However, I agree with Tom. The purpose of a well structured meeting is to reach and formally document agreements (about states of affairs, about roles, about resources, about schedules of work). How we navigate those, and reach consensus, is another matter.

The worst meetings are the unstructured meandering chats in which the big egos and management wannabes hold court with absolute drivel, and nothing is documented or (it seems) decided.

today’s kicker was that it was a meeting trying to assign the same action item to the same person with the same people in attendance. Granted there were a few reasons why there have been multiple meetings in the first place, but the most annoying thing was that the guy who we were trying to get to take on the action item was totally unclear on the concept after two other meetings.

i hate meetings.

it sounds to me like maybe your meetings have a suboptimal objective.

i feel that the primary purpose of a meeting should not be to transfer information, at least not in the sense that you describe it, i.e. ‘speaker presents to audience’. the objectives of most business meetings (in my mind) should be:

1. to pass resolutions (i.e. to agree on things that need to be defined to allow progress)

2. to assign actions (i.e. to agree on who will do what)

in order to do that, information has to be transferred, for sure, but it should be in the form of questions and discussion, not presentation.

a prerequisite of this is that each attendee has the necessary information going into the meeting. the information therefore should be distributed well in advance, and read by all (and then each reader can progress through it in whatever style they prefer). this is, of course, Utopian. but therein lies the real problem. meetings get forced into being ‘information presentation’ because it’s the only time one has a (semi)attentive audience. shame really, otherwise meetings would be much nicer..

tom saffell