On the Reduction of Meetings

A common complaint in many modern work environments is the sheer number of “meetings.”  Collections of individuals that inevitably interrupt creative “maker” work.  In general, there are good faith attempts have at the leadership and team level to indiscriminately “reduce” the number of meetings as well as “improve meeting hygiene.”  On reflection, the issue may not be so much a meeting issue, as it is a communication problem within the organization.  That is to say, meetings have a tendency to be one-sided--the person calling the meeting needs something from the attendees--and therefore feel interruptive and unimportant by some subset of the attendees.  By exploring a taxonomy of internal communication needs, we may be able reduce meetings through improved communication options rather than gross reduction and/or shaving minutes through hygiene.  External meetings are not yet included.

Taxonomy of Meetings:

1. Approval
2. Decision-making
3. Problem-solving/Advice
4. Working session
5. Collaborative Creation session
6. Informational/status update

Approvals:

• Who calls: Decision-maker with responsibility for a decision but not authority
• Who attends: One or more approving managers
• Agenda: Clearly disclaim that this is an approval meeting, send the decision up front if possible to avoid the meeting.
• Length: 15 minutes
• Benefits accrue to: Generally no one, meetings of this nature are often avoidable and reflect poor decision making process.
• Opportunities to reduce: Delegation of authority by role (staffing plans, budgeting, etc.)  

The Approval meeting exists whenever we have set up managers with responsibility to solve a problem but without the authority to do so.  These meetings are often the result of insufficient up-front planning (including budgeting) that would allow pre-delegation of authority to a trusted manager.  In general, these meetings should be reserved for novel situations and should be generally reduced through appropriate work planning and clear decision-making authority granting.

Decision-making:

• Who calls: Decision-maker with responsibility and partial authority
• Who attends: Peer decision-makers, usually of different functional areas with the remaining authority
• Agenda: Inform the participants ahead of time that a decision is to be made by the end of the meeting.  Send point of decision and any initial options ahead of time, but do not present initial options as constrained choices.
• Length: 30 minutes
• Benefits accrue to: All parties as long as this decision-making pattern exists
• Opportunities to reduce: Not clearly a positive.

The Decision-making meeting is different from the approval meeting in that peers with partial authority for decision-making come together to discuss multiple options. One member is not necessarily trying to get buy-in from others, but rather using the diverse functional experience of peers to choose together between a series of options.  As long as our business remains complicated and novel, these meetings will persist.  Reducing these meetings should not necessarily be a goal as we believe unilateral decision-making is less likely to produce superior decisions.

Problem-Solving/Advice

• Who calls: Decision-maker with responsibility and authority, but insufficient information
• Who attends: Functional experts from different disciplines
• Agenda: Inform the participants ahead of time that a you are seeking input on a decision that you will make. Try and determine if you need factual input or judgement input. Send point of decision and any initial questions ahead of time
• Length: 30-90 minutes depending on topic.  
• Benefits accrue to: Decision-maker & judgement giver (to help organize their own functions)
• Opportunities to reduce: Functional experts can maintain knowledge bases to reduce the factual input-style meetings.  

Problem-solving/Advice meetings are similar to Decision-making except the attendees are there to advise rather than decide.  The meeting caller can accept or reject any input, and should make this distinction clear so as to not confuse or offend the attendees whose input is not incorporated in a final decision.  Fact-seeking type meetings may be avoidable if functional areas are able to invest in transparent knowledge bases.  This leaves the bulk of these meetings to be judgement related which are incredibly beneficial for both the caller and the attendees.  The caller gets advice to make a better decision.  The attendees have an opportunity to verbalize and potentially re-organize their thoughts about their area of expertise, which can often lead to breakthroughs elsewhere.  

Working Session

• Who calls: Decision-maker with responsibility and authority, but insufficient skill or labor
• Who attends: functional experts, skill experts, labor from own team
• Agenda: Inform the participants ahead of time that a you are trying to complete a fairly well-described task together, which will likely be complete at the end of the meeting. Send a great description of the problem at hand and initial broadly sketched solutions and/or previous solutions.  Time and task management is crucial.
• Length: 60-240 minutes (with breaks)
• Benefits accrue to: Company & Customers
• Opportunities to reduce: Build functions for commonly occurring tasks/problems.

The working session is when you have to get things done, often early in a small company's life cycle.  A great example is board-book preparation, or customer mailers.  Any time that a project is important or complex enough that more labor and/or special skill are required in parallel, call a Working session to get things done. Regular working sessions to solve the same problems repeatedly may be call for creation of a function with new positions to handle new regular work.

Collaborative Creation Session

• Who calls: Decision-maker with responsibility and authority, but insufficient skill or labor
• Who attends: functional experts, skill experts, labor from own team
• Agenda: Inform the participants ahead of time that a you are trying to complete a complex, poorly-described task together, which will likely NOT be complete at the end of the meeting. Send a great description of the problem at hand and initial broadly sketched solutions and/or previous solutions.
• Length: 90-240 minutes (with breaks)
• Benefits accrue to: Company & Customers
• Opportunities to reduce: Not a goal.

The Collaborative Creation session is used when multiple disciplines are required to solve a new, complex problem. Our Cross-functional teams are an example. Unlike the working session, your goal is not to “get things done” but rather build something new and different.  This is generally hard, messy, takes more than one meeting, and is exactly why many of us come to work every day.  We have plenty of internal skill, specifically on the Operations Development, Talent and Culture and Product teams at how to facilitate creative meetings so I will defer to them. Managing these meetings over time is often a necessary skill as the work will spill from meeting to meeting and participants will not always be available.

Informational/status update

• Who calls: Functional area/Team leader, Someone who wants to know something
• Who attends: functional experts from one or many teams
• Agenda: Clear agenda of topics to be covered, either ad hoc or regular agenda. Inform the participants ahead of time of what is to be covered so they can prepare their updates.  Make it clear that the goal here is to inform and not necessarily advise or decide.  Allow for Q&A (to distinguish this meeting from what could have been an e-mail). Time management key to cover all areas.  Will likely spawn additional other types of meetings.
• Length: 10-60 minutes (with breaks)
• Benefits accrue to: The need-to-be-informed. This is generally a cost for the informers unless they learn as well.
• Opportunities to reduce:
• Any unilateral information dump of non-contentious nature could be converted to a written communication, e-mail, knowledge base, snippets, tweets, etc.  
• Smaller sized meetings also more likely to be universally beneficial.
• Ask yourself if there is another way to learn the information that takes less of your participants time
• Find ways to bring additional content that is useful to the attendees 

The status meeting.  On the positive side, these meetings allow very sensitive or nuanced information to be discussed, access to senior leadership decision-making thought process rather than facts.  They help keep everyone synchronized and working together and on the right things.  Done well, these meetings are crucial to a healthy organization.  

Perhaps the greatest paradox is that we do not have any time to do work, read notes/updates, because we are always in informational or status meetings.  These are the biggest potential offenders for wasted, interruptive time.  Because they tend to be large, they are often scheduled at a time that is optimal for no one.  Also, it can be hard to make these meetings sufficiently beneficial to everyone as the benefits often accrue to the uninformed, who call the meetings, and then continue to call them causing a downward spiral.  These meetings tend to be regularly occurring without clear need or agenda.