Things sure have come a long way since the Dark Ages. A few centuries ago we’d all have been living in a kingdom where any autocrat could summon all of the peasants into the castle for a meeting at a whim. At the same time, if two of the local knights had a disagreement — say, over ownership of a pig, a plot of land, or some serfs — they would meet on a field of honor and duel until one of them was dead or seriously injured.
It’s amazing the difference one enlightenment and a few centuries can make. Now we all work in some company where any manager can summon all of the employees into a conference room for a meeting at a whim. If a couple of supervisors have a disagreement — say, over control of a resource, an office, or some ser…employees — they meet in an executive board room and argue until one of them is deaf or seriously tired.
Measured in terms of “gallons of blood” spilled, the modern approach is infinitely superior to the medieval equivalent. However, the meetings haven’t changed much in nearly a millennia.
Oddly, you see a lot more movies about knights and lords than you do about business meetings. There’s a simple reason for this; meetings are dull.
We love action heroes because they’re too important to attend meetings.
Imagine a film that opens with a group of stuffy old guys in suits sitting around a polished wood table.
“Come to order, please! Gentlemen! First on the agenda will be a report from the planning committee for the Marshall College Spring Cotillion. Dr. Jones?”
If George Lucas had sent Indiana Jones to committee meetings instead of Egypt, the franchise wouldn’t have made it past the first film. (Unless Indy used the bull whip to move the proceedings along; that might have packed the theaters.)
If you need proof that meetings are inherently evil, take a moment and think about the highly instructive James Bond films. Who holds the meetings? Not Bond. He’s too busy using cheating death, using cool gadgets and dating beautiful women. It’s the bad guys who have the meetings. Be honest, when you see them all sitting around a big conference table in a dimly-lit room debating some plan for world domination doesn’t it make you think of your last staff meeting just a little? I thought so. The only difference is that the survival rate in your staff meetings is probably slightly higher.
Yet, unbelievably, some people think meetings are cool.
For example, Star Trek: The Next Generation appeared to be an action-oriented space adventure as re-imagined by a group of Harvard MBA graduates. Instead of fighting monsters and wooing alien women (or even fighting alien women and wooing monsters) Captain Picard conducted an endless series of staff meetings to strategize ways to increase the Federation’s value stream while still staying true to the organization’s highest values in a changing pan-galactic economy. All the series lacked were guest appearances by business consultants.
Even the Star Wars sequels had as much to do with senate meetings as they did with battling evil. It was as if some hapless script intern had accidentally inserted fifty pages of C-SPAN transcripts into the screenplay. I kept expecting Yoda to cite Robert’s Rules of Order.
“Call the question you will or motion to impeach I will make!”
Even though there is convincing evidence that people just don’t like meetings, companies continue to call them in record numbers. The economy may have slowed down just because it got tired of the endless meetings. And, really, who could blame it.
An awful lot of meetings appear to be built around one-way communication. Someone who has the authority to call a meeting also has the desire to spew out large quantities of information in a brief period of time. You might call this the “info hose” approach. (Alternatively, if you’re in the government and you deliver the meeting to a carefully selected professional audience, you call it a “Press Conference”.)
The biggest challenge in attending most of these meetings is giving the impression you’re totally focused on the proceedings while your brain is doing something entirely different. I suggest exercising your brain by recalling and writing down song lyrics and bits of poetry you remember from school. By writing, you give the impression that you’re studiously taking notes. At the same time, the mental effort involved in dredging up rhyming words from your forgotten youth will give your face that thoughtful, considerate expression that says, “I’m a team player and I here to learn what I can.”
In reality, you’re mentally humming while you write;
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…
That’ll keep your mind engaged for five or six minutes. In fact, I’ll be you’re humming it right now. Go ahead. I’ll wait for you.
For those of you who are more spiritually-minded you could work on recalling the words to a favorite hymn:
Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
If you’re in a particularly long meeting and you want a real challenge, try thinking back to Freshman English when you had to learn the poems of Emily Dickinson.
Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me;
Go ahead and finish. I’ll wait.
For bonus points (if the meeting is now being measured in terms of decades rather than hours) try fitting the words of Emily Dickinson to the melody of the Gilligan’s Island Theme.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
See? It works with Amazing Grace, too. And the Yellow Rose of Texas. Who said meetings have to be dull? A few lyrics, a simple melody and you can have endless fun … until you realize that the meeting ended hours ago and you’re sitting alone in a darkened conference room humming to yourself.
