Meetings

I often think that human beings should never try to make decisions in groups larger than two, if even that. It’s difficult enough to make up one’s own mind about anything, much less negotiate the preferences, biases, and knee-jerk reactions of a bunch of people with any degree of efficiency or charm.

I’m speaking of course about meetings, that scourge of right thinking people everywhere; and we certainly don’t need to set up a focus group or “disappearing task force” to establish the veracity of that claim.

I’m just not cut out for sitting together on padded chairs with a posse of people trying to come up with solutions, strategies, and initiatives.

For one thing, I tend to fall asleep. Within moments of joining a circle of chairs in a conference room where someone is talking, I start to do that dozing thing where your head drops and you jerk yourself awake. This is particularly embarrassing when I’m the one doing the talking.

Even worse is the phenomenon where people feel compelled to fill the scheduled time with discussion even when there’s nothing to say. Sort of like this piece here.

Today at school I preserved through an hour and a half meeting in which some stuff actually did get done. But I can’t help thinking that we’re all sort of just play-acting at it; we follow a modified Robert’s Rules of Order, with motions, seconds, and voting, but I wonder if we’d be just as efficient if the whole thing was more of a free-for-all.

I wonder if meetings wouldn’t be more effective if everyone had to stand up during them—more like a cocktail party.

And then, of course, to really fill out the image, we could have cocktails, too.

I’m not at all convinced we’d be significantly less successful in getting our work done. And probably, it would be easier to achieve quorum in most cases.

And I’ll bet I’d hardly ever fall asleep.