The Project Book

CHAPTER 40 RUN MEETINGS THAT DON’T SUCK

We have a problem with meetings. Most of them suck. Like, really badly, and for some reason we seem reticent to do anything about that.

Some fear challenging the existing culture, others have decided to become part of the current culture, and a last group just don’t know how to do it well because the meetings they attend, well, suck.

In the US alone over 25 million meetings are conducted every day and the unproductive ones cost, on average, US$37 billion annually. If ever there was a statistic to persuade us of the need to change the way we do them, that’s it. It’s like buying a membership to a gym, turning up every day, then never exercising. I’ve definitely never done that, and I know you haven’t either.

Meetings are generally unproductive for three reasons:

1. The emotional intelligence of the attendees is low.
2. The attendees are not engaged in the subject matter.
3. The meeting has no structure.

Meetings will fall into one of the following quadrants (overleaf).

• Wasteful meetings are those that just shouldn’t happen at all. These are the ones we call ‘meetings for meeting’s sake’. Either that or they’re talkfests that take 10 minutes of content and spin it out into an hour. They’re a waste of time, energy and, for some, emotion.
• Cheerful meetings are those where we spend the first half hour talking about anything other than what we actually ...