I am not a fan of meetings. First, we meet too much. Secondly, too much is wasted in meetings - too little work is accomplished, too many resources squandered (e.g. time, energy, money). The normalized way we meet is so fraught with waste. This is partly due to bad meeting practices, and partly due to the frenetic nature of how many of us are living.
We literally bounce between meetings, appointments, obligations, errands and tasks. This busy-ness of our physiology is mirrored in our psychology. The more events on the calendar, the more occupied our minds are with logistics and timeframes, leaving little time to access, consistently, the deeper cognition needed to be even more strategic, creative and impactful. This means when we finally make it to the meeting, we are often not prepared or present. Then we walk away from the meeting unclear about what happened or what we are to do next. So then we need additional meetings to clarify and confirm what the heck happened at the last meeting. So how can we reduce the busy-ness and still go about our business? Step one: Kill all unnecessary meetings.
As we strive to bring about positive systems and cultures, our busy-ness undermines our ability to imagine and implement the impacts we are trying to bring about. Ensuring that our meetings are engaging, impactful, and clear is the least we can do to ensure our organizations, departments and teams are able to sustain the mental, emotional and physical powers needed to create the communities, build the unimaginable, and discover the astonishing..
Our time is precious, and meetings - scheduling, preparing, conducting take an enormous amount of time, energy and money. By meeting too often, for too unimportant reasons, the ritual of meetings loses power, and ends up being a practice in disengagement. Consider this:
There are over 25 Million Meetings daily in the US.
15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings.
Executives say 67% of meetings are failures.
These stats, taken together, and cross referenced with annual economic data for US-based organizations means ~$37 Billion is spent annually on unproductive meetings! Even with a margin of error of 50%+/-, these resulting wasted resources are cause for alarm. Ignore, if you can, for a moment, that ~$37 Billion of US-based organizations' resources are wasted, and think about the impact that this wasted time has on the subjects of these meetings.
If their executives think these meetings are ineffective, I assure you that the participants know they are. Meeting morass is not just draining financial resources, it is draining your people, frontliners to the executive team - leaving them uninspired, uninterested, demotivated and deflated.
If we are more intentional about when we meet, how we meet and what we meet for, we change the way we work and live together. The first step is to meet less, allowing time for us to work more, focus better and prepare for more impactful connections.
