Only a select few have been lucky enough to avoid a bad meeting. You listen, fade, fidget, shift in your chair, look at your watch, out the window, you click off all the other things that you could be doing. You listen, fidget, shift in your chair…. The meeting became and remains the tool for that collaboration whether occurring over the phone, via Skype, teleconference, or in the same room. 

The meeting as a social phenomenon and trend occurs more often than ever. Furthermore, whether your employer or your company is an economic behemoth, a sole proprietorship, a nonprofit, or a government agency, you still need collaborate with people around you. And you probably do this by meeting with other people.

Once you enter the meeting space with another person, you cede a certain portion of your independence to the larger group in an interesting social contract. For this consideration, your organization should accumulate greater benefits for the time spent together than it would were any of the meeting participants spend the time alone. (That is the justification at least, though I wonder how often a meeting is viewed this way.)

In effect as a meeting participant, you and your fellow participants jointly become an entirely new and separate social entity. This is different from what happens with a friend or a spouse in only one respect: different motivations underlie your necessity to effectively collaborate. With a spouse, it is hopefully love and fulfillment; with friends, hopefully pleasure, leisure, or some form of enlightenment or social gratification. With co-workers, it is usually economic survival, coercion, or another form of compulsion. (One should consider whether he or she attends meetings by choice—I always need a better reason than desire.) Thus is formed the meeting-self (thanks JJR); born of necessity and the motivations which underlie its behavior depart from the more enjoyable forms of individual self-cession to a social end.

It’s fascinating that means of communication have increased dramatically but we remain with traditional and perhaps even archaic modes of personal interaction and collaboration. (For example, whether we conduct a meeting with an iPad or a PowerPoint presentation, we are still doing the same basic things that participants in a medieval guild meeting would have done (less perhaps the sudden strike by the hilt of your sword to the Hansea-Viking on your left). Usually that function is some form of advisory or deliberative process that requires the input of at least a few individuals. Our means of meeting (the tools at our disposal to conduct them) have advanced exponentially but our modes of meeting (the basic manner of conducting meetings and their results) have remained tragically static.

I have seen leaders of all stripes and sectors spend nearly every waking moment keeping current on all the new “business” books. However, they are missing the forest for the trees: without optimal meetings and actionable results of those meetings, the organizations that these leaders command and the individuals therein will only reach their potential by luck or chance. Without effective modes of meeting, visions cannot be communicated; strategic plans cannot be formulated; tasks cannot be allocated; and follow through cannot be ensured.

How do we effectively operate in our meeting mode? How do we communicate so that we all understand each other? How do we make decisions collectively? What tools do we use? And my favorite: why do we meet in the first place?

These are some of the questions that I’ll explore in the subsequent posts. I hope you’ll join the conversation.