While a guy next to me is taking minutes, I’m getting stupider by the minute. Welcome to the business meeting, where much is said, little is learned and nothing gets done—unless, of course, you count the opportunity for people at all levels of a company to express uninformed opinions, or the rather amazing accomplishment of having 10 people agree on a course of action that not one of them actually likes.
There are certain situations in which it’s necessary to have a meeting. Granted, I can’t actually think of any right now. Oh, wait: It makes it easier to pass out chocolate. But otherwise, having a meeting really holds no advantages over sending out an email, asking if anyone has any input and then letting the boss, director, committee chair or water cooler vendor make a final decision.
“But D.F., what about the inherent value of being able to look someone in the eye, see their body language and shake their hand?”
Oh yeah. I forgot about that. What about the inherent value of a booger?
Whatever tiny benefit is offered by any of the above is more than offset by a little problem known as “groupthink,” which is worse than abject stupidity. At least stupidity is the result of wrongheaded thinking based on legitimate ignorance.
Take the stupidest person in your company, Blimbleberry. You know that, if given the opportunity, Blimbleberry would make bad decisions. Hey, Blimbleberry! Should we buy the inexpensive good part or the expensive bad one?
“That last one you said.”
Dope. That’s why we don’t let Blimbleberry decide. He’s stupid. That doesn’t mean he can’t contribute anything to the company. His job is to put Part A into Slot B approximately 600 times a day. He can do that. Can’t spell “cat” if you spot him the C and the A, but he can do the job he’s been given, so we keep him around.
Blimbleberry, we understand. The collective beast that is the crowd at the meeting is another story entirely. There’s no telling what this beast will come up with, but you can bet it won’t be good—and it’s all because they think as a group.
Blogger Christopher Null (http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null) reports that people sitting in a meeting couldn’t even handle naming as many soft drinks as possible—compared to what they did when they were asked to make the list by themselves. See? Just having other people around makes you dumb.
But it’s worse than that. The meeting designed to develop a good idea is ill-equipped for the task, precisely because good ideas are antithetical to the whole structure of a meeting. Good ideas come when someone is sitting at his or her desk staring at the color pattern on a coffee cup, and wham! Cure for cancer. A meeting doesn’t have any mechanism for drawing out ideas like that.
It’s not so much because meeting facilitators don’t ask the right questions. “Any ideas for curing cancer?”
Good question, Bob, but I got nothin’.
It has more to do with the fact that the whole point of a meeting is for Bob to hear what Susan thinks, and for Tad to hear what Eleanor thinks and for everyone to consider how to get the support of management, the union and the little people.
“I know!” Bob says. “Cure cancer with hardwood charcoal.”
Well, Bob, that shows promise. But management will have concerns. Who’s qualified to work with hardwood charcoal? The union will want to set work rules. Albert in shipping had a traumatic experience with charcoal when he was 12. What does everyone think?
“Have you thought about taking a more systemic approach?” Remy wonders.
Good thought, good thought. No one knows what it means, but the secretary records this in the minutes: “Group agrees that charcoal cancer cure approach must be systemic.”
The final proposal is: “Harvest hardwood sap for Pancakes for Homeless event.” The group agrees to schedule the event in September. It will never happen, of course. Blimbleberry was going to suggest giving the homeless all free vodka, which is beyond stupid, but at least you could actually do it.
Meetings are designed to develop path-of-least-resistance-type ideas for which everyone feels he or she had input and is thus “invested.” The longer a meeting continues, the more aggressively participants’ mental defenses against stupidity are lowered.
In the first half hour, Jay’s suggestion that the company manufacture socks made of gravel—just to be different—strikes you as moronic. But since there are no bad ideas, Mindy wonders if gravel could somehow be woven into cotton so the company can position itself as “gravel edgy.”
By the end of hour number two, you’re actually considering the possibility that the idea has merit. By the time things adjourn at the 4:15 mark, you’re not only onboard, you’re a co-sponsor. Anything to wrap this thing up and stop Burt from making another speech about what he remembers from reading The Purple Cow.
This columnist doesn’t advocate drinking, but I can understand why people want to head for a bar after a business meeting. It’s one of the few times alcohol actually makes you smarter, if only because it makes you forget the idiocy that’s been rolling around in your head for the past few hours. When you walk up to the buxom blonde with the weightlifter boyfriend and say, “Hey, toots, if I told you you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?” you’re actually closer to intelligence than you were while sitting in the boardroom.
Then again, this works both ways. Mob violence is really nothing more than an alcohol-fueled committee meeting. It’s less systemic and more action-oriented. The minutes are less likely to be accurate, but everyone will vote to approve them anyway.
The next time I want a good idea, I’ll do two things. First, I’ll call a committee meeting. Second, I’ll ask Blimbleberry to make a list of as many good ideas as he can think of. The results of the committee meeting, I will immediately discard. Blimbleberry’s list? I’ll pick out the worst ideas on the list and implement their opposites.
Then again, maybe I should skip the committee meeting entirely and have those who would have otherwise attended it run some of Blimbleberry’s errands. He may be stupid, but at least he gets right to it. People who sit around for three hours actually working at developing bad ideas…Part A in Slot B, all day long, people.
