Effective Meetings

Every now and then, one hears of ways to make meetings effective. Most of the time, it is question of agenda, schedules, minutes, action points, and various kinds of control. Restrictions.

On an other hand, there are various kinds of meetings: presentations, brainstorming, formal meetings (like the infamous Change Control Board), informal ones, short, around coffee.

Isn't that paradoxical? What's the problem with meetings? Or isn't it that effective meetings are a myth, and that meetings are just overrated and display a lack of faith in SCM and in what tools may provide?

Meetings are inherently:

• synchronous, i.e. force everybody to submit to the same timing and order; effectively forcing to wait
  • until the meeting takes place
  • until you get your turn to speak
  • until it's over, to return to your real work, your tools, with which you can access real information and make suitable tests to check that you understood what was said, and that you agree with it
  • until the verbose idiot currently speaking has stopped with his irrelevant (to you) bullshit.
• private. There are only the people who were invited, and could come. For the others, you'll have to call another meeting, and to repeat what was said, hoping that nothing new comes in then, or in between.
• volatile. Whatever minutes are taken, the minutes are not the communications itself, but only a report of it. Paradoxically what was said and felt by some, will stay, and cannot be fixed, for lack of a shared, objective, representation. It cannot be managed. Any slides or similar material, are optimized for presentation purposes, bringing concerns remote to the information itself.
• discontinuous. Before the meeting is not the meeting, and afterthoughts will come too late. Thoughts from others cannot be merged in. Further treatment will have to build on representations disjoint from those that were part of the meeting.

So, what's an effective meeting?

First it's a humble meeting, one which doesn't pretend to what it cannot deliver. An effective meeting is one which builds on social aspects, on growing faith between the members of a team, which may be useful for work, later, elsewhere. It doesn't hide its being inherently expensive (be it face-to-face or on the phone).

So instead of coffee, order Champagne.

-- MarcGirod - 01 Jun 2008