Comments on: Meeting Dynamics

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Organizational Cognition || November || 2008

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 07:26:31 +0000

[...] Such conversations are where an organization’s thought processes are made visible (audible?). In other words, if an organization could be perceived as a group mind, then those conversations are the equivalent of watching the synapses between neurons firing. It’s the only way to get insight into how the group mind operates. This may sound a little wacky, but I’m inspired by Edwin Hutchins’s book Cognition in the Wild, where he extracts observations about cognition by watching how a group mind in the form of a navigation team operated. In the best case, meetings can be a reflection of this organizational cognition, an aspect which Peter mentioned in the comments of my meetings post. [...]

By: peter

peter — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:32:19 +0000

Meetings generally have a bad press, particularly from academics. But academics, as a rule, focus on knowledge and information (and discussions about knowledge and information) over actions. Planning and co-ordinating the actions of people requires interaction between the people involved. A key component of any action-planning task is understanding the consequences of possible alternative actions; because knowledge and experience is distributed in most organizations, learning these consequences requires consultation and socialization. These activities in turn are most efficiently done as F2F meetings. Few academics, even those in B-school, know anything about this, and almost nothing in their academic experience is relevant.

By: peter

peter — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 17:21:06 +0000

Well, aiming towards a typology of meetings, you could usefully start with a typology of dialogs. The taxonomy which has been most influential in Computer Science (for machine-to-machine interaction protocols) is that proposed by philosophers of argument Doug Walton and Erik Krabbe (in “Commitment in Dialog”, SUNY Press, 1995), which classifies human dialogs according to:
(a) what the participants know before the dialog starts, and
(b) what the respective goals of the participants are.

Information-seeking Dialogs is just one of the 6 types in the (incomplete) W&K typology. The others are Persuasion Dialogs (where one participant seeks to have others endorse some statement), Inquiry Dialogs (where no single participant knows the answer to some unknown question at the outset), Negotiation Dialogs (where participants aim to divide some scarce resource), Deliberation Dialogs (where participants seek to agree a course of action), and Eristic Dialogs (where participants give vent to emotions which may otherwise be expressed as violence). Subsequent research efforts by people in CS have identified a whole range of other dialogs, eg, examination dialogs, information-transfer dialogs, command dialogs, etc.

Most actual human dialogs are combinations of these atomic types, of course. I beliebe the same is true of meetings. Only rarely do corporate meetings have a single purpose, even when (maybe, especially when) they have a single stated purpose.

By: joe p

joe p — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 18:34:18 +0000

If you don’t attend meetings and get face time with influential executives, you will not go beyond where you are in your career.

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 17:53:29 +0000

Same goes for blog posts.

By: Beemer

Beemer — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:29:20 +0000

I think size of meeting is as important a factor as duration. Different types of meeting work better at different sizes, so it’s important to separate different goals into different meetings.

If the goal is to make a decision, you want to limit the attendees to the absolute minimum necessary. More people require longer to reach consensus and usually muddy the issues.

If you want to disseminate information, on the other hand, you want as large a meeting as possible to be sure the information spreads well. You can accomplish that with an email, but often these meeting aren’t just about transmitting data, but have a social function as well, like giving people a venue in which to have a reaction to the news.

The main purpose of a status report meeting isn’t sharing information, but synchronizing it, making sure that everyone’s on the same page and has a common understanding. I think that often they need to be face-to-face so that you have the high bandwidth necessary to find and correct misconceptions. We’ve been having very productive small (three person) sync meetings, but I think they can scale. The bigger they are, the more you need to have an agenda and a good leader.

In conclusion, we have both been totally spoiled and always will be by Haus meetings at TEP. Not that they were particularly efficient or anything, but social factors meant we had a really good set of systems for not having to deal with people’s egos, and that made them so much less painful than a lot of the meetings I’ve had to go to since those halcyon days of yore…