meeting as “alive”:
• we’re less surprised by its complexity
• we start looking at it more holistically
• we’re more respectful of it—it’s not a disposable commodity
• we notice it repays our efforts when we take care of its vitality, rather than purely its efficiency
• we realize that shutting it in an airless, windowless concrete box in a hotel basement, sorry Business Suite, may not be the best idea
• we know it will have its good and bad days, just like us
Treat it as another metaphor if you like. For me, after many years of doing this work, it’s a reality. If I am observing a six-person meeting I’ll see seven actual participants: the six people present plus the meeting itself.
If something goes wrong, I ask people not to blame each other, but to look up and pay attention to what the meeting needs. Is it getting over-heated or over-pressured? Is the meeting running
