"I really need to talk to you, but I'm triple booked at the moment...", is a common excuse of people running, open laptop in hand, from one meeting room to the next, because (of course) all those meetings were booked back-to-back, in rooms at the opposite side of the building, three floors up.
But it's not just that their calendars looks hectic; those same busy people will later tell you how much they dislike most of these meetings, and how little seems to be accomplished in them.
I have sat in many of those meetings, listening and observing the dynamics at play, and concluded that the "too many meetings" complaint usually can be traced back to two problems: high WIP, and mixed conversations.
Lots to do, lots to talk about
We meet to talk about the work we do; if we've committed to a lot of work (or we're planning to do so), then it follows that we'll most likely have lots of things to talk about. So, the first way to tackle the "we have to many meetings" complain might be to reframe it as "we have too much work in progress".
The effects of high WIP are multiple (and I have explored them in a past article), but in the context of this discussion, its effects on cognitive load and multitasking are the most relevant.
So, perhaps instead of solving the "too many meetings" problem by attempting to restructure our calendars, we could take a look at our inventory of commitments and then decide to do something about that: perhaps some commitments can be deferred, or we can put some limit to making new commitments, or some rules about how many to work on at a given time, etc. In any case, there are several strategies to limit WIP at our disposal (see my article on the subject).
There's also a common countermeasure that I think deserves a separate note: an attempt to change the rules about which meetings people should/can attend, often telling people that they are in liberty to decline or skip meetings they think are not relevant to them. Or even unceremoniously deleting meetings that "shouldn't be needed".
To be clear: I'm in complete support of taking a rational look at a calendar and dropping unnecessary meetings, as well as giving people agency when it comes to participating in meetings. That said, I haven't seen these strategies work in practice very often.
Giving team members the ability to decide is fine, but it needs to be accompanied with a clear guidance on the criteria to decide. And I don't believe that simply marking them as "optional" in the meeting invite is enough. More often than not, I've seen people still attend the meetings (after all, they also hear that the work we're asking them to do is important, right?), feeling that this is an option with no choices.
Something that I've seen works better is to change from "opt out" to "opt in" meetings: invite all the required participants as "required", and then make an open, general invitation for anyone else who might want to attend; that is, no "optional" invites. Perhaps ask people to contact you for an invitation, or create a sign-in page, or even better, hold the meetings in an open space where people can just drop by. A company I worked for many years ago used to run their Sprint Reviews in this fashion, in open areas with a large projection screen and comfy sofas, with everybody in the company invited to drop by, watch, and participate.
Dropping some unnecessary meetings can, of course, be a good idea. However, since we haven't really dropped the work those meetings were going to address, it's likely that the conversations that work required (and that arguably were going to be had in the meeting we just canceled) will find their way to other meetings convened for some other purpose.
Something similar tends to happen when someone decides to skip a meeting they assumed were "optional" for. The next time they show up in some other meeting, it's not uncommon to see the meeting highjacked into a tangent.
I think this is just another manifestation of that second problem mentioned at the beginning: mixed conversations, which we'll be exploring in the next instalment of this newsletter.
Stay tuned! 😉
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