Why Meetings Fall Flat
If you’ve worked in the corporate world, you’ve likely experienced exactly why meetings fall flat in many ways. In fact, if you’re a developer it’s probably one of your greatest causes of job dissatisfaction if you work for a company that loves its meetings.
The average corporate meeting suffers from a number of pitfalls. It’s hardly controversial to say that most meetings in the corporate world are ineffectual and wasteful.
We’re long overdue for an Agile-like transformation in the world of meetings to an approach that values people’s time and takes full advantage of diverse perspectives.
“The Medium is the Message”
Philosopher and author Marshall McLuhan said it best, “The Medium is the Message.”
“It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message.” – Wikipedia
And so it is with meetings. People gather in the same room at the same time to share information and solve problems quickly. That’s how it’s supposed to work at least.
Now, the meetings mostly take place over a phone bridge as most teams are distributed. How else are you going to communicate when the project manager is in New York and the IT support team is in the Philippines and the product owner is in Texas?
The fundamental problem of most meetings is inherent in its medium, synchronous verbal communication. While this modality is certainly useful in some contexts, it’s deployed far too often than is warranted.
We have much better technological tools these days that can help us collaboratively solve problems more effectively through other means.
The Biggest Problems
The biggest problems of meetings are centered around synchronous communication and the combination of personalities on the call. Add in the ease in which meetings can be completely derailed and you have a recipe for futility.
Synchronous Communication
Real time conversation can be tremendously efficient. Meetings however, rarely achieve this in practice. As I’m sure you’ve all experienced, when more than two people enter a conversation the effectiveness of synchronous communication craters quickly. As the number of people in the conversation grows, so does the propensity of non-speakers to become passive observers.
There’s also the social pressure element to meetings that encourage sub-optimal responses. For instance, when asked a question in a meeting you will naturally feel pressured to answer on the spot. Especially if the question is something in your realm of expertise. If the answer doesn’t come to you immediately, you’re much more likely to give an approximate answer which likely won’t be fully thought through. This is just the way the human mind works.
In order to avoid the embarrassment of saying “I don’t know” in front of a group of our peers our minds tend to give us a “good-enough” answer to move the conversation in a different direction. Usually away from us or towards a topic where we have more conviction in our answers. The amygdala is a powerful force and even the most resolute of us have to deal with irrational fear responses.
In short, synchronous communication is especially vulnerable to generating emotional responses. Add in the notoriously poor fidelity of the average human memory and it’s hardly surprising that it often takes many meetings to solve even the simplest of problems.
Personalities
Why then don’t we just build a team full of people who work well together to solve this problem? To be sure, hiring a cohesive team will absolutely be a goal of any leader. Unfortunately this alone will not solve the major problems.
Even if we manage to assemble a team with highly cohesive personalities, it’s inevitable that we’ll need to work with others outside of this core group. This is another way of saying it’s not realistic to solve this problem on the front end by simply optimizing hiring for interpersonal compatibility.
We’re going to have to work with people whose personalities don’t mesh well. And so it’s much more effective to build a fault tolerant communication system than it is to psychoanalyze prospective hires.
Introverts and Extroverts
Unsurprisingly the software development world is full of introverts. And a telltale characteristic of many introverts is the preference to avoid confrontation.
Give an introvert a little time and a different medium however and you’ll certainly get a better response that fully answers a question and avoids acrimony. Removing the emotional response triggered by meetings is far more likely to lead to better outcomes.
Combining extroverts and introverts in a distributed synchronous verbal exchange usually doesn’t go well. The extroverts are highly likely to take over the meeting and leave no breathing room for others to interject.
When forced to rudely interrupt to get a word in edgewise, it quickly becomes a toxic environment. This toxicity serves to totally defeat the purpose of collectively gathering to solve problems in the first place.
While most extroverts do not intentionally try to take over exchanges, it’s just natural for them. Especially when paired with introverts who are not as comfortable thinking out loud in a group setting. The best leaders will recognize this and set up a system to seek input from both the introverts and extroverts on the team.
Derailed
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:
Today’s meeting is about adding a new feature to the app. It starts off well enough with discussion around the most important aspects of the feature.
Then the group “talker” chimes in and before you know it he’s left Feature World and starts giving a soliloquy on the original architect’s lack of foresight in designing some other unrelated part of the system.
He would have done it MUCH differently and as a result the app would be slightly easier to work on for the developers.
May I present Exhibit D in why meetings are vulnerable to futility. It only takes one such “talker” to completely derail any meeting.
In practice, you’re lucky if there’s only one of these in any meeting of more than 5 people. They may not all be quite so brazen, but having to perpetually nudge the conversation back on target is extremely tiresome and wasteful of everyone’s time.
It also takes an iron-willed leader of the meeting to do so and these can be hard to find. Few things cause meetings to fall flat quicker than dealing with a serial derailer.
Summary
There are many reasons why meetings fall flat in the corporate world. Meetings take place in a synchronous medium which has inherent drawbacks for yielding good decisions.
While not all contexts are inappropriate for the medium, meetings are too often utilized to decide things that would be better dealt with in a different format.
Meetings suffer from a myriad of deficiencies. The synchronous nature of meetings promotes emotional responses from participants.
Personality differences are also inevitable and can lead to poor decisions where an overconfident, yet incorrect, extrovert is more convincing than a docile, yet correct, introvert.
And finally, meetings are easily derailed as it only takes one person to dive into irrelevant minutiae and the usefulness of the meeting is hopelessly lost.