In praise of good meetings
Why is it that so many people don’t like meetings? Why are there so many jokes about dreadful meetings, and so few stories about great ones?
Perhaps it’s because we have all experienced bad meetings ourselves.
But really, it’s not so hard to have a good, or even marvellous, meeting. All it takes is to conceive, design and run it well.
These are all skills that can be learnt. The hardest part of a truly effective meeting is to make sure that everyone who wants to gets a fair say.
September 13th, 2005 at 9:40 pm
I think that one of the core reasons for meeting failure lies in failure to define the purpose of the meeting since this really determines the appropriate meeting style.
A meeting may be fun and well organised but still fail if the desired outcome has not been thought through.
September 15th, 2005 at 11:09 am
I’d have to agree with Jim’s point.
September 17th, 2005 at 5:02 pm
Thanks, Ben.
To continue the discussion, David suggested that the critical issues in having a good meeting were that it be well conceived, designed and run.I would agree.
Recognising that things overlap, would it be sensible to actually use the headings conceiving the meeting, designing the meeting, running the meeting as some of our initial discussion categories?