Meeting evils!

Does hearing the word “meeting” still rings a bell in you. The common chores amongst all are “oh, no! look at my calendar, it's full of meetings and I don’t know when I will get time to do my actual work”.

I am not sure who Invented meetings. It is believed that Meetistotle (brother of great Aristotle) invented “the meeting”. During my last 15 years, I somehow never felt connected during meetings until I decided to become a Scrum Master 6 years back and I was forced to make love with the meetings and make them interesting. The so-called “meetings” were renamed to “ceremonies”. But the question arises why everybody hates meetings.

My first acquaintance with hatred towards the meeting started in the year 2013. I use to attend those monologue meetings with seniors who were supposed to convey the vision. The monologue type meeting is where one person does talk and mostly is the only loudest person in the meeting. Their thoughts always roam around the world giving them the pseudo belief that their talks had changed the world, unrealizing the world outside the meeting room is still the same. In conclusion, either you are shattered, broken, visionless, or just waiting for that coffee or bio break after those pointless meetings, finally flushing those thoughts in the closet. I learned my first lesson: Every meeting should have an Agenda, zone (divergent + convergent thoughts), and more importantly a conclusion (actions).

How many of us walk into a meeting without even knowing why you are there in the first place? The problem, in this case, the decisions are always made by the loudest person in the room, most of the time the loudest person is the one who drives the meeting. But the real danger is these decisions are more likely to be reversed, ultimately wasting everybody’s time. WORKING WITH NO REAL PURPOSE!

Most of the organization, the bosses insist that they are educated on the whole thing (problem) so that they can take decisions on behalf of there people. But in such cases, the real struggle is to explain to them the actual ground-level issues as they only hear or understand what they want to (Want to try this, try initiating a discussion on velocity — I bet you will have a tough time!). You recollect seating behind the boss, and he/she is typing the response listening to you (on the big MAC). You will always be in the hands of someone to make a decision who knows the least about the situation. PUSH THE DECISION DOWN, TRUST YOUR PEOPLE!

The solution to this problem is simple but impossible. Apart from tracking the regular metrics such as burndown, cycle time, etc, we can think of tracking the below things:

1) No. of decisions taken by every scrum member in the sprint. (importantly understanding the Why part, taking a decision is a critical part of empowerment and risk ability)

2) Total no of meetings in the sprint. (including the scrum ceremonies).

3) How many decisions made by employees during these meetings? (tracking the decisions taken/meeting and decisions reversed/meeting).

4) How many meetings went without any decision or action plan? (This is what is slowing you down or your decision-making process).

I agree that it’s the facilitator’s art how to make meetings more interesting, but it is true that not every meeting will be more interesting e.g. any mgmt. level meeting. So, it is important to note the decisions taken during these meetings.

Lastly, I forgot to tell you Meetistotle was eventually stoned to death for doing so ??