Meeting madness
Some years ago I learned about techniques to have more effective meetings, is not a secret that, globally, millions are down the sink every year just because uneffective and useless meetings. There’s one technique, that is quite known in the agile world called “the facilitation loop”, that consists in three main steps, preparations, do the work and follow up, some people consider it has two more steps, opening and closing the session, but it doesn’t really matter for us at the moment.
I always hated meetings, the most of them are quite irrelevant and a waste of time, and this kind of techniques and theories won’t help you to fix the problems but will make you understand why your meetings will be useless anyway, because the problem, as always, it’s not the theory, it’s the people applying it, in case they want to apply something, of course. Meetings are a very nice display of human miseries, and if you understand why this happens and try to be out of the game, you can definitely start to enjoy them. Let me try to enlight you a bit on what should happen in the meetings, but won’t ever happen, and why.
The “facilitation loop” is a very simple way to understand how you should proceed when you schedule a meeting, first step, “preparations”, makes sense, don’t?, well, it seems not, many, and when I say many, I mean really a lot of people schedule meetings without assess if it’s really necessary to have one, maybe you only need to send a mail to have a yes/no from a couple of people, and if the replies you get are not clear, then it’s time to think to plan the meeting.
From here, we go to another very common pitfall when creating a meeting, not giving an explanation about what the meeting is about, we all have received this kind meetings with subject “project goals”, and that’s all, what we are going to do? do we want to see a set of already decided goals? do I have to propose goals, we are going to do a super productive brainstorm to build a list of sensible goals and targets? Depending on an accurate description on the meeting’s target, or a small agenda about what we are going to talk there, we can save a lot of time, and therefore, money, and start the meeting in a smooth way.
We only analysed the “preparations” step, and we can see already two of the most usual human “features”, lack of common sense and laziness. I admit it, I see myself reflected there, I have created tons of crappy meeting invitations, but, since somebody explained me how to do it better, then, I try to do it better, for me make sense, but it seems not for everybody… I’m checkin my agenda right now, and I can see one meeting where the subject is directly the link for a Jira ticket, of course, don’t expect any further information or description. Please, don’t ever disrespect the ability of the people when it comes to do things in the wrong way.
Now is turn for the second step, and the most juicy one, “do the work”, easy to say, difficult to do. Obviusly this is the most interesting and complex step, actually is divided in some of substeps, or better said, stages where the meeting should go through, supposedly… this stages are “new topic, business as usual”, “divergent zone”, “groan zone”, “convergent zone”, “closure zone”, you can check this image (sorry for the poor quality):
We don’t have to be smartest guys to clearly see that the divergent zone passes so fast that is almost skipped in many meetings, or to see that the convergent zone is basically an utopia, an unicorn. First, we are dragging the problems of the first step, bad preparation, what will make start the meeting with people asking too much things, and even the wrong things, probably making the host upset (and awkward too) and taking the meeting directly to the groan zone.
The groan zone is where the magic happens, it’s so magical that the people refuses to abandon it. It’s where the people shows all their real capabilities, like giving non meditated ideas, asking the wrong questions, interrupting others constantly, trying to adapt the targets to themselves… Eventually, whatever that means to get an agreement, it’s discarded, because team targets are not really important, what’s really important is to look like you understand, you look collaborative and you are right.
This is mainly promoted by bad management, and a concept I already wrote about, the open communication. This is used from bad management to cover their lack of vision an ideas, and let the people talk, so they can appropiate the best ideas and take the credit. This creates an environment where everybody feels forced to participate, because we all have an opinion, and in an open culture, all the opinions are valuable (this is bullshit, of course)
When people has no valuable opinion to give, maybe because the best idea is already on the table and you only need to say “I agree on that”, maybe because you don’t totally understand the subject and prefer to be cautious to not make more noise, or directly, you have been invited to the wrong meeting (what’s another collateral damage of the open communication, end up in ALL the meetings), but they feel forced to speak, usually this derivates in mental diarrheas, ideas made up in that very moment, just something you have to say quick to look like you are particinpating, making the meetings very hard to control.
If at some point we reach the convergent zone it’s because a manager already took a decission and decides to go for the less improvisated idea, or the one suits him the best and says “enough!”, some people call this dictatorship, I prefer to call it leadership. It would be clearly better if the management can have their own ideas, present the way to go, and the rest just follow them, but maybe this would not work either, because the monster created by managers themselves through the open communication, people get’s used to give useles opinions, people like the feeling of their ideas being valued by the management etc., etc., but it’s a lie, nobody cares about you, except if one day you have a good idea, so they can stole it.
So this is how we reach the closure zone, after a long groan zone suddendly ended up by a manager when he already got what he wanted. On this “do the work” is where see more of those human “features” emerging, insane competitivity to shine, fear for not looking useful and ending up doing the opposite, bad management, lack of ideas and direction, anger, stress, as I said before, is pure magic. And I’m not going to say I wasn’t ever part of this problems on meetings, but again, I tried to fix it, I don’t play the open communication game, I only give opinion after a self assessment of what I’m going to say is going to add some value, I don’t have fear of looking like not participative or collaborative, I try to not add more noise, confussion and fight to the meetings, especially those ones with 20 people in a room and another 20 on call, is not difficult, choose your battles carefuly and you will be contributing to have healthy meetings.
And to end the analysis of the “facilitation loop”, we have the follow up. In the practice this step doesn’t exist, mostly is groan zone part II, groan zone part III, groan zone the nerd empire strikes back… or if some leadership appears and the management takes a decission, theres no more follow up, decission is taken, do it, don’t make me waste my time any more with this, please. And at this point the human behaviour is totally disclosed, so there’s not too much to comment on human “features”.
My tip here is to identify the patterns in your meetings, identify the people’s behaviour and classify them, to know better how you can defend yourself of further attacks, enjoy seeing the knifes flying, in summary, it’s a big show, and we don’t know yet how to enjoy it.
