Effective Meetings

About this Episode

This episode of the Acima Development Podcast dives deep into the art of effective meetings, exploring both what makes them successful and what causes them to fail. Mike opens with humorous anecdotes of ineffective meetings, such as “death by PowerPoint” and marathon discussions that inadvertently turned into workout sessions. These examples highlight the common pitfalls of meetings that lack focus, preparation, or structure. The episode aims to turn these common frustrations into learning points for hosting productive, engaging, and goal-oriented meetings.

Panelists Tad, Eddy, and Dave contribute insights into the key components of successful meetings. Tad emphasizes the importance of structure, such as having a clear agenda, timekeeping, and redirecting off-topic discussions to maintain focus. Eddy underscores the value of respecting participants' time, avoiding unnecessary tangents, and setting clear expectations for the meeting’s purpose. Dave provides a philosophical perspective, distinguishing between passive, reactive participation and proactive engagement, and stresses the importance of preparation and decision-making as central objectives of any meeting. The group also discusses strategies like giving everyone an active role, employing visual aids, and embracing rules like timeboxing to manage discussions effectively.

The conversation concludes with actionable takeaways for designing better meetings. Key recommendations include establishing rules of engagement, distributing materials beforehand to ensure participants come prepared, and maintaining focus through time management and participant roles. The panel advocates for meetings that prioritize purpose over duration, ensuring decisions are made efficiently. By adopting these strategies, the podcast argues, teams can transform meetings from dreaded time sinks into productive, collaborative sessions that respect everyone’s time and energy.

Transcript:

MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike, and I am hosting again today. With me, I have a nice panel. We've got Dave.

DAVE: Howdy, Howdy.

MIKE: Ramses.

RAMSES: Howdy, Howdy.

MIKE: Eddy.

EDDY: Hey.

MIKE: And Tad.

TAD: Hi.

MIKE: Today, we are going to be talking about meetings, specifically about how to have effective meetings. And I'm going to present the topic on purpose because then I'm going to talk about the alternate. Because I think that if you're listening to this, and you're old enough to listen to a podcast, you have been in a horrible meeting. It was ineffective. It seems to be the default state of meetings because they are awful. They're famously bad.

I've been wondering about which particular example to bring up. I have a couple from my experience of bad meetings. Once somebody offered...when I was doing a presentation, they had a related presentation, and they had some slides for it. This was some time back. I was teaching a class, and they had some slides. And they said, “Well, do you want some slides for your class?” And I said...and I paused for a moment. And I thought, slides? And I asked him, “Have you heard of death by PowerPoint?” [laughs] And he said, “Yes, actually, I have.” And it surprised me that the question was even asked because it just sounded so opposite of what I thought an effective discussion would be made of. It’s the first example that came to mind.

I had another situation, this was quite a few years ago, where the team I was on discussed things so much. We had such long discussions about every architectural decision because we were building out a new application. It was hours. It was like six hours a day. And this was before people generally had cameras on. This is long enough ago, you know, video didn't always work, so it was audio meetings. And I couldn't stay awake. So, I started doing pull-ups and push-ups [laughs] during my meetings. And I put on 15 pounds of muscle from my meetings [laughs]. It was so bad that it actually improved my health [laughs].

TAD: Nice.

MIKE: So, I don't know whether to complain about that or not, but meetings can be that bad. And, on the flip side, when you're in a meeting that's good, that is on point, and you get your topic covered, and you end early, everybody is just like, “Wow, how did that happen? That was a good meeting.” And I think it stands out because it's so different from what we expect by default. It turns out meetings are hard. It's hard to have a good meeting. And so, we're going to talk at length about that today.

And I can give my ideas, but I've talked about some bad ones. I'm going to kind of step back and ask the panel here, you know, what do you think is important to have a good meeting? Or we can start off on the other track as well, you know, feel free to mention what you think makes for a bad meeting. I have some things that I believe are key to having a good and effective meeting, but I'm not going to throw those out first. I'm interested in what you all have to say, and then we'll build from there. So, what makes for a good meeting?

TAD: One of the reasons why this topic kind of struck me is because I've actually...and I haven't been a member recently, but I was a member of Toastmasters for about four years. And it's primarily known as a public speaking club. But they’ve kind of tried to change the branding a little bit of more just a leadership business public speaking. Like, there's a whole host of skills that they really are trying to promote. And one of them is specifically meeting management because every Toastmasters meeting they require that you have an agenda. They require that you know all the speakers, all the things that are going to happen beforehand, how long they're going to speak for, that sort of thing.

And as the person that runs the meeting, the success of your meeting is determined by did you hit all of the time points, and did you close the meeting out in an hour or less? And that's considered success, right? And they actually have someone in the meeting who's the timekeeper who the person running the meeting has to consult regularly like, okay, are we on time? Oh, did we fall behind? Okay, let me adjust. So, for me, it would be, do you have an agenda? Do you know what's going to happen in that meeting? Do you have a good idea of how long each piece of that meeting is going to take? And did you end on time?

And part of that is, also, a lot of times things will come up in the meeting, and you have to have a way to, like, you’re like, “Okay, that's a great point. That's off-topic.” What's the process to handle something like that, right? Okay, do you take a note? That will be an action item. We'll take that offline. We'll have a discussion about that later, that sort of thing, too. So, those are just a handful of elements that I think make for a good meeting.

MIKE: Okay. So, I think you've given a good list there. I'm going to come back to some of those as host because I think they're worth revisiting. What about others in the call here?

EDDY: I think one thing people need to realize when they set up meetings is that you need to respect other people's time, right? If you're going to ask someone to be there for 30 minutes and then you spend 20 of those minutes about random stuff that's not even part of the agenda or the topic, you're not being effective, and then you're actually causing people to not pay attention, right? So, I think what's really important is that you have to respect the fact that other people have other things to do and to stay on course. I think that's one of my biggest concerns when being part of meetings.

Another one that kind of just top of my head is timeboxing. It's something that we like to do in other meetings, right? Like, set things up in a certain window. If you think that it's going to go longer than that, axe it and then talk about that elsewhere. Again, it goes back to respecting people's time. I think that's really important.

And probably setting some expectations, like, some ground rules, right? Like, this is what this meeting is going to be about. Let's try to not go into tangents and stay on course. So, I think those three core things, for me, is what makes meetings important.

DAVE: When I think about good meetings, there's, like, the how, and the why, and those are two separate things in my mind. Like, the why, like, what is this meeting for, and, you know, why are we doing this? Most people come to a meeting in reactive, passive response mode. Just like, well, I'm just going to go to this room. I'm going to sit down, and then I'm going to see what happens. And then, I'm going to respond or react to it. And that's what most of us do in our meetings. And when you've got 99 people in a meeting, and only one person has a 5-minute agenda, it's going to be an hour-long meeting where it's just chit-chat, and socialize, and discussion.

There's a really good very, very short book. It used to be free. I don't know if it is anymore. It was paid for a while. It was, like, two bucks at the time. It's called “Read This Before Our Next Meeting.” And he takes a very aggressive stance. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in the podcast, a couple of episodes ago, that we do stand up with 30 people on Michael’s teams, and we're out in five minutes. And Will got mad.

He’s like, there's no way you're having...and I'm like, there's no way we're getting together, and discussing, and socializing, and screwing around and not having a meeting. You're right; we're not getting any of that done. But we are getting decisions made, and we are getting emergencies addressed, which was the whole point of that particular meeting.

The read this before the meeting guy...I don't want to do a whole book report, but he basically says, “Meetings are to make decisions.” Everyone in the meeting should come ready to make that decision, which means they should have the information they need. Now, we do an architecture meeting where we get everybody together. And we say, “Let me show you this system,” and that's kind of information dissemination. If we wanted to be really, really aggressive, we could say, “You know what? Why don't you go make a 20-minute video? And then, in architecture, we'll just show people where the link is, and they can go watch it on their own time. We don't have to have everybody here.”

I kind of like the socialization side of it. It's not worth, you know, like, really getting it after. But what I noticed is that if you go through any of the meeting etiquette books, they'll tell you: don't have status meetings; just stop. Because you should know what your team is doing. You should know what's going on, and if you don't, you're going to end up one person talking about “Well, I'm working on this,” and half the people in the room aren't on that team. They don't care. It's like Eddy said, “ Be respectful of people's time.”

And I think it's really, really interesting that if you...that's the how versus the why. If you come in ready to say, “We need to make a decision. Are we going to use this technology or that technology, or is there a third-party technology we need to be ready for?” That's a very, very active meeting at that point. You come in. You have an argument, you know, hopefully. Well, hopefully not.

But, I mean, like, if you're prepared to debate and push back, everybody's got their ammo loaded. Everyone's loaded for bear because they came ready to talk about this is the Elasticsearch problem, or this is the Sidekiq problem, or this is dah dah dah. And everybody comes ready and laser-focused; I think we should. And then, the objective is get to a decision. Everybody commits to the decision, and we walk out.

Not to tattle on ourselves, but, like, we've talked about dry monads versus dry transactions for like two years, and we haven't made a decision. And now they're both in the codebase because we have people that want to champion it. And that's fine. I mean, that's one of our functions. That's how we do things, and that's fine. But if we had wanted, if we needed a very strong discrimination of, like, “We want one, and we definitely want not the other.” We would send everybody, “Go study this, go study that, play with them both. Come armed and ready because when you walk out, you're going to be using one of these, and it might not be the one you like.” And that's a very active meeting. You come much more energized and ready to go.

And you can actually have...I've done this before where I've walked into a meeting, and we're all loaded for bear, and then, also, we find out every single person in the room already agrees. Like, there's literally nobody backing the other contender, and it's like, we're done. Let's just not have the rest of this meeting. And you kind of go from there. So, anyway, that's my excited thing.

I've got a bunch of, like, howsies, you know, like, functional things to do. But that was the big thing is, if you come ready and focused and there's an agenda in advance of, this is what we want to accomplish, and as soon as we accomplish it we're done, oh man, you motivate people by saying, "Would you like some of your life back?"

TAD: Yeah, I think I want to say Jeff Bezos does that at Amazon, where he requires you to have a full written up memo before the meeting of, what's the core discussion topic? Why is it important? What are the details of it? And if you show up and you haven't read that, he'll be like, “Okay, who hasn't read it? Oh, some of you haven't read it. Okay, we're going to take five minutes at the beginning of this meeting or whatever. And everyone has to read through the document and familiarize themselves with all of the things we're about to discuss.”

So, the idea being that you have to do your homework before the meeting or else what's the point of the meeting? Because I think I've been in meetings and you've all been in meetings where you get there, and you realize, oh, we've just got a bunch of questions. We've got a bunch of stuff we don't know. Okay, well, now it's time to assign homework to people and come back and have the real meeting later because this meeting was just a realization that we don't have anything prepared [laughs]. We don't know what's going on yet.

EDDY: So, you're saying that if a meeting leads to another meeting because that meeting wasn't productive [laughs], that's a problem.

TAD: Yeah.

DAVE: I've worked with a manager who took the extreme, draconian other end of that, which was “Has anybody not read this?” And, you know, somebody would be like, “Oh, I'm sorry, I need to catch up on this.” And he just canceled the meeting on the spot. And, like, “No, we need everybody in on this, and I'm not going to waste everybody else's time. We'll meet tomorrow.” And they came ready the next day. I mean, there were some scalded paws, and this particular person didn't mind conflict. He didn't mind upsetting people. But, boy, we all came ready the next day. And --

EDDY: And, again, you're setting up expectations, right? I think that's why it's important. Like, we come back to that again is that you're respecting people's time, right? You're setting up expectation of what that meeting is going to be about, right? And if you're not going...basically, if you arrive late, or you're not participating, you didn't do your homework, right, then you're not respecting other people. You're saying that your time is not worth --

DAVE: I wouldn't go so far as to call it disrespect. It absolutely can be considered disrespectful. But I think a lot of us don't realize that, oh, I’ve got this stupid meeting. Fine, I'll just go and find out what it's about, right? And you show up in reactive passive mode. And those are the same thing, right? If you willfully show up unprepared, you're a jerk, yeah, so...

Mike, you talked about being in six-hour meetings, and I had a thought about that, which was that was not a meeting. That was a mob programming design session, right? The objective was to come up with the design. What are we going to build? And if you tell people that's what this is going to be, it's much more palatable.

EDDY: You know, what I'm actually really interested in is kind of a tangent from that, is, if it really is true, what you said, and I'm hoping it's a bit of an exaggeration, Mike, but if you're in six-hour meetings a day, right, I for one struggle to pay attention for longer than, like, 15 minutes on something before I start wandering off and, you know, start doing stuff. So, I think I have some pretty gnarly ADHD, right, and if I'm not being focused, if you're not actively engaging me, I'm just going to start to drift, and then I'm not even going to listen to you anymore. So, I guess as we progress, I'm really curious to kind of dig your mind on how the heck.

MIKE: Well, I wasn't exaggerating so you know [laughs]. That was literally what was going on, and it went on for months, and it was brutal [laughs] for all the reasons you mentioned. That's why...and I'll actually say that...and I think we're going to talk about this in a future podcast. One thing that is important to realize is we do have finite ability to concentrate. And if you don't have some way to get through that, yeah, everybody's going to be disengaged [laughs].

TAD: Well, I think it's especially bad, well, you know, like going back to when I was team lead, I would go from meeting to meeting to meeting. And people would just put stuff on my calendar, and I'd just show up in a meeting. I'd just click next meeting, next meeting, next meeting, and they're back to back to back. And I didn't even know what the meeting was about or why I was in it. I'd just kind of be there.

But I think ours is especially tough because a lot of times our meetings are very complex, technical, think real hard kind of meetings. And those kind of meetings really drain your battery a lot more than just a regular meeting, right, like trying to work out very complex systems and systems interactions. I feel like we need a lot more gaps between those types of meetings just to let your brain decompress than just a regular business meeting, right?

DAVE: I've worked with people, and fortunately, not many. It was, like, 10% of the population are psychopaths that tend to be on that dark triad thing. And I think we've all probably had this experience where there's that one guy who wants you to come to his meeting because he wants to control your time. And so, he's not going to give you an agenda. He's not going to tell you what the objective is. He just wants you here.

And you can tell because he's the guy that when you start looking at your laptop and thinking, you know, I could probably kick off another build, he's the guy that will pounce on you and say, “What do you think?” and will deliberately not tell you what they were just talking about. That's somebody who's a predator at that point. We've all worked with jerks, but it gets weaponized. And if you have people that are reactive and passive, it snowballs, and those people end up running the company, which is why they do it.

MIKE: So, you touched a little bit on wrong [laughs] meeting management for people. Well, also, on something that tends to just really destroy meetings, which is when you have a single individual who takes control, and that can be the host.

DAVE: If there's an objective, yeah, let's have a leader. Absolutely.

MIKE: But there's a difference between being the host to get toward the objective and being a host because you're the focus of the meeting [laughs]. And those are two very different things, right? One is self-aggrandizing, and the other one is to try to facilitate. And we should recognize that facilitation is valuable. Self-aggrandizement is horribly disruptive to meetings; you know, generally, self-aggrandizing is not acting in good faith. They'll say something to draw attention to themselves without necessarily providing value.

DAVE: Which, again, that's the objective of the meeting, right, is, daddy, come watch me swing basically. Yeah.

EDDY: But what I feel like really works with me is to try to have a discipline to not multitask and do other things, right, when it directly doesn't involve me. If someone's going and talking about something else, their updates or whatever, you know, and I'm like, okay, cool, I don't need to listen. And I do [laughs]...I go, and I do another task, right, I end up losing all the context.

And then, when I get brought back in, I'm like, oh, crap. I'm like, now I don't know if I should ask them if they need to [laughs] summarize again because I wasn't listening. So, I hate to say that I know stuff when I don't. So, if I have to have them course correct and kind of summarize everything they talked about at that point, I feel really bad. So, I really do my best to, like, try to not do other things while other people are talking because I'm also trying to active listen.

TAD: So, you need to reduce the distractions. Is that the [inaudible 18:36] there?

EDDY: Because it's so easy, right? If someone else is doing something, I'm like, oh, they're just talking. I'm going to go ahead and check my build, or something. Oh, I'm going to queue up something. It's really easy [laughs] to --

DAVE: But it’s also, especially if you've got ADHD, it's impossible to track a meeting where there's nothing interesting, nothing novel, nothing challenging, nothing urgent. If somebody else is talking about their project and it's not even your team's interface, and you start wearing down. And especially if you’ve got ADHD, you're like, I need a rabbit to chase. And so, you start looking at things.

So, I agree with you that, as much as possible, it is courteous and powerful to be participating. So, I will do several...I have a bunch of tricks in my back pocket for that. Two very quickly are one is I will go look at...when I was a very short kid, I learned very quickly to never say, "I'm bored," because somebody would hand me some work if I did that. And so, I very quickly learned to entertain myself.

So, if I'm sitting in a meeting and we're talking about a thing and I'm like, I have absolutely no interest in this, but they're using that API. I'm going to go look at the API. So, now I'm doing a distraction, but I'm actually trying to contribute by, you know, I'm literally trying to invent questions for the test and go look up the answers for them. It's a great way to study, right?

The other one...and I think I've done this to all of everybody in this meeting, and it's not disrespectful. It is literally a coping strategy I use. And it takes guts the first time, and it's always kind of a risk. But if I get caught flat-footed, I don't hem and haw. I just go, “I'm sorry. I was looking at a thing on my laptop. Could you repeat the question, please?” Just own it. Because now what you're saying is I respect you enough to admit that I was distracted and that I wasn't paying attention, and you now have my full attention. And I apologize to everyone for making the question be repeated.

And I don't think I've ever had somebody say, "Fine, I don't want your answer," [laughs] and turn on. But if it was a thousand-person meeting, I wouldn't feel, actually, I would feel really, really bad, but I would agree it was an okay thing to do.

EDDY: Would you agree, Ramses?

RAMSES: Yeah, I think so.

EDDY: Okay, cool. He was paying attention [laughter].

TAD: So, a strategy that I use is I'll usually turn on subtitles or something. Because I'm like, oh, cool, like, if I'm listening but I'm not totally focused, oh, I need another level of stimuli to help me out here. And so I’ll turn on sub-styles, and I'll read what they're saying as they're saying it and that sort of thing. But I think that's also just probably a good meeting design is that you have lots of...it's not just droning for a PowerPoint. It's audio-visual discussion, variety, that sort of thing, to kind of break things up so that it's not as easy to just zone out in the meeting, right?

EDDY: Fun fact: part of the symptoms that I have with my ADHD is, if I'm watching a movie or a TV show, and I just try to hear what the dialogue is about, I can't distinguish between, like, sound effects and people talking. It gets mumbled [inaudible 21:57] and stuff like that. So, when I put subtitles on, it helps me keep focused, right? And it helps me be more engaged, and I can actually zone out all the rest of the noise because I'm able to correlate, you know, what they're saying versus what's being written on screen. So, subtitles, yeah, I should really --

DAVE: I love how fast live captioning went from being space race, futuristic, impossible. Like, in COVID, I don't think I had any meetings where I had live captioning. And now it's in Teams; it's in Google, their Hangouts, they'll do it. All these people will do it. And now we're all just sitting there, and we’re like, oh yeah, that's old hat. You need that. Turn that on. I love it.

EDDY: Yeah. But you also have to have it going live as you're in the meeting because if you try to retroactively go in and read the transcript, yeah no [laughs].

DAVE: I want to point out that I'm watching our live captions, and I said, “You need that. Turn that on.” And they transcribed it as turn that off. So, whoever's reading this podcast, pity!

[laughter]

MIKE: So, luckily, we have a professional transcriber [laughs], and not the digital version. I provide them with a digital transcript, mostly to see who's talking when so they can pick out the voices.

So, I'm going to come back and draw out some themes here. We’ve spent quite a bit of time talking here about engagement and how engagement is a challenge. And I think that goes back to the beginning of why many meetings are so bad is because it is hard to try to maintain focus for something that is not engaging you. And doing that for multiple hours is [laughs]...the thing is, you're not going to. So, you're either going to feel bad, or you're going to be working hard and trying to make it work. Or you're going to...you're going to fail somewhere, right? And somebody's going to call on you, and you're not going to know...like, there's all these problems that come from there.

We're talking there about meeting etiquette and how we stay engaged. But if you're thinking from the side of how to present, as mentioned, well, you need to have an engaging presentation that if you go in with an open-ended meeting where there's nothing visual, there's nothing audio, there's no agenda, what you're going to have is either people are going to chat. And if your goal is to socialize, well, maybe you've met your goal.

DAVE: Absolutely.

MIKE: And that has merit. So, if that's your purpose, fine. But, typically, you're trying to accomplish something else, and the engagement needs to be handled elsewhere and some proposals there. And I'm going to, again, I’m trying to pull all these threads together. You have an agenda. You have an agenda prepared beforehand and, you know, Tad started right off the bat with that, and not only you have agenda, but you have things time blocked. Time blocking has been mentioned several times.

Dave mentioned that that preparation is not just having, you know, like, the names, you know, these topics we're going to talk about but to have preparation that happens before the meeting. So, an effective meeting comes when informed people come together to make a decision. And if you don't have the information and you don't have the preparation, then you're going to be spending your time getting people up to speed instead and maybe recognizing that. Maybe you're going to have a meeting where you're having a training meeting. Well, that's, again, that's a different purpose because you can't have an effective meeting unless people are prepared. So, that's something else that's come up.

And then, another thing that I caught there that we haven't talked too much about yet is that topics almost always tend to explode. They go longer than you would expect. And when that happens, you need to have a mechanism, some sort of rules in place to say, “Okay, great, this sounds like this is bigger than what we can fit in this meeting. And we're going to ruin the rest of the meeting, unless we take that and give it its own place.” And you need to have rules in place, some sort of mechanism to be able to do that. That's another thing that I'm hearing here.

And, you know, so we gave a checklist. You have your agenda, and you have the time boxes. You have advanced preparation that people are able to take part in before they make it to the meeting, and you have a mechanism to take distractions and lay them somewhere else so they can go be handled elsewhere. Now, if it's truly tangential and has nothing to do with what you're talking about, then you just set it down like, well, we don’t need to...let's get back to the topic. Or maybe it's important, say, “Okay, let's note that. We’ll bring that up in a more appropriate form.”

DAVE: And it's consciously deliberately...because everyone in the room is thinking, oh, we're trying to get this done. It's good to say, “Okay, we are going to do that,” or “Let's do that later.” Or “Not now.” Everyone should see, okay, yeah. And the gears are still turning for the objective we want.

MIKE: Another theme here is we're engaging more than just audio, so you have some visual representation. If you’ve got your agenda, you table something. You put that on a list that everybody can see you're putting it on the list. This is an action item. We're taking this elsewhere. You're keeping people engaged in a multi-sensory fashion wherever possible.

TAD: One thing I touched on, but I feel like I maybe should delve into a little bit deeper is, in Toastmasters, everyone at that meeting has a role and has a job at that meeting. There's no passive anything, right? Meaning that there's the person who's in charge of the meeting. You also have someone who's a timer, who's keeping track of how long everything took and keeping the meeting on track. You'll have someone who's like an ah master who's listening for ums and ahs and hums, right?

And they're keeping a tally, and they're actively going to give a report at the end of the meeting. These are the things that I picked up, you know, terrible, little noise things we add to all of our speech that we're trying to reduce. These are the things I noticed in the meeting. Someone is doing grammar checking, and they're making notes on that thing. And so, everyone in that meeting has something they're actively doing in that meeting.

And just, in a general meeting, you could have someone who's like, okay, I'm in charge of timekeeping, making sure we stay on task. I'm in charge of the action items. I'm going to keep a running list of every action item that comes out of this meeting, right? You could give jobs to all the people in the meeting and have something for them to do other than just passively sit and listen in a meeting. And I find that to be fairly effective that if I have something that I know I'm supposed to be doing, then I'm more likely to be paying attention, especially to the role that I've got in that meeting.

EDDY: That's a good point.

MIKE: Well, and that goes to the engagement that we've talked about. If you're in a situation where maybe one person is going to be presenting, then everybody else is going to be likely to disengage unless they have an assignment.

TAD: Yeah. Well, in Toastmasters, they actually have a role called listener who will ask questions at the end, you know, ask a question and say, “Oh, you know, so and so talked about there are three things that do this. What are those three things?” And the rest of the people are supposed to say like, “Oh, number one was this, number two was this, number three was this.”

And so, you know all these roles. You know the things that are going to get reported on at the end of the meeting. You know what you're going to get asked about. And so, just all those mechanisms make it more engaging because you know you're going to get asked about things. You know there's going to be a report on, like, a little summary report on all these aspects at the end of the meeting.

MIKE: And it's interesting because that's a training for meetings, right?

TAD: Yes.

MIKE: But general training tries to follow best practices. This is the ideal for a meeting. And so, we can learn from that, that in meetings where we're probably not going to have somebody counting the number of times, the presenter says, “Um” in a business meeting, but that idea of a designated listener who, you know, maybe he’s not asking the group. Maybe you have a designated...sorry, a dedicated listener who will ask the presenter at the end, you know, somebody who's looking for holes. And that could be done if you could have more than one person assigned to do that. They could be given assignments. Potentially, everyone in the room could be given the assignment to have a list of questions to ask at the end. There's things that could be done in order to enable that.

TAD: I think so.

EDDY: How short should meetings be is my next question. Or rather, another way to twist it, how long should they be before you [laughs] say, okay, after X amount of time, no one's paying attention, and everyone's done, right? Considering the --

DAVE: It’s a good point.

TAD: I just think there's a problem in that all of our calendars have one-hour blocks. And so it seems like if I have a meeting, I need to fill that one-hour block. And I would love to instead see, oh, this is a 30-minute meeting. This is a 45-minute meeting. This is an hour meeting. And more than an hour maybe is this should be more than one meeting because I don't know that any time you go over an hour, people are really staying focused on that meeting. I think there's a limit to how long a meeting can go and still be a good meeting.

EDDY: I want to say a threshold is 30 minutes tops, but that's [laughs] just me.

TAD: 30 minutes?

EDDY: Yeah.

MIKE: Well, you could have a 30-minute threshold for a topic. If you had two extremely engaging topics, each went 30 minutes, that might be an engaging meeting. But if your 30-minute topic starts to climb into 60, 90, then you're probably in a lot of trouble. And it probably depends also on the level of engagement. I've been in architectural discussion meetings on a whiteboard before, where, you know, time flies and three hours are gone. And everybody is like, “Oh, wow, we need to go eat lunch. That was a while ago.” Because everybody is up there drawing pictures, you know, and involved in that discussion and deeply involved in those technical details.

And then, there's other ones where you have the presenter up on the stage, and everybody checks out after five minutes max [laughs]. And those one meeting works and the other one doesn't. So, it seems like it does depend somewhat on the level of engagement from the group.

EDDY: I've drawn some stuff on a screen, on a laptop. And I've been like, cool, this is awesome, and I get distracted. As opposed to if I get up, get on the whiteboard, basically get a sharpie, and start drawing stuff, I'm engaging the same way, I think, but I think part of that is just nostalgia, right? Maybe. But I do tend to pay more attention if it's in a whiteboard in front of me [laughs]. It could just be that I'm just old.

MIKE: Well, and thinking about the sensory aspect of it, if you're looking at a screen [laughs], yeah, you don't smell the marker, you know, you're not moving in the same way. It’s genuinely, I think, a different experience. A lot of people say they like paper books more than they like digital books. You're not seeing this, listener, but Dave is nodding wide.

DAVE: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

MIKE: And, you know, I think that having that multi-sensory engagement, even if that small of a marker has nothing to do, and it's probably bad for you, right, has nothing to do with the meeting itself, but there is some engagement. And also standing up...and this is something that I wish was more socially acceptable, is to move in meetings because your brain just works better when you're moving.

TAD: Well, I've had stand-up meetings that are literally we all stand up and walk to the corner of the room and all talk to each other, and then we go back and sit again, right?

EDDY: A stand-up meeting was a stand-up meeting [inaudible 34:36]

TAD: Yeah, like you literally stand up, and you literally move to somewhere not right there at your desk and have the meeting, and then you walk back. And you're just standing the whole time, right? Because I think if you do that, they tend to go a little faster because people don't want to stand around so much [laughs].

DAVE: You don't want to stand, yeah.

MIKE: Hence the name, right? If you force people to stand, they don't want to do it, so it's going to be a short meeting.

DAVE: The counter is true as well, right? You get people that are like, I don't want to do anything in this meeting. I just want to kick back and sit. So, they're the ones that are saying, “I don't want to do stand up. I want to sit down for stand up.” And it’s like, well, it's because you want to check all the way out. You don't want to just not stand. You want to just, like, you know what, fine, you guys do your thing; it's fine, right? So, when you have a stand-up that is three minutes long, all of a sudden, anybody can focus for that long, right?

TAD: So, I hypothesized earlier that meetings expand to fill the time. Does that tend to be true?

MIKE: Yes. Almost always [chuckles].

DAVE: If everyone in the room is reactive and passive, your goal is to pass the time of the meeting. So, you literally have nothing to do, and nobody...especially if you've got like a little bit of organizational pressure, nobody's going to have the psychological safety to go, “Hey, guys, can we just quit? Can we just leave? Can we just be done?” Because there's going to be one person who's like, “Well, but I have a topic, right?” Like, if no one's engaged or if your goal at that...Sorry, I'm an extrovert. I think by talking, and I just hit on this. Thank you, Tad. If you don't have a reason to be there, you're reactive and you're passive, your meeting objective is now to get through the meeting. And you have no objective standard other than the clock.

MIKE: But, on the flip side, if you have a goal and you've accomplished that goal, that changes things. And it may even be a metric. Going back, also, to Tad's point about having an effective meeting, you have those time boxes. And you measure the effectiveness of the meeting based on how well those time boxes are honored. It's not about an arbitrary box. It seems like the goal there is to effectively contain those decisions. Well, let me say it differently; it's not to contain, but rather to engage. And if you're meeting your purpose, then you're done with that timebox, and you're ready to move on.

I would say that compressing the time is generally to be considered a success. One metric you could use of effective meeting, and I've often seen this, if you get out early, it's a good meeting because it meant that you were on point. You reached your objective, and you stopped. Your goal is not to fill that space but to solve a problem.

EDDY: Or the individual who tends to prolong the meetings is not there [laughs].

DAVE: And the counterpoint is true as well, right? Goodhart's law is that if the metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good metric. There will be that same psychopath that wants to drag the meeting and control everybody's time. If you tell that person we want to cut people off at time, they will eagerly do this, not because they want to save people time, but because they like cutting people's toes off. Great.

And as soon as that happens, everyone else in the room will say, “I'm not getting into that timebox because we lose toes in there.” That's Goodhart’s law writ large. All of a sudden, nobody wants to participate in that metric because it's a terrible goal. But if you have another goal, then it's a great metric for measuring, did you achieve it?

MIKE: But you keep on touching on something here, Dave, which is that an actor not in good faith can...and, you know, sometimes maybe they are even in good faith. They are earnest and just really care about something, and they want to talk about that, nothing else, that a single actor can easily destroy a meeting, and that's hard. That is hard as a meeting host. If you host a meeting where there's somebody who is very interested in getting what they have to say out there, and they're not going to let anybody else stop that, it is a challenge. What can we do to address that problem? Because you get into that situation, it's going to be very hard to have an effective meeting, ever.

DAVE: Stop inviting them to meetings [laughs]?

TAD: Robert's Rules of Order.

DAVE: We had a similar rule to that. It's related to this. It's not a direct answer to that, but we had a rule that we use called ELMO. It stands for Enough, Let's Move On. And, basically, if you've made a point and somebody else makes a point back at you and then you make your same point again and they make their same point back, there's nothing else. We're done. We're done. Let's move on, right? You can weaponize ELMO. I've had somebody shout ELMO at me who very clearly just wanted to hurt me and wanted to just be a jerk. But other people would do it, and it's like oh yeah, I need to focus because I know I get distracted. I get excited.

MIKE: One thing that got mentioned earlier was having rules of discussion, rules of engagement in your meeting. And if everybody has engaged in the rules before the meeting and has agreed to those rules, then it's not the host who is causing the trouble. It is the rules, right? The rules are what's ending this. And it's really nice to be able to point to the rules and say, okay, well, we decided ahead of time that we're going to timebox this for 15 minutes. We've reached the end. We're going to table this and bring it back another time. Now, you can't blame the host for following the rules.

The person who is disrupting agreed to those rules as terms of being in that meeting. So, they cannot, you know, it's not personal. You can't make it into a personal attack. They can ask to change the rules, but that's a group decision, and you have to get consensus. So, it seems we haven't talked very much about those rules of discussion, but they can help the host tremendously. And all of us are going host a meeting sometime, probably [chuckles] by giving control to the rules. And you think, well, no, I want to have control; no, you don't [laughs]. You want to be able to direct the conversation where you can, but you also want to be able to have that structure.

You want to have a constitutional meeting where you have a structure that defines the engagement, and your role is to facilitate within that structure. And you can lean on the structure for that rule of law rather than having to invent the law as you go. You cease to become the king. You don't have to have that on your shoulders. King or queen.

DAVE: It helps when everyone in the room feels like the rules are there to help us get to the thing. Then it becomes, like, if somebody slams the door on your toes, you realize, oh, I'm sliding out of the box that I was supposed to stay in, and we all need this box. One of the most powerful things that happened to me...I did Toastmasters. It's been 20 years, but I loved it.

And I remember watching the president of our club speaking something, and the timekeeper said, “You're out of time.” And he stopped mid-sentence. You're allowed two words when you go over time, and those words are “Thank you.” And he stopped mid-sentence and said, “Thank you,” and he sat down. And I'm like, “Wait, what? You just stopped?” And he’s like, “Yep.” And everybody followed that example after that, and we got out on time every time after that. It was amazing. Again, not because we like chopping people's toes off but because we like the utility that the box gives us. What is the meaning of this?

MIKE: If people can be bought into the system, then, you know, it's a group effort. It's a tool that people are using to accomplish their goals.

DAVE: I could do a whole nother hour on allegiance to systems, versus victimization, versus yeah...we have 3 minutes left in our meeting today, so I'm not going to get into that.

MIKE: We've covered a lot of ground here. This isn't one of our longer episodes, but it has covered some key points repeatedly. This is one I think I may revisit because there's some things that I can reuse here. I've definitely learned some things from the panel here today. We've talked about the rules of engagement and getting everybody working with those, right, using those as a tool, employing those to make the meeting effective, the whole group.

We've talked about engagement by giving people assignments, and we're there for a reason. Give people a purpose so that they are engaged, not to waste time but to actually provide utility. And if you can't give somebody an assignment, maybe they don't need to be there [laughs], and they can be excused. Or you need to change what your meeting is because you're not engaging people appropriately.

We've talked about timeboxing, making sure you have an agenda and a mechanism in place for being able to end topics when you reach those timeboxes so that they can be discussed elsewhere or can stop.

We've talked about some metrics for effective meetings. Ending early suggests that you are trying to solve problems. We've talked about having a discussion ahead of time, the pre-read being very important to enabling people to be able to come in and make an effective discussion and decision. I'm trying to make a summary here as we come to a landing. Anything that I missed?

DAVE: I don’t think [inaudible 44:15] good.

MIKE: We had a meeting with a purpose [chuckles]. We gave ourselves a timebox actually on this one, which we're going to hit in about two minutes, and we're going to nail it. We had advanced preparation by giving out the topic ahead of time enabling us to have a discussion. I think we nailed it. I think we did a good job here. Thank you. And until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.