Why Meetings Don't Work (and what to do instead)

[@AJSmart]

🤔 Do meetings actually work? What's been your worst experience in a meeting? Share your answers in the comments below👇 ➡️ Check out our 1-hour FREE TRAINING to learn more about facilitation and to get a preview of our Workshopper Master Program 👉 go.ajsmart.com/start

[@chei86]

90% of meetings is this: a bunch of people get together to listen to 2 people talk to each other, while the rest is not achieving any work at all

[@damiengauthier]

Is it really how it is in your organization? What is the discussion about usually, or the meeting agenda?

[@blueskyguy1]

Excellent reasons for company to move and take action…also a workshop generally introduces a “calendar into the equation” which is much needed 😂

[@Leonardo-13]

My worst memory of a meeting? It happens over and over again. Someone takes 5 min to say something he could have said in 30 seconds.

[@teotti]

I think a workshop is a type of meeting. In general I try to apply this list to make meeting (or workshops) high performing: - Know the meeting's purpose and desired outcome - Structure meetings to achieve the desired outcome - Respect the time invested - Structure meetings for engagement - Take visible notes - Publish meeting records where everyone can find them list by Elize Keith from "Where the Action is". I'd argue a workshop where people aren't engaged--where perhaps there is a facipulator instead of a facilitator--would have the same problems as a boring meeting. Or a workshop without a clear purpose and outcome.

[@dojohansen123]

Does it work though? I often wonder what we could learn from Open Source. If you've tried to dip your toes in very carefully by putting something like Ubuntu on an old laptop and begun to have a look around, just from a user's perspective, this world of open source software, but like me you've never been part of an open-source project (or any project where the participants live all over the globe, work at completely different time schedules and in very different time zones), you kind of have to begin wondering how they were able to do it. Something tells me "documentation" is taken rather more seriously by successful open-source projects than by most tightly-knit teams where it is also in the direct interest of every member to be as indispensible as possible. People often joke about lack of documentation being a form of "job security", but it would be foolish to believe this disincentive doesn't play any role at all! My own POV is that pair programming and other forms of working together two people at a time has real value. Both can learn from the other. The "pilot monitoring" can spot things while "pilot flying" is typing them out and they can be corrected immediately. It's more fun than always working in solitude. And if pairs are mixed up a lot, it promotes common understanding, shared culture, more similar practices. But more than two people? I think I've only ever found it useful for brainstorming. And football (minimum six, three on each team, but five-a-side is ideal)!

[@MP-mg3un]

I enjoyed understanding the reasons workshops are more efficient than meetings. I remembered random words. Some written smaller than others.. some I saw only in passing vision as I was heading to write on my paper. .. we are so random.. people, I mean. And I can't get enough info.. but I truly just want to find balance. Btw, congrats on the cosmetics.. hair and teeth look nice

[@asystematec]

I still have a lot to learn from Jonathan!

[@AJSmart]

Awww Amr 😍! that's so sweet and probably true too 😉 but we all also have a lot to learn from you too! Cheers

[@mjmallari796]

Amazing. Thanks, Jonathan.

[@AJSmart]

Thank you!!!!

[@renebas852]

Thanks the new speed I am more motivated :) Thank you. I just realised I did not switch off speed 2.0 I thought it is jus the new Jonatan's idea. Anyways, the material is cool.

[@AJSmart]

hahahaha thanks rene!! If we make Jonathan talk even faster he'll probably collapse at the shoot! Just keep watching him in 2.0 and stay motivated! Cheers

[@knasher]

Just get on with it!

[@sueh1286]

Very helpful 👍🏻👍🏻 thank you 🙏🏼

[@AJSmart]

Thank you Sue H! Glad you find it helpful!

[@zacheisey3112]

Really like that little experiment and the "Magical Number 7" tidbit. In terms of hair, I'm gonna go with OLD Jonathan, but I give NEW Jonathan kudos for having the balls and swag to pull off adult braces. Well-played sir.

[@AJSmart]

hahahaha thanks! I don't know about balls and swag. He complaints quite a lot every time the braces get tightened. Glad you liked the little experiment and the old hair! Did you remember cat and hammer though? Cheers

[@zacheisey3112]

@@AJSmart I did remember "cat," but not 'hammer." I got a few others right, but getting 9+ is ridiculous. That's genius mode for sure.

[@morgansworld_]

Worst experience in meeting - when I was not prepared to tell the story behind data.

[@AJSmart]

😖😖😖😖

[@dojohansen123]

I think meetings are horrible. But most other forms of live interaction between more than two people at once is insanely inefficient anyway. Where I'm at now, meetings are called all the time, mostly without any description of the agenda beyond the "name" assigned to the meeting. Nobody does any preparation, so it's impossible to have any intelligent discussion (because to have anything intelligent to say, we'd need to each look at the things closely, by ourselves, in peace and quiet so we can *think* properly), and it's almost always unclear afterwards whether we did in fact decide anything. But people feel like work is getting done. Ironically we typically use a *better* process like some kind of voting when making inconsequential decisions such as "what should we call the new team?" or "should we do shuffleboard, bowling or curling on the upcoming social gathering?". And if it involves food, people actually go study menus and have a think before they cast their vote, which is more than they'd have been able to do if the same decision had been made the way we make decisions with ramifications many years down the line (say, technology choices like REST vs GraphQL, architecture, product roadmaps, how to organize the codebase involving hundreds of repositories, documentation, coding guidelines, unit testing, integration testing, UX testing, penetration testing, or the gazillion smaller design choices one comes face to face with on an almost daily basis when trying to make software). I must be getting old, because in truth, everything was better before!

[@damiengauthier]

Just a quick survey: Is it REALLY how meetings are conducted in your organization? Nobody is actually keeping notes or minutes? No clear agenda or anyone conducting actively the meeting? Just a random conversation? I mean is it actually how it is in your real life?

[@dojohansen123]

I cannot recall having ever taken part in a properly run meeting that I felt was useful for me to take part in, and useful for the others that I took part in. Or rather, more useful than obvious alternatives would have been, though what the alternative would be varies from case to case. For example, I've had many project managers who call "status meetings" that seemed to me to serve only the purpose of improving the manager's understanding of how the project is going, and I don't understand how this can be better than actually keeping track of status in the project management tool (there's always one). Other examples are "decision meetings" where we are "efficient" by having a short discussion where we usually talk past one another, based on very little real investigation and analysis, before we proceed to decide that we'll use this or that technology or framework or method or process - usually by someone with a fitting hat going with their gut feel. It shouldn't be like this. I believe in "hurrying slowly", not in "moving fast and breaking things". A strategic approach means you start out by thinking through and writing down what it is you actually want to achieve, WHY you want to create the new thing you have in mind, NOT whether it should be a microservice, a nuget package, a REST api or whatever, and WHAT PROPERTIES of the solution are desirable, with weights reflecting their importance. Then figure out how you're going to MEASURE how different proposed solutions perform on these criteria, and invite people to submit proof of concept implementations, which you then evaluate according to the criteria established up front. Granted, this is quite idealized, and it is hard to measure most important things like "how easy is it to change?" - but it is possible to make reasonable *assessments* of such properties. Making software is, like all forms of engineering, so much about making the right tradeoffs between different concerns, but almost every software team I have ever worked in really ignores completely even having any real dicussion about this topic. We pretend instead that we can have excellent everything, but fail to get excellent anything, because people aren't on the same page at all about how to do things, which is pretty natural when it isn't ever discussed and also isn't written down anywhere, at least not in a way that people have a similar understanding of it.

[@FerdausAmzah]

how much is the course, please don't force us to go through your funnel to get to even the price...

[@AJSmart]

Ohh Ferdaus Amzah, actually going through our funnel is the only way to find out about the price of the program and also to find out whether or not the program is a good fit for you and your career. If you're truly interested in facilitation and workshopping I would recommend to do it. If you don't want to go through the funnel but you still want to learn more about facilitation, then you probably know that we share free content here on youtube and in our blog, which is based on a lot of the things that we teach in our courses, so you could still learn a bit from that here. Have a great day! Thanks

[@jonathancourtney1175]

it is a lovely funnel tho

[@menlo7256]

@@jonathancourtney1175 lol gone through the funnel and I fully agree

[@shawncramer374]

@@menlo7256 Same!

[@yusecond6879]

First and probably the only oneee

[@AJSmart]

hahahaha hopefully not the only one though! Cheers

[@johnshanahan8788]

That hair and retainer tho - what a beure xoxo

[@jonathancourtney1175]

hahahahahha BEURE

[@AJSmart]

hahaha thanks John 💇‍♂️🦷!