The Meeting. It’s the most profound organizational expression of humanity’s ultimate interest in all innovation: laziness. Hard work pays off in future; laziness pays off now. Poorly organized and conducted meetings are the easiest way for our brains to get lazy.

The Meeting. It’s the weakest link in the chain gang of organizational performance. We don’t know why we are having most meetings. We are having meetings to organize the meetings. We run from place to place to make the meetings. The direction becomes circular, like a hamster wheel. Always going around but never getting anywhere. Feeling busy but knowing we are over-worked doing nothing 90% of the time. Organizational self-serving purpose eating itself for lunch.

The Meeting. It weaves all of us together in ways that make us hate ourselves and each other after – like we have laid our ambition to waste as we ate the entire tub of ice cream in the freezer watching Friends reruns all night. They clog our days and filter the rays of the way we think about life itself…how The Meeting(s):

• Force your pre-selection of your falling-asleep-in-meeting excuse: “they told me at the blood bank this might happen.”
• Makes you want to go the extra mile at work, but your boss always finds you and brings you back.
• Has an outcome that feels like a statement of the obvious, as wasteful as emailing all your co-workers to tell them that if anyone needs you, you will be in the bathroom.
• Leads you to do exasperated things in hour three – like adopting the mantra “annoying you personally is part of my ongoing therapy.”

Years go by. Life marches on without its soul or its inspiration, driving erratically toward the meeting of our maker. The sign on the front lawn of the Funeral Home has been prophetic: “Drive carefully!. We’ll wait.

We need to stop waiting to be great, create the exceptional, and make progress each day toward our purpose. The Meeting is an illness. We need to find a cure.

To find the cure, I think about the best meeting I ever had. The participants still laugh about it. We call it “The Tennis Court Meeting.” Fenced in on a cold winter morning, long coats harkening back to the era of spies meeting in dark alleys, it was a location of convenience for the right people to fence in. It felt a little dangerous. Adrenalizing. We all stood. It was rushed to meet travel schedules. It was focused on short-term solution seeking and quick resolve in actions. Game-changing content. Service ace. Game, set and match.

In the spirit of the Tennis Court meeting, here’s some tips:

• Can it be done without a meeting? Nine times out of 10 the answer is yes. Try different things – like text chats or online tools like Slack for brainstorming.
• Set both singular objective and desired outcome – whether it’s to solve a problem, make a key decision, or do some brainstorming.
• Pre-send a short agenda – max three working elements with an objective and outcome wrapper on it.
• Set a timer. The quicker the better. Title your meetings with the Bounty paper towel tagline: The Quicker Picker Upper. Insist that everyone come into the meeting with a full bladder. Don’t sit down…have hallway meetings. Feel the urgency to get in and get out – like an eight second bull ride at the rodeo. Maintain a consistent, quick pace.
• Assign the leader – who is also facilitator and adjudicator.
• Require participants to prepare. Be specific with what people need to prepare for. Hold people accountable for not being prepared.
• Do not roundtable endless open discussion. Force 30 second per person thoughts on a topic. Accept there’s never consensus in the world. Leadership ultimately needs to make a decision with decent input acquired.
• If you have no idea what’s going on, just smile. The worst thing you can do is argue or intervene in ignorance.
• Study body language. The soul is expressed in body language. Crossed arms and leaning forward means back off and listen. A laugh means there’s engagement. The frailty of hidden agenda lies in facial expressions.
• If you are brainstorming, use a fun tool like smartphone polling (e.g. polleverywhere.com) to make process more entertaining.
• No small print PowerPoint. Use props. Use flying pigs on PowerPoint to draw analogy. Keep it interesting by forcing purposeful entertainment value.
• There’s always a certain disorderly randomness to epiphany. To encourage it, reserve five minutes of a meeting for playfulness focused on freethinking around the objective.
• Talking about new clothes and cars is nice, but leave it for the water cooler not the meeting room. Meetings are for business.
• Lighten up. If you need to, make up nicknames for your co-workers and refer to them only by these names in meetings: “Next let’s hear from Fluffy.” “Anything else to add Hipster?” Creatively title your meetings like Google changes its logo everyday. “Let’s Make a New Plan Stan, Let’s Invent a New Toy Roy,” for the planning meeting or “Oh Romeo Where Art Thou” for the discussion about an arts initiative.

For the meeting facilitator:

• Be ruthless with process – objective/issue definition, 30 second roundtable input, “handy” straw poll, decision.
• Challenge people to be dangerous with the ideas…to step out of the tunnel vision that bedevils organizations. But challenge before the meeting. Most are not light bulbs of imaginative delight on demand.
• Know your team and rely on each of them in meetings for their strengths. Controllers, coercers, listeners, helpers, collaborators, ideas people, fence posts…you have them all. They all participate differently – and some more positively than others. Encourage the positive. Control for the negative. Do not let the “controller” dominate. Ask for silent brainstorming then visual recording as one technique to overcome this ever-present problem.

Most of all, remember that the value of the meeting is a sum greater than the parts that lies in collaboration. However, the most creative time is quiet time away from the office, with headphones on, or staring at the breeze in trees – alone with thoughts. Independent time and preparation in advance – under razor clarity of objective – is what creates the conditions for the joyous epiphany that can place The Meeting onto the hallowed ground of the game-changer for the bottom line.

Some included humour courtesy: Src: https://www.rare-leadership.org/humor_on_work-business-leadership-success.html