How to Fix Meetings

The impulse to have a meeting arises because something important is at stake, and there's enough ambiguity or complexity that you don't want to decide now. So you say it: "Let's have a meeting about it."

There's next to no cost for that phrase in the moment, and it provides two benefits: 1) it gets you out of making a high-stakes call now when you don't feel ready, and 2) having a meeting feels like "not a bad thing" to do, or maybe even "a really good thing to do".

This combination (getting out of jail with a high-stakes call plus meetings feel smart) turns meetings into an automatic reflex and relief valve. Meetings will be generated in the face of any pretext.

And meetings have even more problems.

In a meeting, ideas circulate, plans are discussed, actions are set, maybe even expected outcomes and milestones. At the very least, analysis occurs. After the fact, it's difficult to feel like any of that was a bad idea. Everyone will feel productive.

And everyone will feel better having vetted their ideas and decisions in front of each other. The meeting is a check swing. Check swings become addictive.

All of this means your leaders and team members will have less and less bias for action and more and more bias for meetings where they can vet their actions first.

This is not to say vetting actions is bad. This is to say it can become a security blanket that outgrows its place.

Why does this matter? Because meetings are expensive. Not just in terms of the hourly cost multiplied by every person and position in the room, but the opportunity cost of what that many independent actors could be doing were they taking independent action toward the outcomes they own.

So, bad meetings are bad because they take up space and act as a relief valve and substitute for action. The actual products from bad meetings are delay for the sake of needlessly vetting what doesn't need to be vetted. It's a security blanket payoff.

So what does a good meeting produce? I think a leader would describe the desired outcome as traction. Traction means a high rate of correlation between the content of meetings (things discussed in meetings) and new types of action taken.

The solution is a defined high bar for why meetings occur, and what qualifies as content for a meeting.

Start with simple criteria and a high bar, and then adapt as your team and organization require. Here are three good starting points. A meeting can only occur if #1 is true, and either or both #2 and #3 also apply.

1. Every meeting should have a stated relationship to some aspect of the strategic plan, and that meeting should begin by stating the relationship between that meeting and the strategic plan.
2. Decisions that need to be made and can't be made without the full participation of everyone in the room.
3. Information that pertains to everyone in the room, and can't be shared effectively in any other format.

Then, some additional guidelines can help:

1. No descriptive content: As in, no activity updates, no descriptions of efforts or actions, no descriptive content that isn't strictly necessary context to understand a problem to be solved. Descriptive material destroys meetings because the storyteller (the one doing the describing) can keep adding "yeah buts" after each proposed solution until everyone is exhausted. And long stories about efforts tried and activity taken are really a play for standing: "Look at how hard I've worked!" Zero value. Interrupt the activity story immediately with the question, "What problem do we need to solve and what's your proposed solution?" No proposed solution, no talk time. That's guideline 3 below.
2. Minimal context: State as little context as you think you can get away with, and let the meeting ask for more if required. You can start coaching the team in this direction by saying, "Give us the minimum context we need to make a decision." Why? Context takes up time, and it smuggles the presenter's assumptions and problems into the solution environment.
3. Zero problems without proposed solution: Every aspect of the meeting must be an attempt to solve a problem worth solving, and worth solving now at the expense of any other problem the meeting could solve. Even critical information sharing is attempting to solve future problems driven by lack of coordination. Presenters and attendees should be able to state the problem they're trying to solve, and why that problem is worth solving now.
4. 1 of 3 Outcomes: No agenda items close with "let's come back to this later". I modified this from an approach Jack Welch used for his "Work-Out" sessions. Only three decisions can be taken at the end of an item: 1) Decide now, 2) Table forever, or 3) Someone in the room commits resources to advance some aspect of how the problem is understood or a solution under consideration and pre-commits to a date and time to report back. As a leader, you can get used to saying, "Decide now, table forever, or who's going to commit resources to advance our understanding?"

Meetings become an easy escape reflex because it's always more uncomfortable to take action now. You want your team to have a bias for action, not meetings. Raising the bar on what meetings are for, what's discussed in them, and what's expected from them can correct the "let's have a meeting" default.

Meetings will move from being the problem to being a tool for solutions.

Target a meeting in your organization, decide which criteria or guideline above could most improve it, and start that meeting by talking to your team about the change.

Best,

C

Running this kind of analysis is harder alone. I work with groups of 7 to 12 CEOs, founders and owners who do it together. Let's book a 30-minute conversation: https://calendar.app.google/oggFtXP2xHFxDzZW9