These futile meetings!

Nikolay Tinkov
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read
Photo credit: pixabay.com

How often were you in a meeting where 20 per cent of the people takes 80 per cent of the talk? In a diverse office environment and because of the traditional corporate hierarchy it is more than usual to have people who participate physically in a meeting but do not contribute mentally. In my 15 years corporate experience in a multinational environment I’ve been part of similar meetings and workshops hundreds of times. It is very often to happen after the meeting and around the coffee machine to get the opinions of those people in one on one chit-chats. And very often we realize they have something really valuable to say.

But why those people didn’t say what they want to say during a meeting? Is it because they are afraid of saying something they have in mind, or they could not find the proper words or are afraid of failure or having senior executive presented who could say just ‘no’, or are bored from the next useless thing, or for whatever reason it could be there? Forbes recently came with an exclusive interview with Jeff Bezos on how he encourages innovations at Amazon. “Let’s say a junior executive comes up with a new idea that they want to try. They have to convince their boss, their boss’s boss, their boss’s boss’s boss and so on — any ‘no’ in that chain can kill the whole idea.”, explains Bezos.

So, how we are sure we take the most we could from our peers, partners and employees? A few years ago Canon did a study to find out the reasons for anger and stress among employees in EU companies. To the manner born there are few things which are a source of extreme frustration in the office, but the one scaled the most is the long and useless meetings.

And by the way, if you’re just reading this during a meeting, you are definitely not alone. This happened to me as well. Michael Mankins and Eric Garton mentioned in their book Time, Talent, Energy that web browsing is one of the many examples of futile meetings behaviour. Moreover, they argue that such kind of distraction causes a fall in the IQ two times more than that achieved by smoking marijuana.

Evidently, there are some choices one could make.

  • Leave the things as they are and do the usual stuff, and as long as you can live with that this is ok. It is safe (or at least seems to be).
  • Try for a change. You can try to change the futile meetings, but how many times you did it? Or it happened few times and then the things continue as usual. Sure, it requires a lot of efforts.
  • Work to be 100% useful, no less

There is a way to encourage participation and imagination to flourish so that a meeting is productive and lean forward. A meeting that raises non-routine decisions. With LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® all that is possible. It is a live 3D immersive experience where there’s full participation of everyone involved.

And no, this does not mean that you will waste a whole day playing with LEGO! (Though it would be great.) On the contrary, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® facilitated method helps organizations, teams and individuals to solve problems and unlock insights in a creative and collaborative way, to stay focused while solving them and to mobilize the group when it comes to implementing the solution. As we know from Einstein creativity is intelligence having fun. It’s about a new way to look at the “fuzzy” things.

Bezos said in his interview given to Forbes “If I have a week with no brainstorming meetings, I complain to my office, like ‘Come on, guys, help me here.’ “ Being able to access all the knowledge and wisdom of all the employees — not just the bit they bring to the job within the constraints of their official roles — would be a major competitive advantage for any business!

The best organizations understand that leaders do not have all the answers, prefer to tap into the collective knowledge of its people, and stop the futile meetings. So there you have it.

Written by

runs What-If Studio in Sofia, Bulgaria, facilitating workshops using the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® method and materials www.whatifstudio.eu

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