I am currently contracting to a major automotive company, providing functional safety services. In the period of less than two years that I have been doing this I estimate that I have attended well over a thousand meetings. Compared to many others in the same company I have relatively few meetings; some have at least twice as many.

Some time ago I worked for the software development company Logica. At that time Logica did not allow any meetings and the only meeting room in the building where I worked was the board room. They considered meetings to be inefficient use of engineers’ time.

Clearly there are very different views regarding meetings between different organizations.

I have been wondering what may be the reasons why a company would have so many meetings? Given the obvious expense of meetings, which tie up the time of numerous highly paid staff, why would a company have more than a bare minimum? What might a prevalence of meetings tell us about an organization?

Does the adoption of the Agile methodology have something to do with the preponderance of meetings?  There is a principle in the Agile Manifesto “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”  So, maybe in the attempt to achieve the promised efficient and effective communication, meetings are encouraged.  For large systems that need hundreds of engineers to develop, this means very many meetings.  Note that the Manifesto says “conversation” and meetings are not conversations, so leaving aside the question as to whether information of a complex technical nature can really be conveyed efficiently and effectively by word of mouth, Agile does not really recommend meetings.

Problems Leading to Too Many Meetings

An excessive number of meetings can be a result of weaknesses in an organization, either structural or cultural. More meetings may be necessary to mitigate these weaknesses. I have identified here a few problems from my own experience that could result in a preponderance of meetings.

Meetings can sometimes be the only way things get done within a company. If a company lacks a clearly defined, communicated and agreed way of working, then without meetings people don’t know what to do, or how to do it, and are afraid to take action. They organize meetings at every step to decide what to do and how to do it. Progress is slow but some progress is better than none.

“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer the meetings the better”

Peter Drucker

Meetings can be a way to avoid being held responsible.  By taking decisions in a meeting, no individual can be singled out in the event of the decision being found with hindsight to be mistaken. In a typical software project that is late and full of bugs nobody wants to be held responsible for these failures, so they seek safety by ensuring everything is decided by committee.

Sometimes the only way to obtain needed information is to have a meeting with the person that has the information.  If you are lucky it is just because the individual is too lazy to make the effort to write the information down.  However, it can be because of a culture where each person tries to keep information to themselves, as a protection against being laid off or as a way of bolstering their ego or competing against their colleagues in a fight for promotion.  In such a culture meetings are usually unproductive, as there is no genuine intent from individuals to divulge their special knowledge.

Micro-managers often want work to be done in meetings so that they can personally control every aspect of the way the work is done.

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

If the organizational culture is such that not everybody accepts decisions that they have not personally been involved in, then before any decision can be made it becomes necessary to hold meetings with everybody that will be involved in implementing the decision. Of course any re-organization will result in another round of meetings to ensure that after the change of roles there is still agreement.

Problems Arising from Too Many Meetings

Meetings are dominated by a few that are the most talkative. There is rarely an overlap between talkativeness and technical excellence. We should avoid the mistake of confusing talking with communicating. Talking more doesn’t mean communicating more. We may decide to communicate something verbally, but good communication is always concise, whether by word of mouth, writing, or drawing.

Decisions made in meetings are frequently shaped more by social dynamics than by rational analysis. For instance, fear of appearing foolish can silence dissenting voices, leading to compromised choices. It may appear that by having a meeting there is a consensus, but this apparent consensus often emerges from a desire to avoid conflict.

“Any simple problem can be made worse if enough meetings are held to discuss it.”

Anonymous

Engineering needs extended periods of continuous concentration to produce good results.  If the working day is punctuated by multiple meetings this results in an ineffective way of working.

Meetings are inefficient for complex technical communication. If your way of working involves communicating technical information primarily in meetings, you will either have very expensive software, or (more likely) very poor quality software because you wasted too many of your limited resources in meetings.

If too many meetings are held, people’s diaries become full of meetings, so that it becomes difficult to schedule the meetings needed to make progress.  If the work is being done by a team spread across different time-zones, scheduling meetings becomes even of a problem. The contribution of engineers in a different time-zone may be restricted.

In a working environment where many participants are not speaking their native tongue, they are at a disadvantage in meetings.  They may not fully understand what is said, but are embarrassed to admit.  They are inhibited from contributing due to lack of confidence in being able to express themselves.

“One either meets or one works.”

Peter Drucker

When meetings are used to come up with a design, this can result in “design by committee”. The result is a design that is complicated by compromises between personal preferences. Creativity is stifled and experienced and talented engineers are frustrated. .

Meetings can result in too much “brainstorming” analysis. This is excellent for generating long lists of things to be considered, but must be balanced by analysis that refines, condenses, and structures or you end up with an intractable mess in which the critical things are difficult to keep track of in the ocean of less important, and often completely irrelevant things. This type of analysis is not suited to being done in meetings.

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings can be effective when they are between a group of peers. Once hierarchy is introduced, one can end up in the situation that is lampooned by P.G.Wodehouse in his short story “The Nodder”.

“It is not easy to explain to the lay mind the extremely intricate ramifications of the personnel of a Hollywood motion picture organisation. Putting it as briefly as possible, a Nodder is something like a Yes-Man, only lower in the social scale. A Yes-Man’s duty is to attend conferences and say ‘Yes.’ A Nodder’s, as the name implies, is to nod. The chief executive throws out some statement of opinion, and looks about him expectantly. This is the cue for the senior Yes-Man to say yes, He is followed, in order of precedence, by the second Yes-Man—or Vice-Yesser, as he is sometimes called—and the junior Yes-Man. Only when all the Yes-Men have yessed, do the Nodders begin to function. They nod.”—English humorist P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975), “The Nodder,” in The Best of Wodehouse: An Anthology (2007).

Of course in any organization there is always hierarchy, both formal an informal, which contributes to the results of many meetings being of little value.