The Meetings Death Spiral

The pandemic was a major event. For a while, I considered preceding it with the characterisation of "one in a lifetime". Then, I reflected on what was happening in Ukraine and its global effects and didn't dare. I am terrified of provoking life to send more "one in a lifetime" events in our way just to commoditise the term.

Anyways, let's set aside my metaphysical worries.

Any event with cataclysmic effects represents an excellent opportunity for those who constantly seek to blame anything that isn't working on something other than their actions and attitude. Covid and its aftermath are blamed for no end of problems and inefficiencies. The disruptions in the global Supply Chain, the?airports’ or airlines'?ridiculous operations?and?customer service?(this is an?excellent analysis of the mess), inflation, etc. The list is growing every month and will continue to grow for years.

Certainly, Covid has a significant impact on all these. However, it cannot be an excuse and a whitewash for everything.

Thanks to an abundance of clickbait titles like "more and more meetings since Covid 19", and because people usually superficially browse the news without really reading, the sentiment is that we spent more time on meetings during the pandemic. However, if one digs just a few lines further, one will discover that studies found that we spend less time in meetings cumulatively, but we have more meetings (two examples from?Harvard?and?Microsoft).

If we look at the situation over a more extended period, the time spent in meetings increased steadily and considerably over the years. Some estimate the increase at?8% to 10% annually since 2000. A study published in HBR in 2017 found that the average time an executive spent in meetings in the 1960s was 10 hours. In 2017 it was more than double at 23 hours.

So we have been in this Death Spiral for more than 60 years. Ironically, it coincides with the birth, growth, and establishment of?modern management principles?based on the ideas of?Peter Drucker.

In reality, Covid and remote working performed as a magnifier bringing into plain sight a hideous situation we all experienced in our professional life before the pandemic.

This spin-chilling feeling of joining yet another pointless meeting isn't something appearing for the first time during remote working. We used to joke about it before and after while stoically suffering during the meeting. We used to smile with the expression of?death by Powerpoint until it happened.

How this Death Spiral works

Meetings increase because of their poor quality, which is getting worse despite the technological advance in tools enabling the potential of better quality meetings. There are tons of resources and tips on how to schedule, prepare, and run an effective meeting. Still, the failure is massive.

An effective meeting improves communication and collaboration across functions; a bad one works the other way around and erodes those areas precisely. Plus, the frustration. There should be conversations in a meeting, an exchange of views, knowledge, experiences, etc. People cannot have meaningful discussions if they discover what they should discuss during the meeting.

Attendees come to the meetings unprepared or superficially prepared. No conclusion or decision can be reached, so there's another follow-up meeting planned, then another and another. In epidemiology terms, meetings have a Reproduction number (R0) > 1, which means that they spread like a disease. The poorer the quality of the meeting, the higher the R0 is. That's the Death Spiral.

The reproduction of meetings eats on time. And remember, time is what you need to prepare for a successful meeting. That's why people avoid it, they don't have time as they run from one meeting to another. This is a vicious cycle.

Under such time pressure, the least effort principle?comes into play. We want quick fixes, quick solutions, and action now. Running from meeting to meeting gives the impression that one's too busy.?Activity, panic! A substitute for achievement.

Everyone tries to patchwork, to come up with something one can tell others and look like he/she did their part. For example, one might consult a generalist co-worker down the hall rather than a specialist in another building so long as the generalist's answers are within the threshold of acceptability. This trick works as none is challenging and calling it out, especially the leaders.

What's happening next is that our threshold of acceptability gets lower and lower to the detriment of quality (increasing the R0 further).

The damage to the organisation is even deeper. Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting consumes time for solo work that's essential for?"deep work", the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. This is something extremely important in our days for the knowledge worker because the less demanding, straightforward, rule-based tasks got digital and automated, so what remains are the tasks that require cognitive work.

"The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy".

A subtle touch of irony

Thanks to the affluence of employee surveys, the topic of "too many meetings" frequently lands among the top three reasons for employees' dissatisfaction. The denial to fight the real root cause is obvious from the start: the issue is rarely described as "poor quality meetings" but as "too many". However, I am surprised by the persistence of the same naive approach even after repeated failures.

Urged to deliver immediate results, the organisation (often led by the team that used to be called Human Resources and now it's self-defined by various names, short of Human) rushes into action.

The irony is that additional and long meetings are scheduled to analyse and work on solving the issue of too many meetings. In one of my experiences, a big project with an entire team and a budget was set up to deal with it. This is an accomplishment even?Sir Humphrey Appleby would envy.

The outcome is "new" (or "back to the future") policies and guidelines. There are, of course, more meetings to inform managers and employees about it. There are lists with do's and dont's, and guidelines. All these are pushed down until the concern of the number of meetings drops down in the list of employee surveys, and then we gradually go back to our beloved spiral.

Is there a way out?

Yes, there is. But it starts and ends with something rare: true leadership. That is the root cause of the proliferation of meetings in an organisation.

Holding many and inefficient meetings is a behavioural issue, one that touches the company's culture. Only leadership can change and shape the culture and attitudes in an organisation. Haven't you heard that "Culture eats Strategy for breakfast"?

As we well know from experience, changing the culture is a huge and complex task. It encompasses how employees coordinate and work with each other, manage pressure and respond to various challenges, and treat customers and suppliers.

This change is not happening overnight. It takes time. And none wants to dedicate it. It also takes courage, tenacity, and perseverance — qualities that are hard to find (I rarely came across any program helping leaders or employees to develop those qualities and skills).

We have at our disposal many processes and tips that proved successful sporadically or for a short-term, such as (among many others):

• a no-meeting zone (a few hours every day or one day per week)
• standardised calendars anchored around key meetings
• rules about when to call for a meeting (synchronous collaboration) and when to use email, messaging, recorded videos, etc. (asynchronous collaboration)
• rules about the preparation of the meeting, the roles of the participants, and the documentation and the follow-up of the outcomes.

But the driving force to sustain the success of the system is leadership. The best system will fall apart like a house of cards if leadership is anaemic and hesitant to call out those who insist on resisting, coming unprepared, and defying the rules one small attempt at a time.

Did you ever stop a poorly prepared meeting or participated in one that was stopped by someone else? How many times has this happened? I should guess rarely. How did you feel after? I should guess you were relieved (unless you've called it).

Constantly challenging that attitude and behaviour until a healthy culture is established, training and developing leaders with courage, tenacity, and perseverance is the only way out of this death spiral.