When Meetings Don’t Produce Results

People are gathered around the table, the conversation is lively and engaging. Ideas are flying around, people discuss this and that, arguments are exchanged in good spirit and everyone defends their point of view. Yet somewhere in the back of your mind, a thought keeps ticking: "Why are we once again discussing things that should have been settled long ago?"

This is a well-studied topic – why meetings fail to produce results. In short: the preparation hasn't been done, and people arrive with different expectations of what the meeting should actually achieve. As a result, a common and rather tragicomic situation emerges – everyone is right, yet everyone believes the others are wrong.

Because each participant is sitting at the table with a slightly different goal in mind, nobody understands why the others "don't get it". The problem is not anybody's ability to understand. The problem is that too many different topics have been packed into the same room and the same hour. It is simply impossible to discuss all of them with the depth they require.

The result is that over the course of one or two hours, the conversation touches a long list of different topics – ideas, plans, memories and grievances. Everyone's mind is actively engaged, yet by the end of the meeting no actual decision has been formulated. There are only as many interpretations and impressions as there are participants.

Formulating a decision does not mean that the meeting must end with a bureaucratic document. But neither does it mean that everyone can walk away with their own version of what was supposedly "agreed" upon. A good indicator is whether, by the end of the meeting, the outcome can be written down in two or three sentences. Even if the decision is: "At the moment, a final decision cannot be made. Before deciding, we need to clarify this, that and the other."

Each person can then do their preparation independently, and the next meeting can focus on reviewing prepared information instead of revisiting what somebody said at some point in the past.

Running a productive meeting is not really hard. It simply requires a little more preparation, follow-up and discipline than we might like. What is at stake is not an extra hour spent preparing, but whether the time invested in the meeting had any value in the first place.

Meetings are expensive, though. Multiply the duration of the meeting by the number of people attending and you will quickly discover what those "couple of hours" actually cost. Often the equivalent of one or two full working days.

If one person spends two or three hours preparing a meeting properly, the meeting itself can be short and the outcome tangible. A meeting that would otherwise consume two hours without producing a real result can often be completed in thirty minutes with proper preparation.
Preparation is not a luxury. It is a sane use of resources.

Why is it that a company developing software solutions is writing about a topic like this?
Because projects with clients move forward significantly faster when meetings are precise and purposeful, and then the goals are achieved with reasonable effort and cost.

We have seen that the attitude toward meetings is not merely a matter of preference or habit. There is something larger at play than the success of a single project. The way meetings are conducted shapes the development of a company for years to come, including in areas that have nothing to do with cooperation with Tarkma.