Good meetings are as few meetings as possible

Meetings can be places of creativity where people come together to uncover ideas that couldn’t be uncovered by individuals alone. There is something magical about the energy of a group of people bouncing off of each other and achieving a level of creativity that only a group can. Meetings can also be soul-sucking. Soul-sucking meetings impact the projects, teams, and organizations. Effectivity suffers, work happiness takes a hit.

Meetings fascinate me. What is the difference between a creative meeting and a soul-sucking meeting? How can we make sure we have less soul-sucking meetings and more creative meetings? A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay on this. It is a constant question that occupies my mind. Lots has been written about this because research shows that soul-sucking meetings are the number one office productivity killer. HBR has a whole section of articles on meeting management. In my experience, soul-sucking meetings break some of the basic rules of good meetings the way I see them:

• Good meetings are as less meetings as possible. A good meeting is a solution to a problem that cannot be fixed with a personal conversation, a chat, a phone call, a document or an e-mail. Meetings take time and can be tedious and take people out the flow of their work. If the objective can be reached with another way of communicating, that should be the preferred option. A meeting is a last resort not the default.
• A good meeting is a conversation. And not a series of people presenting their views one after the other. A conversation can also be called a meeting. I am not talking about those meetings: just spontaneously walking up to someone and having a conversation, possibly including other people in the conversation if necessary. These should be plenty in an office if we want a creative environment in which people inspire each other. I am talking about the other type of meeting here: the planned meetings in agendas. The “official” or “formal” meetings. They should have the same creative energy and effectiveness a personal conversation has.
• A good meeting solves a problem for the entire group and not just for the person that organizes the meeting. If the people in the meeting sense that the meeting will have little value for them, the meeting goes sour quickly.
• A good meeting is a meeting to which everyone in the meeting agreed to before the meeting was planned. A good meeting is a meeting to which everyone knows in advance what the purpose of the meeting is: the context and the problem that needs to be solved in the meeting. A good meeting is prepared by talking to the people in the meeting before the meeting is planned to make sure they are in agreement, see the purpose and their role. Nothing is more killing than walking into a meeting without knowing the purpose. You had no chance to determine whether you should accept or not and you are in a disadvantage because the organizer knows the topic and you don’t. Surprises are fun, but not for meetings.
• A good meeting is a meeting in which only people sit that are needed to solve the problem. Others can be updated outside the meeting. There are polite ways to decline a meeting request.
• A good meeting is a meeting in which new information is shared. And not just all the knows are listed, new solutions are created and not just existing solutions revisited. This seems very basic, but these things happen.
• A good meeting is a meeting to which people bring solutions, ideas, prototypes to solve the problem at hand. A good meeting is prepared and not just people walking into a meeting and then asking what the meeting is about. It’s good practice to come into a meeting with a prototype of sorts even if nobody asked for it.
• A good meeting doesn’t include office politics. A good meeting is a meeting that is not used to try to set the hierarchy between the people in the group by outsmarting each other, pushing own agenda’s, and elbow work. All this just distracts from achieving goals. Roles should be clear before the meeting starts.
• A good meeting is a meeting in which all the participants are empowered to contribute to the solution. Everybody is in the meeting because they have something unique to contribute. Recognize and leverage that.
• A good meeting is a safe place in which there is no such thing as a mistake. There are no good and bad ideas. People should feel safe to say silly or unpopular things and express their opinions. The best creative work is done if everybody feels safe to express their ideas.
• In a good meeting, the leader speaks last. This comes from this speech by Simon Sinek. It creates space for others to be heard.
• A good meeting is rather short than long. Having a meeting is not a goal in itself and the goal should be to make it shorter than planned rather than longer.
• A good meeting ends with notes and follow-up tasks. Lots of meetings start with remembering what was discussed last time. Track what was discussed and decided and share that information.
• A good meeting starts on the right note. If the first moments of a meeting are not in the right vibe, they hardly ever recover. Start positive, set the tone.

Most of these things are pretty basic. Other are more personal opinions based on reflections of personal experiences. I don’t think it is rocket science to have good meetings but there are so many things that can get in the way. And everybody will experience a meeting differently. One person can think a meeting was very good while it was soul-sucking for another. I believe meetings are a great tool to move projects ahead, a great solution to solve problems in projects. I also see the tendency to have too many meetings that are soul-sucking because organizing a meeting is so easy today. You can check all calendars in Outlook and just plan a meeting very quickly if you feel the urge. I see meeting requests pop up in my calendar that are simple called “meeting”. Those things are very basic bad meeting hygiene. I believe we should be more careful with people’s time and energy and communicate better around meetings. Meetings can take people out of their flow. Meetings can be very inefficient ways to share information. Meetings can be soul-sucking for different reasons. I just think it would be good to be more critical around meetings to prevent meeting madness. Have more empathy towards the people you invite into a meeting. Be more critical whether you should be in this meeting, whether this meeting should take place in the first place. Borrowing from Dieter Rams principles of good design: good meetings are as less meetings as possible.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you enjoyed it. If you clap for this essay, I will know I connected with you. I will dive deeper into the topics around Design Leadership in upcoming articles. If you follow me here on Medium, you will see them pop up on your Medium homepage. You can also subscribe to an email service here on Medium which will drop new essays right into your inbox. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to see new articles in your timeline or talk to my bot at dennishambeukers.com :) You can also find me on Instagram. When I am not blogging about Design Leadership, I work as a design strategist and project manager at Zuiderlicht.