I Only Hate BAD Meetings

About two hours into a team meeting, the other manager in the room said, "this room is starting to smell.  Maybe we should take a break?" 

He was right.  Still, nobody moved. (About 20 minutes later we did break, briefly, before resuming for a third hour.)

It's fashionable to complain about meetings as time-wasters, and "the tyranny of meetings" is something of a buzzword. But I've been in some fabulous meetings: I only hate the bad ones.  Anti-meeting hype generally says, in the fine print, that the author is talking about useless meetings... and of course useless things are bad. But how do you recognize a useless one before calling for it?

I see two ways to think about whether a meeting is the right tool. The first is about what the goal is; the second is about the mechanism. Let's address the second first: there are three things that meetings have that other formats simply do not:

1. Meetings are synchronous. On the down side, that means they interrupt everyone's precious personal calendars, yes. On the plus side, it means you actually get the job of the meeting done with timely efficiency. You have to decide which of the two to prioritize.
2. Meetings are single-threaded. There's only one active topic at a time, and everyone is involved in it. This makes it easier to concentrate participants' attention, and easier to focus that attention on the important thing. It also means everyone can participate and not miss the one sub-thread or side-channel.
3. (Good) meetings build community, which builds efficiency. With the rise of remote work, the few minutes before a call-to-order (or, in person, the chatter while going to the meeting) are when people get to know each other, which helps them work together.  Just limit it to a few minutes before the meeting!

That leaves the goal of the meeting. Clearly, if a meeting doesn't have a goal, it shouldn't happen. But less often discussed, if a meeting does have a goal, that implies a specific output, which requires certain inputs and participants to achieve that output. Even with a wonderful goal, you shouldn't have the meeting without first identifying and having those requirements.

A framework I've developed (but still work in progress, and only loosely held!) separates meetings into three types, with distinct inputs and guidance on participation. That's useful on its own, but it's also a framework for discussion---my boss and I disagreed, for example, on whether a postmortem is an "update" meeting (focused on disseminating what happened) or a "decision" meeting (focused on identifying remedial steps to implement); it could be both, but the framework gives us a way to focus that conversation.

My three types are:

• Updates usually want broad participation and prepared presentations (slides not required; "I know what to demo" and "I know what to call out for standup" are preparation!) and simply aim to share context. The big all-hands updates are often my least favorite, but if you don't have any, things do go sideways... so the usual question here is how few updates you need. The answer isn't zero.
• Decisions are the middle ground in participation. The result is in a clearly documented and justified choice, so you need to understand the choice to be made in order to know who needs to be involved and what information they need. One of the inputs is the framework for the decision, so if your org loves SPADE or RAPID some other acronym, that's an input too.
• Collaboration meetings are generally fully-crossed communication, O(n^2), so for that meeting you want to minimize the number of participants. The inputs are the participants (and their expertise), so the only added input is something like a problem description; the output is a work product such as a design or strategy for that problem.

The overall point is that yes, bad meetings waste time that could be productively used---but the same is true of a lack of good meetings. Whenever I am formally put in charge of a team I do review the meeting calendars for waste, but the spin isn't "meetings are bad," it is "what is this meeting trying to do?" It might be there is no goal or the goal is met in other ways; kill that.  Or it might be that the goal is solid but the meeting doesn't deliver on it, and needs some revision.  Or, of course, it might be the right thing for the right job. Meetings aren't bad; bad meetings are bad.