If a meeting doesn't have a focused agenda and expected outcome, it's usually a waste of time for most participants. Standing meetings are the worst offenders, unless you're in a crisis situation. If you're using meetings to get status updates, my condolences.
Meetings are forcing functions
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Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes, although not always, it might be (but certainly could never be) wise to hedge, maybe. In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant. We can be assured that assumption incorrect, in this case.
> In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant. It's not cool to insult the readers' intelligence when someone makes a shaky overly broad claim. Better to retract or modify the claim. The headline "Meetings are forcing functions" is borderline clickbait. Most of us here have been in companies that meeting'd themselves to…
Perhaps it’s worth considering you both have valid experiences that are context dependent and not mutually exclusive.
In either case I think you might be coming in a bit hot. OP is just sharing their perspective. No one wants to get into internet fights.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#43sometimes. often they are therapy sessions and theater.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#44I've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specific to talk about. I wrote a short but hopefully clear description of what we needed to cover on each event that I scheduled. I found this worked really well in practice. We actually talked mor…
I have no doubt that this approach works better than recurring meetings, but I do want to point out the trade-off, which is that this approach requires much more management attention and energy to keep their finger on the pulse and ensure all concerns are handled, compared to their time management being on autopilot with recurring meetings.
So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effective. Who knew?
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#45There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same. But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool. Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting fo…
> There’s a lot of meeting hate here
meetings have their role, but the hate at least in my case is when they become a distraction and/or a waste of time. They are susceptible to the organizer and to the highest ranking person in the room and many managers are not up to the task of doing it correctly.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#46I've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specific to talk about. I wrote a short but hopefully clear description of what we needed to cover on each event that I scheduled. I found this worked really well in practice. We actually talked mor…
I have no doubt that this approach works better than recurring meetings, but I do want to point out the trade-off, which is that this approach requires much more management attention and energy to keep their finger on the pulse and ensure all concerns are handled, compared to their time management being on autopilot with recurring meetings. So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effect…
I’d also give some pushback based on scheduling: fixed meetings are a known quantity people can schedule around.
For coders and people with lives, knowing what their week looks like is critical to planning and stress management (ie in X work hours topic Y will be landed, I have X - 2 hours to have my facts in line; daily 9:15 meeting ends at 9:30, everything after 9:30 is a predictable block I manage).
Now, to the issues and whattabout’s that implies:
1) bruuuuutal meeting discipline: off topic gets killed, new topics insta-popped onto next agenda, scripts of expected responses prepared and shared (“we are green, need approval by X”). Stand if ya gotta, chess-clock if ya gotta, bring in a non-teammate for secretary duties as needed. Meetings are not gab sessions.
2) if that agenda isn’t lava hot with everyone actively getting something, W-O-W, end the meeting. Split off, 1-on-1, task-group it. Fixed project meetings are to make manager-me not have to chase anyone or anything, we are racing to get that done ASAP and the second we’re done it’s time to get the fu… ahem> grab a coffee, and return to the activities everyone is being paid for. Gab sessions naturally follow, as needed, dynamically adapting to needs and pressures.
Managers who manage meetings manage to meet without meetings managing them. Manage time or time will manage you. The real MBA was the one inside you the entire time.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#47IMO this is such a manager-brained take. If your long-term strategic goals aren't being advanced, you have to figure out why. Talk to your team and figure out what the deal is. Talk to other teams too, while you're at it. You might accidentally solve a problem. The number of managers who've successfully convinced themselves that knowing things and making decisions aren't part of their job, and just fill their days wi…
You know what, I read it again and I don't even disagree with the concrete advice in the post—weekly meeting, starting with open tasks from last week—which I would characterize as a basic, ubiquitous, almost anodyne organizational coordination tool. My problem is this part:
> Everyone has other obligations, fires to put out, and emails to answer. It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list...this creates pressure on everyone to make progress.
One experience among many: I spent a very painful six months as a new grad, in a particularly dysfunctional corner of a mildly dysfunctional organization, in hours of daily back-to-back arm-twisty status meetings with team after team who wanted something from me and were sure this would get it (after which I would stay up all night working, since that was the only time I had left for that).
You know how it ended? The tech lead on my team cornered me in a conference room to find out why nothing was getting done, and I fully lost it with the guy. Like just started shouting that the actual consequences of ignoring the things people wanted ignored were transparently not acceptable, and I was barely sleeping trying to hold everything together. He got very quiet, said "ok," and we started going to meetings together and saying no to stuff. The amount that was collectively being demanded from me/us exceeded what could be delivered, but no one was on triage duty.
I've learned quite a bit since then (including spending a few years in management), so I've gotten better at understanding what's happening and asking for what I need. I've just also decided that "it's not my role to figure it out" managers (and PMs) are like rocks in the bowels of an organization. They’re in the way, subtly, quietly making everything bloated and painful as long as they’re there.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#48I've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specific to talk about. I wrote a short but hopefully clear description of what we needed to cover on each event that I scheduled. I found this worked really well in practice. We actually talked mor…
I have no doubt that this approach works better than recurring meetings, but I do want to point out the trade-off, which is that this approach requires much more management attention and energy to keep their finger on the pulse and ensure all concerns are handled, compared to their time management being on autopilot with recurring meetings. So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effect…
I think it seems tautological to us because it's obvious to us. But other people do not understand or care to understand or even care to think about it. You can see it in this very comment section that there are people swearing how amazingly helpful fixed standups supposedly are even on a whole org level. It's obviously absurd but they have different jobs and priorities, they don't have to understand the inner workings of the product and for them it's invisible that the meetings are almost entirely worthless for the actual workers. The meetings are helping them in their job and so it must be great for the org, that's how many people managers think.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#49This is what sprint planning is all about. It's ostensibly to accept the work. But my God how everyone's hidden assumptions come to the surface.
Re: Meetings are forcing functions
#50Nah. A forcing function creates pressure toward an outcome...a standing meeting just creates pressure toward the meeting. Those aren't the same thing. The moment you put a recurring block on the calendar, the implicit contract shifts from "we make progress on this work" to "we show up on Tues at 2". The meeting becomes the deliverable. And it always stays long after the original need has passed because nobody wants t…
Yeah. The real thing that creates pressure is the people applying that pressure if progress is not made. If people act that way the meeting is an effective way to do this on a weekly base instead of letting it languish over month(s).
If nobody in the meeting actually cares that the feature isn't getting finished, then the meetings value is rather small.