Amazingly, talented people who care can come together and yet fail demonstrably in a ‘meeting.’

Meetings fail because the participants do not know HOW TO succeed. Meeting challenges include anything that takes the energy from meetings. To deal with low energy, first understand the causes of meeting challenges.

Chaos 
Without Structure

To contend with difficulties, take a closer look at how a normal business meeting processes information. Like all other forms of energy, unless you harness and manage meetings within a structured environment, chaos will result. The structure takes the creative energy generated in a group and converts it into something productive. The creative energy available to any group comes as ideas and information. When information and ideas are processed in business meetings, it is usually done without adequate structure.

Information Problems

Meeting Challenges

The following information processing problems occur because of unstructured meetings:

• Disruptive interruptus—limits the continuity of the group’s ideas.
• Inconclusive progressions—moving on to another topic and not adequately concluding or summarizing the previous topic.
• Information queuing—mentally storing comments while waiting for an opportunity to speak. When the time comes, the timing is inappropriate and the discussion gets derailed.
• Mixing abstractions—two people talking at different perspectives and levels of detail, different wavelengths, or different levels of resolution.
• Solution jumping—prematurely discussing solutions before the problem has been adequately defined.
• Topic jumping—inappropriately changing the topic. (In the average unstructured meeting, groups change topics every minute and a half.)

Complicating Factors

Complicating even further are the tactics used by meeting leaders to deal with information-processing problems. Three common and unsuccessful approaches:

1. Heavy-handed control—overreaction that results in the inhibition of creativity and analysis.
2. Symposium style—speaking one at a time in sequence. Eliminates the advantage of spontaneous interaction.
3. Withdrawal—results in no direction at all.

Decision Problems

Decisions are made generally by:

• Default (that’s the way they wanted it anyway)
• Dominance (the squeaky wheel syndrome)
• Groupthink (no one disagrees or questions the decision because all assume someone—usually a strong leader—has the right answer. This is one of the explanations for the “Bay of Pigs” incident—no one argued with the decision).
• Sheer exhaustion (we give up—do what you want)

Decision Styles

In response to the problems of decision-making, some leaders have adopted tactics such as:

• Authoritarian (good control and quick, but is often wrong and creates low morale)
• Consensus (encourages participation/ unanimity, but is slow without someone to facilitate it through discipline and structure)
• Majority rules (very democratic and participative, but allows tyranny of the majority and is slow)
• Minority rules (permits persuasion, but creates political resentment)

Underdevelopment

Remember, while the number of meetings is growing, the mismanagement of meetings is costing a substantial amount of money each year. Wasted time equals wasted resources. Meeting leadership is an underdeveloped management skill, but it can be learned.

Meeting Types

There are as many types of meetings as there are meeting leaders. Most meetings, however, fall into three general categories:

• Information sharing meetings
• Task-related meetings—directed or instructional
• Task-related meetings—facilitated or developed

Loss of Creative 
Energy

Session leaders typically use more than 60 percent of the communication time available in a meeting, leaving at most 40 percent of the talk time for participants, or 24 minutes in a one-hour meeting. Unequal distribution means much of the creative energy located within the group is not being tapped, decreasing the productivity of the meeting. Hence, it’s no wonder meetings fail because of low energy.

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

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Related articles

• 3 Ways to Keep Meetings Short (Every Time) (inc.com)
• How to Design Culture: 16 Patterns to Build Adaptive Learning Organizations (emergentbydesign.com)

Facilitation Expert

Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.