How To Split An Atom

An old saying goes that you should meet as much as you need to, but you should only meet as much as you need to. Meetings are a great way to get everyone in the office on the same page, but if handled poorly they can easily explode into a garbled mess of inefficiency. Here are a few thoughts on how to keep your next meeting under control.

Bored Meetings

Jargon. Avoid pulling out phrases from your MBA (or Web 2.0) word of the day calender. There is nothing that turns a productive meeting into a death spiral of jargon fueled nothinginess than the first time someone says “viral” or “synergies.”

Guest List. The length of a meeting is geometrically related to the number of people involved. If you hope to ever see the light of day again, be certain that you limit the guest list of your brainstorming sessions to those who can truly benefit from the information being presented there. As tempting as it is to invite everyone to bask in the glory of your presentation, it’s better to keep good records and make them public later.

Manage digressions. While it might be OK to tell that story about your kid’s Baseball game for the twelfth time, understand that by doing so you have just doubled the time you’re going to spend in meeting. Sociologists call it the Broken Window theory, if you allow yourself a little digression (one broken window) you make it really easy for the rest of the room to take the distraction ball and run with it.

Keep good records. The worst feeling in the world is to leave a great brainstorming session just to realize that your notes make absolutely no sense to you and no one remembers any of the “great new ideas” you hashed out. Especially in long meetings, a lot of information gets put on the table, and the only way to ensure that it doesn’t fall through the cracks is by good record keeping. If you can, tape record the meeting so that anyone who wants to can review it later. If video isn’t possible, make certain that you have someone there who is responsible for corralling all of the good ideas that you work out.

Learn to let it go. There is a fine line between a discussion and an argument. Discussions have a chance of accomplishing something, and arguments (for the most part) are mindless and only take away from the goal of a meeting. If you notice two people going back and forth over a topic and it doesn’t look like it’s going to resolve itself into anything short of a fist-fight, take the reins and stop it. If people want to argue, have them do it on their own time, there is no point in dragging the entire meeting down over bickering.

“Just one more thing.” Set a strict time limit for your meetings. It’s amazing how an agenda can get thrown out of the window if no one is paying attention. Especially in meetings that occur frequently, set aside a certain buffer for additional topics but make certain that once that time is over you push the remaining pieces of the agenda to the next meeting.

Few people like bad meetings, but by taking a little time to organize yourself you have a chance of putting together a meeting that might justify waking up early on Monday morning to go to it.

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