Let me preface this essay by saying that I’m not anti-meeting. I’m against wasting time in meetings. A good meeting is great, but good meetings in the wild are as rare as agile done right.

Why Meetings are Broken

No agenda

No agenda at all is a pretty obvious way a meeting can be broken, but the no agenda meeting can take other forms. A common form I have seen is a standing meeting for a given topic, say Project X. People feel like the meeting has an agenda (“hey, it’s about Project X”), but that’s not an agenda. What if there is nothing to discuss on Project X, then what? How would that be discovered prior to the meeting?

Off Topic

Even with an agenda, many times meetings simply veer off topic. People in the meeting use the time to discuss other things that is on the top of their current list. Effectively, they bring their disorganization into the meeting and spread it to every other person in attendance.

Time Box?

Time boxing can take a couple forms. There is time boxing the entire meeting and also time boxing each agenda item in the meeting. Ideally time boxing should not be needed. If a meeting is called to make a decision, the meeting should only end when the decision is made. But, time boxing is often used as a way to maintain urgency and keep the meeting from veering off topic.

Synchronous

Meetings are by nature synchronous. Every person in the meeting has to be part of that meeting at that moment regardless of what else they could be working on instead. Discussions in a meeting are also in real time. This leads to the topic presenter having an advantage over the other participants during the discussion because the presenter has given more thought to the topic. The other participants then either have to think quickly or can only really offer gut reactions to the topic.

Late!

Another obvious one is when people are late. First there is the cost of the meeting itself, but then delaying the meeting even further quickly puts the company in the hole. Five programmers at a fairly low salary can cost the company $40+ for every 10 minutes they are waiting around.

Lack of Documentation

This is a big one for me. I take notes in and after the meeting as a way to make sure what was discussed and decided is what happened. Even then, there can still be miscommunication about what was decided by who and why.

Lack of Intellectual Rigor

Talk is cheap. It is almost too easy to say something without thinking it through in a meeting. Now, I’m not talking about brain storming sessions to figure something out, but the typical meeting to discuss some agenda item. Writing forces a higher level of intellectual rigor that speaking does not.

How to Fix the Meeting

Nothing I’ve stated above is novel, yet companies still continue to have completely wasted meetings. I’m using this series of posts as a way to put some coherence to my thoughts, and will address how to fix meetings in a future post.