Context Matters
Quick, which is better: Fewer but longer meetings; or shorter meetings, more often?
Unless you replied “it depends,” you fell prey to my trick question. Whatever you answered, you probably didn’t stop first to assess the context of my query. What type of organization are we talking about here? Is this a business, or a club? Who is meeting, volunteers or professional colleagues? What is the purpose of the meetings? Are they tactical, focused on advancing near-term tasks? Governance, focused on structure, strategy, or policy? Retrospective, considering what has been working and what might be improved?
You see, context matters. Clients ask me all the time for the self-management best practice for meetings, or performance management, or decision-making. And I frustrate them every time when I say there is no such thing. When we use the term “best practice,” we imply that there is one state-of-the-art way to do something. But that is almost never the case. There are only practices that work well in specific contexts.
As human beings, we tend to want prescriptions. We want an expert to save us the trouble of experimenting on our own to learn what works, to save us the pain of failing, and the effort it takes to learn hard lessons. Just tell me what to do! Even the people who are trying to practice self-management, who are pretty progressive when it comes to org design, are prone to this behavior.
People also want to think they are ‘doing things the right way.’ Or at least doing what ‘people like us’ do. It feels safe to dress the way ‘people like us’ dress, to talk the way ‘people like us’ talk, to express opinions widely held by ‘people like us.’ We bring this herd mentality to work, too. And so we size up the way other companies make decisions, share (or don’t share) information, or manage workflow, and we imitate them. We adopt their “best practices.”
I’m not suggesting that we can’t learn from what’s working in exemplary organizations — of course we can, and should. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t blindly adopt the cultural practices of a Netflix or the org design of a Spotify because they work for those organizations. Maybe your company is smaller or larger than these examples; maybe you are growing faster, or more slowly. Maybe you hire from a different pool, or your customers have a different profile. Your operation might be more centralized, or more distributed.
Only by considering the full context can you effectively decide which practices might be best for your organization. And then you’ll need to try those out, gather some feedback, and adapt accordingly. No one-size-fits-all. No best practices for anyone/everyone.
So let’s try this again. Quick question: which is better, a small board of directors, or a large one?
If you answered “it depends,” then my work is done here.
