Business Meetings

Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going “topless,” as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend…

But as laptops have gotten lighter and smart-phones even smarter, people have discovered a handy diversion, making more eye contact these days with their screens than one another. The practice became so pervasive that Todd Wilkens turned to his company blog to wage his “personal war against CrackBerry…”

His San Francisco design firm, Adaptive Path, now strongly encourages everyone to leave their laptops at their desks. His colleague, Dan Saffer, coined the term “topless” as in “laptop-less.” Also booted are mobile and smart-phones, which must be stowed on a counter or in a box during meetings. It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers, Wilkens said.

“All of our meetings got a lot more productive,” he said.

Merlin Mann likes the idea.

It stinks. It of course is not being proffered as the sole solution to ‘the meeting problem’, but I don’t even consider it a close runner-up.

My Straw Man

cue birds shining, sun chirping

The meeting lead or a delegate has arrived before anyone else and prepared the room, ensuring there is appropriate seating, refreshments, and a printed agenda. The attendees all arrive on time, having had beautiful stress and distraction free mornings leading up to the meeting. All attendees have been preparing for the meeting in the shower or during the commute and are ready to brainstorm, compromise, and provide insights from their unique perspectives. The meeting lead or a delegate has a history of taking excellent notes and can be counted on to send next-actions to all attendees.

The actual meeting happens and is hugely successful! The meeting strays once or twice from the established goal when a few ideas are discussed that provide unintended benefits to support personnel or secondary goals. Everyone compromises, gives permission, understands, is motivated, is ready to kick off, or buy, or whatever the goal of the meeting was. The meeting ends before its established hard stop.

Reality

The people that are usually early to meetings show up early and wait the five minutes they are accustomed to waiting for everyone else to arrive. A percentage of attendees are late due to random things more important to them than the meeting. A percentage of the attendees have little more than token interest in the goal of the meeting. A few people will take bad notes, a few will take no notes, a few will take down what they think are their own next actions, a few will accept more than they have bandwidth to actually finish in time, and so on. No one knows who scheduled the meeting for 3:30PM on a Friday but everyone agrees silently to murder that person if their identity is revealed.

The meeting will not start on time because the early folks will be chatting about their personal lives or other work related stuff and the late folks will be explaining why they are late. The people that think they avoided any of the above pitfalls will silently begrudge the attendees that didn’t. The actual meeting begins and is rife with communication problems. One attendee spaces out due to family problems, another due to biological problems, a third because it is more fun than the meeting. One attendee keeps grinding the same axe, tangents fail to get redirected. One of the two people that conferenced into the meeting fills the room with barking dogs every time he unmutes, the other keeps saying “what”? when asked questions. Some people fiddle with their laptops and smartphones. The meeting will stop at the hard stop because people absolutely can’t stay later, or it will run late.

…and after the meeting

The people that were on time will blame the lack of progress partly on the late folks (and they’ll be right). The late folks will blame the lack of progress on their distractions (and they’ll be right). The percentage of attendees with no more than token interest in the meeting goals will forget they wasted their time (and they’ll be right to do so). The note takers will be amazed anyone does anything without taking such great notes, the non-note takers will wait for someone to ask them for a deliverable so that they can handle it, and the overloaded folks will do whatever they do that isn’t learning to be less overloaded.

Obviously the doodling is the problem. And the chairs in the room that allowed people to be so slouchy and doodly. And the cell phones and laptops. And the fidgeting. Why, I can see you now, skimming this and IM’ing someone else, and fidgeting with your left foot at that thing under your desk. Why in my day, meetings were productive and engaging!