Do you have too many meetings on your calendar and no longer know where your head is? That's how many people feel.
And the clever ideas for better meetings don't help at all? I can well understand that.
I suggest you treat a meeting like a bug, like an "organizational bug", and work to fix the meeting - instead of improving it.
We don't want to optimize a software bug, we want to get to the root cause and prevent it in the future. We should also strive to do this with meetings. Many of them arise as a result of errors when organizing work.
Of course there are meaningful meetings. Agile working provides for several of these: A team generates a new solution from a new task in a creative process. A committee selects an option from various courses of action by decision. We all come together because information needs to be distributed or opinions obtained. And as social beings, we want to be in contact with other people. That's perfectly fine. I call these meetings working meetings.
But otherwise? The many coordination, "let's sit down together" and "we'll continue next week" meetings are only necessary because someone should or wants to do something that they can't, aren't allowed to or don't dare to do. Otherwise he/she could just do it. The fault obviously lies in the task, the goal, the ability or the authority.
Such a non-working meeting is an indication that something unregulated needs to be regulated. A bug has occurred in the organization. You thought everything was clear, but it obviously isn't. Someone doesn't know the direction, can't do the task professionally or isn't allowed to. So the rules have to be looked at and adapted.
In organizational German, you could say that the "AKVs" (task, responsibility, competence) do not fit together. Otherwise, a person could simply complete the task: He knows what he should; may do what he needs; and can do what he must.
The solution lies in finding the causes in the rules and framework conditions:
Is the direction clear?
Is the order precise?
Do the skills fit?
Are the powers sufficient?
What about the mourning?
If you answer the questions honestly, you will come up with completely different search areas for the solutions and probably won't have to call a "follow-up meeting":
Someone needs guidance or information about priorities,
needs help in clarifying the order or request,
needs support in building skills,
needs other powers and decision-making competencies,
or needs encouragement to dare to do so.
And it already smells of leadership work. Because the questions listed are to be answered by those roles that organize the work of and for others. These are the supervisors, managers, product owners, team leads, scrum masters, etc., etc. Those who spare themselves the effort of management work to provide their people with the best possible orientation, mission, skills, authority and trust cause meetings. If you don't develop your employees, you force them into meetings that fill up their calendars and keep them from working. You can blame the employees for this, but they are not to blame.
An organization that suffers from the overall burden of so many meetings shifts the technical blame for organizational bugs onto itself. Once all employees have come to terms with the unclear situation, the meeting malaise continues. No one can afford to be absent anywhere.
It's just like with software that is "buggy": everyone then organizes themselves around the errors and at some point considers this to be normal suffering.
Anyone who has to "meet" a lot is obviously poorly organized.
Photo from unsplash.com by rodeo-project-management-software
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