How To Have a Useless Meeting
The best meetings are short, to the point, and simply involve getting the key people together to either make key decisions, or share important information. Why, then, are the vast majority of meetings unproductive wastes of time? The only logical answer is that people must prefer having useless meetings.
Fortunately for you, I have attended so many useless meetings over the years that I have assembled an easy-to-follow set of guidelines to help you make all your meetings as useless as the ones I have endured. Enjoy!
1. Neglect to invite people who have key information or responsibilities
2. Invite a bunch of people who contribute nothing
3. Let every half-wit have their say, whether it's productive or not
4. Do not prepare, and discourage people from coming prepared
My favourite is the kind of person who shows up, picks up a hand-out (that was emailed to him weeks ago) and says "so what's this meeting about?" Invite him to all meetings!
5. Fail to make any decisions or announce anything new
6. If you happen to break the previous rule, do not follow up on any of it
7. Book it on very short notice
8. Schedule the meeting at a bad time (e.g: 7am, noon, 5pm)
9. Start late
10. Find a way to fill up all the scheduled time, plus a few minutes to make people late
If the room is booked for an hour and you're done at quarter past, and you're not sure how to fill the remaining 45 minutes, just follow rule #3.
Want more thoughts about Work?
posted by Robert Vollman at Friday, August 11, 2006
7 Comments:
You should come work for my company. You have what it takes to make it here!
How about:
Make sure that the people you invite carry pagers and cells and blackberries so that you have spend one minute out of five recapping what they missed during the other four while they fiddled with their toys.
Always defer decisions that let you make progress until a future meeting, but never defer fact-finding or issue-analysis tasks. That way everyone gets the annoyance of a lot of work, but not the satisfaction of making progress. Don't forget to do the same at the deferred meeting.
Always use a scheduling system like Lotus Notes to fill up your co-workers' calendars, then change the meeting times and locations many times until nobody knows what meeting they are attending or where.
Related to the above: It's really funny and skillful if you can arrange it so that when the people in one meeting dispurse, check their calendars, travel to their next meetings and surprisingly find themselves in another meeting in another room with exactly the same people they just left 5 minutes earlier.
Try to schedule meetings for people back to back, far apart, with lots of setup effort, and unrelated. You want someone from a meeting that finished at 10am to be in another meeting starting at 10am at least 7 floors away (hopefully another building) where they are the first speaker and they will need to set up a laptop, flipchart and distribute a lot of material that they wouldn't have with them from their previous meeting.
If you are assembling too many people to find a common time slot don't worry, schedule it anyway so that your coworkers can do the hard work of re-arranging their schedules for you. Don't forget to change the meeting after they accept as in the earlier rule.
A meeting is not a meeting unless it's at least an hour, even if all you really need is to phone the person for 10 minutes. A day is just 8 meetings!
Wow, thanks for all the tips. You just gave me the equivalent of one full year of an MBA program!
Now if you can just teach me how to spend an entire budget without producing anything to show for it, I'll be qualified for a promotion to management.
Alex, you're clearly a seasoned meeting organiser. You should look to a career in government.
There are a couple of extra people you need, though Robert, to make your meetings complete.
The nay sayer... he's the guy who openly opposes every decision the meeting is making.
The back stabber... the guy (or girl, of course) who supports everything the meeting agrees to do, then the minute he/she steps outside, starts to actively sabotage the work.
The dreamer... strong on big vision, weak on application or understanding of how to achieve it. This one's useful, but only at every third or fourth meeting. The trouble, though, with the dreamer, is that he will sulk if he's not invited to every meeting.
The boss... has absolutely no idea what you're doing, but thinks the meeting is a great way for him to 'control' his division/department/company.
And finally, no meeting is a good meeting without refreshments... cookies or cakes, or even sandwiches for lunch.
(Which, by the way, is a great way to feed yourself for free... check the lunch time meeting schedules and always try to walk past the meeting room just as the meeting's over. There'll always be a few leftovers.)
Oh... and to spend an entire budget without having anything to show for it... easy!
Just become a government.
And try this...
http://www.bullshitbingo.net/
This is fabulous! Thanks. :)
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