No one likes a meeting. Can we fix this?
This blog was jointly written with Louisa Thomson
Everyone hates meetings. They're the enemy of productivity in service design and agile work, often the butt of jokes and memes. Meetings are something we complain about yet endure- seemingly lacking the motivation to improve or change them.
This is particularly true of public meetings, and the stereotype of virtually-empty draughty halls remains accurate for many events. At the same time, we know that many people feel disconnected from their community, and from local decision makers.
Despite all their problems, public meetings remain significant- not just for the digitally excluded but because, at their best, they have the potential to perform a vital social interaction role as part of a healthy and vibrant civic life.
So meetings are important but they’re also too often dysfunctional.
A lot of people don't like public meetings for very justifiable reasons. It's often not clear what the purpose is, they're not allowed to contribute (or don't feel comfortable doing so), or it's not clear how decisions that are taken will actually be implemented.
We want to do something about this. In Louisa’s Notwestminster workshop last year, she set out a ‘wall of disempowerment’ based on seven years as a councillor and sitting through good and bad meetings of all shapes and sizes. These are common sense but worth sharing widely.
We want to help avoid these pitfalls, and to ensure people affected by the decisions being taken are aware of the discussions taking place, can actively and confidently participate in them, and are kept up to date on any changes as a result.
We’re exploring the idea of creating a 'standard for meetings'. This would be a set of principles that event organisers can sign up to and participants can use to feed back on whether their experiences met the standard. This will help to ensure that fair, open and productive public meetings support better local democracy. This standard could be for town hall meetings, other public services like the Police and health providers, tenants groups, parks user groups and far beyond.
We would love for you to help us. The idea of a standard for meetings will only work for all these groups if we get them involved in the design.
- We want to know about the state of meetings in your area, and are enlisting ‘civic detectives’ to tell us about public events. If you're a regular attendee or you've been meaning to go for ages, please find a meeting in January and answer these questions about how it went.
- We will be discussing this (a lot) at this year’s Notwestminster in February. You should definitely join us there
Chris Bolton says friends don’t let friends have rubbish meetings. Let's start making meetings far less rubbish.
