You Can't Afford Bad Meetings

a discourse on meeting hygiene aka not wasting people's time

Art by A. Cohen

I just heard from a POCA Tech graduate who’s volunteering for a nonprofit organization (our graduates are civic-minded!) who is feeling frustrated. This organization has a noble mission but also, terrible meetings. Consequently I’m interrupting our regularly scheduled programming for an urgent discussion of meeting hygiene, something we’re adamant about in our little world.

Because when people are working for love, you can’t afford bad meetings.

Our graduate wrote to me after a two-hour Zoom meeting that they described as “rambling, incoherent, way too long yet somehow nothing got done? Everyone wants to tell a story and be heard but no one comes prepared. The agenda’s like a vague suggestion and people fill in the gaps with random crap. Since POCA Tech taught me meeting hygiene I literally can’t go back — I don’t understand how the rest of the world just… puts up with inefficient and/or unnecessarily long meetings? I can’t take any more hours of sitting silently on Zoom as my life force drips away. SEND HELP PLEASE.”

Like many things, I learned about meeting hygiene the hard way. Now I preach it with the zeal of the converted, so this is me getting up on my soapbox. At WCA and POCA Tech, meetings almost never go more than an hour (if they do, there’d better be a really good reason); mostly they run like clockwork; and mostly they don’t make anyone suffer — because we can’t afford to make anyone suffer. Our work is hard enough already. See also, how to make things happen when you have no money and no power — if you don’t have money or power, how are you going to get away with wasting people’s time?

This post is mostly an excerpt about meetings from one of our Praxis ebooks that I wrote for students. The entire ebook, Praxis and Leadership, is behind a paywall at the end; it also has a detailed description of how to set up a community acupuncture nonprofit for anybody who’s interested in that. But the part about meetings is free because, as our grad put it, “the world needs to know”. LOL, here goes, hope it helps:

Meetings and How Not to Hate Them

Early in WCA’s life as an organization, I was very resistant to meetings. I thought they were a bureaucratic waste of time, so for the most part, we didn’t have any, which obviously created other problems! I’ve learned to love meetings because when they’re done right, they’re not a waste of time at all: they’re crucial to an organization’s ability to make progress on its goals.

Meetings remind me of asparagus. My introduction to asparagus happened sometime in the 1970’s, in my grandmother’s house. She hated to cook, so a lot of meals came from cans. The first time I tasted canned asparagus, it was colorless, mushy, stringy, and slimy — I couldn’t understand why anybody would eat it. (I think I spit it out.) I was reintroduced to asparagus in college — fresh asparagus, bought from an outdoor market, cooked on a tiny apartment stove by a person I had a crush on (probably why I gave it a second chance), who showed me how to snap the ends of the spears to get rid of the stringy parts and scoop them out of the pan when they were radiantly green and still crunchy. That asparagus was an entirely different story.

Meetings can be nourishing, generative, and possibly even delicious when handled properly — but they require intention.

As everybody knows, I’m into fractals — and I think meetings are organizational fractals, or tiny self-similar versions of the whole. If your organization’s meetings are well planned, well structured, productive, and energizing, chances are your organization feels that way overall. (And vice versa, unfortunately.)

Art by A. Cohen

Good meetings don’t happen by accident. You have to be clear about both the purpose and the structure — because meetings without purpose and structure are worse than canned asparagus. Basic requirements for structure are a designated facilitator, a clear agenda, someone to take minutes, and a firm time limit. A normal meeting should take about an hour, because people get tired and lose focus after that. If it has to go longer than that, plan for breaks.

There’s a virtuous cycle here: good structure creates meetings that don’t waste people’s time; not wasting people’s time creates a shared expectation that meetings are time well spent; shared expectations allow people to invest more positive energy into meetings; high-energy meetings are motivating so people want to protect and take care of them by maintaining good structure.

I learned a lot about meetings from sociocracy, a system of “participatory governance” that WCA and POCA Tech borrowed freely from (we’re not purists) as we attempted to organize ourselves.¹ Sociocratic meetings are very structured; they have certain elements that together add up to a kind of ritual that, in my experience, is very effective in creating the meeting equivalent of fresh asparagus. The purpose of meetings, in sociocracy, is to be a container for decision-making, and the structure facilitates that.

Meetings are also a container for interpersonal connection, which make them an important part of team building. What meetings aren’t, necessarily, is a space for information-sharing, because there are lots of other ways to do that (though connection and decision-making can involve some information-sharing). There’s a reason you can buy a coffee mug that says, “I survived another meeting that should have been an email”.

Here’s our version of meeting structure, with thanks and apologies to sociocracy:

1. Opening Round

First thing: everyone in the room checks in briefly. People don’t have to say anything more than, “I’m okay” if they don’t want to — “I’m okay” is totally fine! — but it’s a place for people to share things like, “I’m wiped out because my kid is sick and we were both up all night” or “I’m preoccupied because my partner’s mom is moving in with us” or “I have a migraine, I’m just barely hanging in here” or conversely, “I’ve been looking forward to this meeting all week, can’t wait to get started!” These check ins are important information because they help everyone have realistic expectations of people’s energy in the meeting. For example, they know not to take it personally if the person with the migraine winces.

The opening round also serves a kind of ritual function: even if people just say, “I’m okay”, it’s a way for people to officially join the meeting, to remind everyone that we’re all humans, and to start the meeting on a note of intentionality.

When I go to meetings where there’s no opening round, I feel noticeably less connected and less confident. As in, is everybody truly ready to be there? Have they really consented to spending an hour of their lives this way, or are they silently cursing their fate? How do I know? Is that person wincing because what I’m saying is painfully inappropriate, or do they have a migraine? Etc.

2. Agree to the agenda

Meetings must have agendas. A meeting that has no agreed upon agenda is almost guaranteed to waste everybody’s time, and even if it doesn’t, to stress people out by making them wonder if it’s going to waste their time. In more formal meetings, each item should have an estimated amount of time allotted to it, and there should be a timekeeper to make sure the meeting stays on course. At WCA, our informal meeting agendas are usually just a list that the facilitator sends around by email the day before: “hi everybody, here’s what I’ve got for topics, did I miss anything?”

An agenda is like a promise: there’s a reason for everybody to be here, we’re going to get something accomplished, here’s a general idea of what that might be! (If you have no idea what you might accomplish in a meeting, you probably shouldn’t have it at all.) After the opening round, the facilitator says, “Okay, everybody good with our agenda?” If people don’t agree to the agenda, the first order of business is making an agenda that everyone can agree to.

3. Proposals

Sociocracy introduced us to the value of proposals as a way to encourage problem-solving. If someone wants to change how an organization does something, the first step is for them to bring a proposal to a meeting. This can apply to small issues (for example: “I don’t like the pens at the front desk, I propose we buy a different brand”) and large ones (for example: “I would like us to have a new policy and procedure regarding how we take paid time off, here’s my proposal for what that could look like”). Proposals are a great way to cut down on time wasted in discussions that go nowhere and on unproductive venting; they’re a nice neat method for moving things forward.

The expectation that people will bring proposals can be a polite (structural) way of saying, “put up or shut up”, which is something leaders need to say sometimes. In practice it sounds like, “Okay, I hear that you’re unhappy with X, how about you bring us a proposal to do it differently?” Rerouting complaints towards proposals in a consistent, methodical way can be crucial to protecting everyone’s energy from people who enjoy complaining for its own sake, or who just like to hear themselves talk. If meetings are mostly about complaining, people will hate them, and if people hate meetings, you’ll have all kinds of other problems.

Art by A. Cohen

4. Reaction rounds

Either as part of a discussion, or as a response to a proposal, reaction rounds are very useful. They’re just what they sound like; the facilitator announces, “Reaction round!” and everyone in the meeting takes a minute or so to give their quick reaction. For example, “I like this proposal but I have concerns A, B, and C ” or “I need some time to think about it before I could say yes or no, could we revisit it next week?” or “I love this proposal so much I want to marry it.” Reaction rounds make sure that everyone gets to respond, and everyone knows they’ll get to respond without being interrupted, which generally makes them more able to listen to everyone else. The reaction round isn’t finished until everyone has spoken. At that point, the facilitator can steer the discussion towards issues raised in the reaction round and keep repeating the process until agreement has been reached.

5. Consent

“Consent” is foundational to sociocracy, and it’s a major reason that sociocratic meetings are effective. Consent is a modified version of consensus. With regard to meetings, consent represents a goal: everyone in the meeting agreeing on a course of action that they can live with. Not necessarily a perfect course of action that they love, or would choose above all others, but one that they can live with in part because everyone else can live with it too. A successful proposal is one that everyone in the meeting can consent to; one sociocracy resource describes it as “good enough for now and safe enough to try”. It encourages people to try out possible solutions instead of endlessly complaining about problems, or wasting time seeking a perfect fix.

A function of reaction rounds is to flush out obstacles to consent, which have to be discussed in order to be worked through. A proposal will often get modified in a meeting, based on everyone’s reactions, until it becomes something that everyone can live with, even if they don’t love it. Giving consent in a meeting means that any objections you had have been addressed to the point that they’re not bothering you anymore.

I love the concept of consent because it recognizes that a team doesn’t have to make perfect decisions — they just need to make decisions that are good enough to keep the organization moving forward. Consent helps make room for trial and error; it allows you to try things, together. It helps avoid adversarial relationships because it gives people the option to say, “I’m not sure about your idea, but I can live with trying it out, to see if it works” as opposed to “No, I disagree.”

I’ve heard consent described as a way to move the organization forward, decision by decision, like football players moving the ball down the field. Meetings should create positive momentum! Consent is a structured way to release people from unhelpful binaries like agreement/disagreement and right/wrong; it keeps us from getting stuck.

6. Closing Round

In sociocracy, the closing round is supposed to be something of a mini evaluation of the meeting, where people can comment about what they liked, didn’t like, or want to do differently next time. At WCA it rarely gets used that way and is mostly a ritual function — but it’s still a useful ritual function. Generally, when the facilitator announces, “Closing round”, people will just say something like “thanks, good meeting” or “appreciate you all, good to see everybody”. Closing round is a good opportunity to make jokes, like “I said I was okay when I checked in; despite this meeting I am still okay”.

As a leader, I like to use closing rounds to express appreciation for something that I think went well about the meeting. For example, “I really appreciate how honest everybody was, that was a challenging discussion about X but I think we did well with it”. Closing rounds, even when they’re perfunctory or silly, are a way to end on an intentional note.

To Sum Up

Sociocratic meetings have a variety of structural elements that work together to keep them from getting tedious, bogged down, or draining. Leaders are ultimately responsible for their organization having a template for good meetings. Obviously a leader isn’t going to be in every meeting that happens in an organization, even a small one, so they can’t be responsible for how every meeting goes — but if there’s a pattern of ineffective or unpleasant meetings throughout an organization, that’s something leaders should deal with.

The rhythm of meetings provides a rhythm for the administrative life of the organization; leaders need to take care of that rhythm. (Pro tip, don’t screw around with your organization’s heartbeat.)

Meetings are also a good way to incrementally practice leadership; they’re a nice, time-limited exercise in coordinating a group of people and creating positive outcomes, which is why we encourage POCA Tech students to take turns facilitating meetings. Running a meeting requires taking responsibility for it; you want your meetings to be good experiences for people, or at the very least, not something they hate.