I’ve been a fan of reforming meetings but have had difficulty thinking about how to do it.
I enjoyed the book Read this Before the Next Meeting, a short book by Al Pitampalli, which emphasized decision making and preparation before a meeting. This was a good start because the advice fits nicely with my preference to solve problems one-on-one, but it was a myopic in its proposed solution.
Death by Meeting takes a different tack by emphasizing the need for meetings is to unearth and expose conflict. This allows all players to put their views on the table for an open resolution. It is an appealing approach, though it will take some thinking in how to implement this, especially as a lower level employee within the organization.
The other key point of the book is to categorize the meetings: five-minute huddles, weekly “tactical” check-ins, monthly strategy sessions, and quarterly off-sites. These categorizations don’t match my professional experience as a bit player outside of the C suite, however I like the idea of categorizing one’s meetings, so that each type can be fine tuned for fit.
When I was in production architecture, I would always push back against management’s assumption that a draftsman could just cut-and-paste old details. No one should start from scratch, but fact one needs to draw another detail means that this is a unique condition. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for such problems. Even so, details should be categorized and sorted, careful organization is the art of putting together a set.
Similarly, I think my role is to find a proper categorization for the multitude of meetings that I encounter in my position. From there, I need to envision how each of those meetings could be made more effective. Then I will need to consider my position (as low man internally, or main client on projects) to figure how to encourage change.
Along with streamlining asynchronous communications, I think this will be a pretty interesting exercise for the next few years.
In the half year since I wrote the first draft, I’ve written an extended blog post about weekly check-ins for projects and started a weekly check-in with my supervisor as well as a bi-weekly check-in for my digital signature side project at the office. I have not made any revisions to the weekly Owner Architect Contractor meetings, though I have been holding them as video conferences (with job walks on a separate day) which I think that works fairly well.
It looks like I will be deep in design for the next year, so it will be interesting to see how that process might be managed differently in a post-pandemic videoconference centric world.