Round Robin.
‘Meetings are indispensable when you do not want to do anything.’ — John Kenneth Galbraith
Many organizations are consumed by excessive or badly run meetings, and there is no shortage of advice on how to fix that. Poking fun at meetings is a common palliative, while the advice often boils down to having more meetings, just called differently — check-ins, pulse checks, stand-ups, syncs, huddles, workshops, scrums, etc.
Beyond Dilbert, HBR also dramatized the issue in an article, ‘Stop the Meeting Madness,’ but their focus seemed more on diagnosing the madness than prescribing a remedy. They did, however — true to HBR’s character — come up with a ‘five-step process’ that is as slick as it is useless.
Meetings are indeed, as Drucker observed, a symptom of bad organization. However, while Galbraith’s witty comment is spot on — he was always serious in substance but never stuffy in tone, after all — meetings are equally indispensable when you do want to do something. This is, in fact, how work is done and how your most precious resources — time and attention — are deployed.
Advice to improve ‘meeting hygiene’ is therefore useful and worth adopting: to have an agenda and stick to it; to invite only those who need to be there; to be specific about the expected outcomes; to reduce the number of ad-hoc meetings and rely more on the drumbeat of regular routines; to start on time and finish earlier; to ban PowerPoint and replace it with Word pre-reads.
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A useful mental hack to prime you to be a better handler of meetings is to repeatedly ask yourself a set of questions:
What if every meeting were optional, every participant a volunteer, and time distributed evenly? What if you overtly gave your people the right to opt out of a meeting they do not find useful or valuable — one they perceive as a waste of time, serving no practical purpose? What if you offered them the freedom to come up with alternative ways to stay informed or contribute? What if you cut the meeting’s planned time in half?
This may be too much for most.
Perhaps, then, a simple meeting technique called round robin? As the outcome of any meeting is indisputably correlated with the amount of interaction that takes place, this easy-to-implement process of having everyone take an equal speaking turn is beneficial on multiple levels.
It improves outcomes, engages all participants, gives introverts space to contribute, makes those preparing for their ‘turn’ listen, brings more diverse ideas, reduces interruptions, and increases psychological safety.
All of that comes from a practice that originated as a method to disguise blame. A few centuries ago, protest petitions were signed in a circle to avoid revealing hierarchy, so no single person could be blamed or identified as the ringleader.
This may still be a compelling argument for some, in fact.
