Although I am not a fundamentally querulous person, there are things that I really, really hate. Many of them , including clowns and bridal showers with games, are easily avoided if one eschews the circus and develops the habit of sending of a lovely gift after declining the shower invitation based on a fictitious but irreproachable schedule conflict. (Mrs. Nichols regrets that she is unable to attend the Tupperware shower for Brittani because she will be presiding over the Summit to Help Widows and Orphans). Other things are not as easily bypassed, and at the bottom of life's barrel, under clowns, bridal showers, black licorice and romance novels lies The Meeting.
I have had good meetings. They are generally characterized by involving no more than three or four busy people, no formal rules of order, no controversy, and a common goal. The capacity to identify what needs to be done, divvy up the doing of it and agree to keep in touch via e-mail is a beautiful thing, and I am grateful every time I see it. I have had this blissful experience often in the context of school-related activities, less often as a part of volunteering in the community, and almost never at an actual job. That is why I work at home, by myself.
I like people, I really do, but I'd like to be honest about whether we are gathering for the purpose of receiving information, making a decision, planning an event or providing a forum for the airing of grievances and the pontificating of the under-heard. There is a kind of meeting attendee who sees a meeting as an opportunity to explore every nook and cranny of misery he or she has experienced since the last one, to throw everything on the conference table, and to gum up the following half hour of the meeting while people attempt to palliate, mitigate, and obligate. My immediate inclination is to defenestrate. It is never necessary to involve a committee in one's own personal issues with the teacher who doesn't like your child, the co-worker who poaches your customers, or your consternation because the leaves were collected later than the date on the City's calendar. If your personal gripe is germane to a more universal discussion of, say, customer-poaching, it is sufficient to say something like "I've had that experience, and it was difficult." Any farther and you are in territory best covered in a private meeting with your boss, your school principal or someone in the Department of Public Works.I am also repelled by the meeting that is actually a lengthy speech followed by a Q & A session invariably reduced to 3 minutes because the "presentation" ran long. I have attended many of these windbaggeries in work and community settings, and have, at various times, texted under the conference table, IM'ed with my husband from my laptop, and calculated the amount of speed and pressure necessary to slash my wrists using a coffee stirrer. Frequently there is a "handout," which involves information readily available online; I carry these home, cut them up and staple them together to make notepads. The nadir is the speech with Powerpoint accompaniment, in which the speaker intones that "we can attain this goal using a three-point approach" while showing us the words "three-point approach" above three arrows joined at the base and radiating therefrom. You can actually make a pretty good incision if you hold the stirrer very close to the point where it connects with your wrist.
While it occurs less frequently, I am persistently plagued by the "Concensus Building" activity in which various alternatives are listed on a series of posters, and victims are given colored sticky dots which they are instructed to allocate among their preferred choices. It has been my experience that these exercises exist solely for the purpose of allowing the Powers that Be to do exactly what they were going to do anyway, after having thrown the posters in the room where they keep broken AV equipment and the box of extension cords.
I cannot leave the topic of Fear and Loathing in the Conference Room without a word about Roberts' Rules of Order. I am certain that if one is actually a member of Parliament, it is critically important to follow an established set of rules governing who speaks when, and how a motion is made. It is also probably important that minutes be accurately taken, and that motions and votes should be made and recorded as befits matters that will affect the laws of a country. None of this applies in a church or PTA meeting, and yet I have sat and waited while people debated the propriety of a "friendly amendment," or the best framing of a motion. I am not arguing that these things are unimportant, merely making it abundantly clear that I do not personally give a rat's ass whether an amendment is friendly or not, and I tend to be of the opinion that most things can be revisited and tweaked if they prove to be less than perfect. I am similarly disaffected regarding the painstaking re-drafting of charters, bylaws, articles of incorporation, or any other long document intended to cover every eventuality that might occur in this, or any other dimension. That is why I don't really practice law.
If you like meetings, plan meetings, and/or find meetings to be a productive investment of your time, my hat is off to you. It really is. I am particularly thrilled if you participate in meetings with a real purpose and a collective passion for cutting to the chase. I am maybe too flaky, too critical, too...conscious of my life draining away if I waste an hour of it reading a Powerpoint while its contents are read to me by a guy in a suit.
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Heather Siegel
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Anne Cameron Cutri
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Among the joys of retirement is No Running Meetings. Or Standing Still Ones.
But, there are actually techniques to improve meetings. I won't list them, but they really don't have to be awful.
I will share one strategy. Namely, in a meeting, it should be possible to accomplish ONE objective of your own, independently of the official topic of the meeting. That is, you have a group of people -- a resource -- and there must be one thing that you either want to know or want to tell someone at that meeting. So, forget the official topic and further your own agenda. Secondly, there will be at least one factoid that is also unrelated to the official purpose that can help you. So, turn the occasion into something that will further your own purposes.
In addition, a general rule that no decision of any materiality should ever be made at a meeting. Anything important needs to be decided in advance and simply ratified at the meeting.
Just saying.
{[R]}
L.
in cute ribboned pigtails
and oh, a desire to tug softly
I love former lawyers who are addicted to Beets, and great sweet cereal:`
Tony's Tiger's Brand of `
Yummy `Sugar Frosted Flakes.
Mennonites may love you to organize a PTA & FFA. Parents Teach Adults Farm Fresh Apples.
Ann bakes some apple pie.
Mennonite meet at the farm for Hymn Sings, and talk quilt knitting, and canning plans. Shoo Fly.
Help sell shoes in full closets.
You be inpatient psychiatrist.
Teach Nature is God manifest.
Sell cookies and bumper sticker.
`
Honk if You Are a Sober Amish.
`
Open Pawn Shop To Fix Button.
Fix Bunny Rabbit Ear Television.
Wear size 13- bunny cotton shoes.
Buy` Mars & M&M or Milky Way.
Sell outdated Nabisco Oreo Cooky.
Flea Markets sell toddler pacifiers.
Breed German Shepherd & Poodle.
Lu Lu can be a black Poodle Mascot.
Breed Barnyard Goat & Chihuahua.
"meeting" "nook & cranny" misery.
In my younger days, I covered every kind of local government meeting known to man for the radio station. In one of them, the Decatur County School Board spent 45 minutes debating whether the new red bleachers should go on the home side of the basketball court at North Decatur Junior-Senior High School, or whether the new blue bleachers should go there. And vice-versa for the visitors' side.
This was followed by 30 minutes of debate about whether the new chalkboards should be black or green.
But the all-time WORST WORST WORST was the Board of Zoning Appeals. This was three-plus hours of staring at blurry plat maps on an overhead projector while they debated 12' versus 15' driveway easements and water runoff patterns.
I was being paid by the hour, so the longer the meetings ran the more I got paid, and these types of stories were easy-peasy to write, so I was basically just being paid to sit there. Time was money and money was time and both had ceased to have any meaning whatsoever.
BTW, the coffee stirrer is an ineffective suicide device. Unwind the coil from the top of a steno pad, fasten it to two pencils, and make yourself a garrotte.
By the way, that company was asked to help a bank reduce the length of its board meetings. Our solution was simple: We took out the luxurious leather chairs. Once board members were required to stand, their average meeting time declined from an average two and a half hours to a half-hour.
but bridal showers are so much worse. SO much worse.
Freaky.
http://www.companyculture.com/topics/BullshitBingo.htm
Agenda
Timekeeper
Meeting room with no chairs.
Stand up meetings always take less time.
And meetings! When I emerged from the world of free lance artist to arts administrator my calendar filled up with meeting dates. I sat dazed and confused at most of them because in my town they schedule not-for-profit meetings before the business people have to report for work: 7:00 AM.
When I have to hold a "meeting" I refuse to call it that. I call it a "gathering" or a "party with a purpose". I also throw chocolates and party favors unexpectedly. Good Lord, that makes me sound a little clownish.
During big projects, we used to have biweekly progress meetings, and we’d spend as much time preparing for the meetings as doing actual work. Larger meetings never failed to be hijacked by someone with an irrelevant personal grievance or an ax to grind. Whenever we prepared for a disaster recovery test, we would hold bank-wide weekly conference calls, half of which would involve addressing minor problems raised by secondary groups that couldn’t be bothered to do the right thing and bring up the issue privately and not waste the time of a hundred other people.
Then there were the corporate morale-building meetings, where management would expound that we were family and that these corporate changes would lead to so many wonderful opportunities, while most of us pretended to listen while mentally updating our resumes or counting the days until our vacation.
Believe me, I know what you’re talking about.
Plus, take and publish minutes. The number of times people forgot their commitments made during a meeting was always astonishing to me.
Best trick, though, is to have a flip chart referred to as "the parking
lot". Whenever someone would have a bright idea that was off topic, he would be quickly and heavily praised and the 'idea' was written down in the 'parking lot' flip chart. To my knowledge, no one ever, ever referred back to anything in the parking lot, since it was simply a dumpster for off topic crap.
Political meeting, etc. are a different animal. Avoid them.
"You mean we actually GET PAID to sit around and bullshit"?
The grass is always greener.
rated
2. meetings that run over 45 minutes ought to include food
3. don't touch the white board ink, it's carcinogenic -- always use an eraser and NEVER YOUR FINGERS
Clearly you're not retired. As soon as a retirement community senses the presence of a 'new fish', he gets drafted to be on every committee in town.
It did not go unnoticed by me that you said "rat's ass".
But I did wish to suggest that perhaps you haven't tried really good black licorice yet. I stumbled upon a bag of Darrell Lea licorice, made in Australia, in the local drugstore, and went back the next day and bought all they had, then ordered some online. It is the ambrosia of licorice. Check their website, please. Perfect to eat whilst watching Adaptation.
I'll never ask you to do anything against your better judgment again. Unless I forget.
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Your writing simply bowls me over. I love every word you post here, Ann. I love your thoughts and the way you put them together for our enjoyment and/or edification. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you again. I apologize for the redundancy but I can't think of another way to express my thanks. More, please! Rated, of course. D
Put down the coffee stirrers and back away from the conference table! :) I am still chuckling from so many of these lines. Thanks.
V
Meetings are a necessary evil, I suppose. But meetings that solve nothing, drag on pointlessly, or worse, circle around and around because one person refuses to let an obscure topic drop, are purgatorial. Great post,
Rated.
dear reader - don't worry; I'm a coward.
dianaani - actually your 10 answer post reminded me of this old post that was one of the first things I ever published here. It had three readers, two of whom have left OS, so i figured it was safe to re-post. So you were the inspiration....
jeanette - I'm sure you are charming, engaging and persuasive and that you did not read from a powerpoint as you presented its contents.
blue - YES! Maybe we worked at the same place?
nick - interesting points and suggestions. I think I tend naturally towards the "one personal objective" strategy, although I have always felt guilty about it. That's really absurd when you consider that, in exchange for taking hours of my time (often uncompensated) I am really asking for and taking very little in return. i also agree about using meetings only to ratify, but that tends to be a struggle in groups that feel it is "unfair" for there to be any point at which "secret plans" are made. That occurs most often not at work, where there are delineated roles and hierarchies, but in volunteer groups.
larry - cautiously optimistic.
kathy - you're the only person left here who read this the first time....
ladyslipper - caucuses are DEADLY. I worked one election cycle as press staff for a Congressional campaign, and caucus meetings, along with county Democrat organizational meetings were like slow amputations sans anesthesia. Actually, our own staff meetings were kind of awful.
lezlie - thanks. I have never gotten past making a teeny tiny incision, although even little drops of blood never stopped a blowhard......
art - no FFA, but two years as president of the PTA, where we sold many a cookie. I would love more than you will ever know to join Mennonites for Hymn Sings, and to plan quilting, knitting and canning. I also make a mean Shoo Fly.
leeandra - a couple of years ago I was a crusading community leader and had to attend (UNPAID) all City Council, Zoning Board and Zoning Board of Appeals meetings. Somewhere in the middle of a debate about whether people should be able to build a shed in an historic district if the shutters were painted a non-traditional color, I would gladly have garrotted myself.
tom - that sounds like punishment along the lines of blasting rock music at Noriega to get him to come out in Vatican City. i have never had the pleasure of a cushy meeting chair; often I am seated in an elementary school library chair designed for a much tinier tush than my own.
owl - thank you!
dianaani - she's good, isn't she?
densie - they do like that stuff, don't they? The "conferencing people in" always seems to take too long, and i particularly like it when the "super inclusive" facilitator person requires that we get the opinion of every disembodied "conferenced in" person on every issue, even if they don't really have one.
sixtycandles - that's an intriguing idea, particulary for the P.T.A..
buffy - I TOTALLY agree. I have had trouble finding others to support me on that. I think many meetings can actually be entirely replaced with a volley of thoughtful e-mails.
elisa - I draw and make lists. I also text my husband on my Blackberry, under the table. At one job, a collegaue and I used to IM each other about the other people at the meeting while sitting next to them. Bad form, but we were desperate.
diary - I so know that pattern. I never did witness a breakout of group bravery.
femme - I believe there are ways to make them productive and interesting, and when it happens, I am delighted. It has been regrettably rare. as for bridal showers, i just don't get it. I have been to lovely ones that were really ladies luncheons executed with great class, and then, the "fun ones" that seem to focus on some hideous combination of TMI and gift-grabbing greed.
joan - yet another reason to be a teacher.
grif - that sounds so painful. I'm glad I could make you feel a little bit better.
mandy - a friend (the one I was IM'ing with during meetings) suggested that game once, and I didn't have the guts.
sheepdog - I have never tried the no chairs thing. I have seen agendas and timed comments bend to persistent crackpots, but i don't think they could get around the standing up thing.....
mime - I am just really frightened by clowns. I would probably be afraid of mimes, but i was taken to see Marcel Marceau as a child, and loved it, so I am pro-mime. I think I might like your meetings. A little irreverence goes a long way towards making me lesss homicidal/suicidal/reactionary.
lisa - I am in the process of de-boarding myself. For a while it was PTA, church Elders, church Personnel committee, and two community boards. Having a post-elementary kid and quitting church made things much better. :)
cranky - I do not know, but often imagine, that bankers may have the worst meetings of all. All of your meetings sound awful, although I would have hated the morale-building meetings the most. It has never been possible for me to believe, in the face of massive evidence, that any employee is part of any "family" involving management. Those things always made me feel patronized, and capable of violence.
nick - the parking lot elucidates for me a fight with the city I live in, in which large flipcharts were made using "citizen ideas." I now know what happened to them. As for the minutes, i agree on principal, but I have sat in a meeting in which someone spent twenty+ minutes correcting spelling and grammar errors in the minutes from the previous meeting prior to agreeing to adopt them.
poppi - someone must like them, though, right?
gordon - I agree wholeheartedly with #1 and #2, and i didn't know wbout #3. Thanks!
susan - the meetings where everybody has a life outside and is anxious to get done and get home are the best. It's the Professional Meeting Attendees (most often found in volunteer groups) who pose a problem. Nobody wants to say "shut up and let's move on" to the sweet little old lady who licks all the envelopes.
agore - I am not retired, but I have deliberately chosen work with no meetings. And still, there are meetings.
bell - yes, and nonprofit boards feel to people like a place where, because they are being so wonderful and generous, they are entitled to babble to a captive audience.
libmomrn - well if you think you will get to ask a question you can at least be diverted by planning the question and getting a little adrenaline rush; if that's lost, you're just...bored.
robin - I think things get better as you move towards creative types; i always imagine that meetings of ad execs might be more interesting than the PTA.
lainey - I hate black licorice. I totally agree about the editor's titling; i was wondering if folks thought I had suddenly turned to political writing.
suzanne - I draw all over everything during meetings. I have been told that it was "bad form" (by my mom) but it's what keeps me alive. I love "rat's ass." Love it. :)
hells bells - I'm sure there is some great purpose for it, but so far, I have seen no evidence of that.
lemonpulp - I am a big skipper of meetings, and am in the process of removing myself from organizations that require them. My dread was grossly disproportionate, which i took as a sign from my psyche.
lainey - thank you, dear.
luminous - I am getting where you are. It just takes a while.
jezzibella - I hate meetings, but I am AFRAID of clowns. I'd have to pick a meeting over a clown. Good thing I'm not Barnum & Bailey staff.....
matt - that might help, depending on the guy. I will check out the licorice; my mother loves it, and if I still don't like it, she'll be delighted to have it.
yarn over - please relay my sincerest apologies to Miss Cleo! You are too kind to me, but I absorb it and radiate it for hours.
malusinka - my meetings tend to involve nonprofits and schools, so I don't get swag. My husband does, though.
lisa - thank you!
token - oh yes; clearly you know those people. I have had only the briefest employment with corporate entities and you're right - I am not a team player. The "individualistic prick" could be the title of the story of my working life.... (Or am I a "prickette?")
gabby - I think if you broke a wooden stirrer just right you could actually do a much more effective job. Let me know....
zinnia - if I had that time back, I could write the Great American Novel or solve the mystery of Schroedinger's Cat.....
diary - you are welcome. I am safely home today, where I use only metal spoons. :)
sheila - that's kind of how the PTA was, right down to commenting on peoples' dye jobs. Ick.
shiral - well of course we were. There do have to be meetings; I just think there are good ones and bad ones, and that often no one makes any effort to create the latter.