Meetings are an example of the futility of the popular misconception that 10,000 hours repeatedly doing something leads to expert performance. If you added up the amount of time people have attended meetings at work, the number would exceed 10,000 in just a few short years. And yet, many people are fed up with unproductive and pointless meetings. Meetings have seemingly become a form of organisational punishment. Having attended a particularly rubbish meeting the other day, on the back of an envelope we calculated the number of customers buying an average basket of shopping would have to pass through our client’s stores to generate sufficient profit to cover the cost of the meeting we, and several others, were attending. It was truly shocking.
Common opinion seems to be that meetings are the scourge of productivity and the only solution is to have fewer meetings. Elon Musk famously encouraged people to leave meetings if they feel they are adding no value or do not understand the purpose. Management guru Peter Drucker argued that meetings are symptomatic of a bad organisation, but they are both missing the point.
Where we agree is that meetings, for many, have become the equivalent of the jogger who does more and more jogging at the same pace and distance hoping somehow they will become a faster and better runner. It’s simply not going to happen. The problem is that so little effort is invested in becoming experts at meeting effectively.
The notion of 10,000 hours of practice leading to expertise popularised by Malcolm Gladwell based on the excellent research of K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues are frequently mis-represented. It is widely reported that if you do something enough times you will become an expert. Meetings demonstrate that this is clearly nonsense. Thousands of meetings later and the most senior managers still complain they are a drain on productivity. Yes, you have to put the hours in to get good at something, but there are two additional aspects beyond repetition that lead to increasing expertise that are rarely mentioned in popular literature but were a core tenet of Ericsson's work.
1) Deliberate practice
Rather than simply meeting again and again, a team might take some time before every meeting to figure out what they want to improve in the way they meet. During the meeting every effort should be focused on practicing the desired improvement. And either during the meeting or at the end of the meeting the team should review and give feedback to each other on how well they managed to make the improvements they wanted. For example, they might work on making sure the purpose and focus of every agenda item is clear. Or, work hard on making sure that any comment made is a build or addition to that already made and not simply restating what has already been said. This is about deliberately practicing getting better at those things that will improve the quality of meetings. Every athlete chasing elite performance tends to have a coach. Why is the same not true for those chasing elite performance in business? A facilitator or team coach can be brought in to help the team become more effective in meeting skills.
Deliberate practice is a significant factor, but the very best elite performers take one more step, and that is to develop the mental skills associated with elite performance.
2) Developing sophisticated mental frameworks
According to Ericsson, elite performers work to refine their mental representations of the target performance. Elite performers such as athletes and musicians develop complex mental representations that enable them to perform at their best in the heat of the moment and thus consistently outperforming others. Such mental representations for improving meetings might include visualising how they want a meeting to run. It may include rehearsing in their mind listening to the language of colleagues to ensure they can spot assumptions, or when they may need to step in to ensure the meeting remains focused on the topic at hand. Sophisticated mental frameworks require deliberate, reflective effort.
Putting it together
If, for even just one or two meetings a week you focused on deliberately practicing great meeting skills and worked together as a team on creating mental representations of what an excellent meeting could be, in less than half a dozen meetings productivity will likely have increased substantially. Envisage a meeting where the pre-reads were thoughtfully produced and shared with sufficient time to allow for proper consideration of the topics to be discussed. Think about the meeting where people have worked hard on the choice of words they use that facilitates open, constructive dialogue. Imagine a roomful of people that are clear on the strategic aims of the organisation and are practised in sense checking discussions to ensure the focus is on the right issues. Visualise a meeting that closes with a review of the meeting and sets expectations of how to make the meeting even better next time. Dream about a team of people who are 100% committed to driving up meeting productivity in order to deliver exceptional business performance.
Summary
Meetings are an unavoidable part of performance. There is next to nothing that does not at some point depend on the cooperation of human beings. This cooperation arises from people meeting and figuring things out together. Simplistically calling for fewer meetings is the equivalent of a jogger deciding to run less hoping somehow they will end up fitter and stronger. We have too many meetings because we have too many bad meetings. Just as the only way the jogger can become faster is through deliberately completing exercises and drills that increase speed, so too getting better at meetings can only arise from deliberately practicing much, much more than most do at those skills and techniques that make for better meetings.
Yes, Elon Musk and Peter Drucker are right - don’t waste time in bad meetings. But don’t abandon meetings; instead, develop elite performance meeting skills that ensure the value of the discussions greatly exceeds the cost of coming together.
Dr Dominic Irvine & Professor Emeritus Simon Jobson