Meetings that set highs not sighs

By VICKI JAYNE

How many times have you emerged from a meeting thinking "well that was a waste of time"?

Some organisations seem wedded to running endless meetings that provide little more than an opportunity for perennial platform hoggers to grandstand, a venue for task delegation or an arena in which egos can clash like battle-scarred gladiators.

Attendance may be based on job title rather than relevance, and hour-long meetings persist even if all the work was done in the first 15 minutes.



The time large organisations devote to meetings can be scary.

"Two to three months a year - and that's probably conservative," reckons Phil Jones, a business coach with Pathfinder International.

"There's a huge amount of time wasted and that represents money. Then there's the cost in terms of frustration and the opportunity cost of other things not getting done."

One problem is that while participants might whinge about time wasted, there's a "huge tolerance inside the culture of most meetings that this is acceptable," adds Jones.

Many people see a meeting as an event rather than a process.

"Because they view it that way, they just go to it and see it as finished when they leave.

"The process actually begins before the meeting and carries on after it, so getting people to shift their thinking and to see meetings as a process is important."

He offers businesses a programme called MeetSmart and says that although making meetings more effective is not rocket science, it does need senior management support. Sending five people off on an effective meetings course won't achieve a lot.

"There must be a commitment from the top to create a smart meeting culture."

Anne Pattillo is spokesperson for a newly formed institute, Open Space Aotearoa, set up to promote an innovative meeting technique.

Her recipe for making meetings more meaningful is to ditch traditional agendas in favour of an "open space technology."

Open space meetings have no set agenda, no speakers, and no planned workshops. Participants set the agenda, take responsibility for work-shopping subjects of their choice, achieving and recording concrete outcomes.

Passion and responsibility are the key requirements, says Pattillo.

The technique has been well tested in a host of settings around the world. It has worked in groups ranging in size from five to 1500, whose purpose has included everything from developing new products or business strategies, to sorting out complex community issues.

"It has been around now for 15 years and is no longer in test mode," says the concept's inventor Harrison Owen, briefly in New Zealand to lend support.

He was prompted to take a new tack on meeting structure by his frustration at the feedback from an international symposium he organised in 1985. It could be summed up as: "Fantastic event ... Really enjoyed the coffee breaks."

So, drawing on his experience of other cultures and his work with a community and business groups, he devised a new meeting system.

Its primary elements were the circle (a setting in which everything of importance is discussed, as is done in an African village), the bulletin board (to determine what is discussed), and the indigenous marketplace.



Combine those three things and you get open space.

"You start out with x number of people sitting in a circle. You get them to identify what they care about, create a bulletin board, open a marketplace and people go to work."

The fear that no one will put forward an agenda topic has never been realised, says Harrison. He has handled up to 150 topics a meeting and the promise is that if someone cares about it, it's on the agenda.

Owen puts its success down to the general principles of self-organising systems identified by biologists.

"Once certain pre-conditions exist, self-organisation happens. The one way to stop that happening is to try to organise it."

The message is: resist control.

While the system might seem to favour the articulate and risk being hijacked by those with strong personal agendas, that has never happened in Pattillo's experience.

She has found open space a constructive way of dealing with divisive community issues and sees major potential for business to achieve productivity gains.

"Every hour of every day there are meetings being held in offices up and down New Zealand. If they were all specifically focused on what needed discussion and there was a firm, consistent action orientation so people left knowing what to do next, they could be a lot shorter and only involve those who have a part in moving the issue forward."

* vjayne@iconz.co.nz