Meetings

Today we had a meeting at work. Not news. It was called by the intern I'm mentoring. Again, not real news.The interesting thing is that afterward he asked me how it went. Of course, this is a good thing for someone to ask.I realized that as one goes to an endless stream of meetings you tend to get a bit jaded. My intern thought that it didn't go as good as he would have liked -- there was a bit too much beating around the bush to start with in his opinion.Me? I thought the meeting went great! It wasn't an hour. All the things we wanted to cover got handled. Everyone knew what were their next steps. No one was left thinking the meeting was a waste of time.The standard, and broken, meeting pattern I've seen through the years goes something like this:

1. Wait 8 minutes for everyone to show up.
2. Talk about the weather or sports (or any other random topic) for 5 minutes.
3. Someone realizes that there's a meeting and starts things up.
4. People get confused so you need to take a dozen steps back to reset to where the last meeting left off. Talk for 30 minutes recapping the results and decisions from previous meetings.
5. Work for 20 minutes.
6. Realize that the meeting has gone over time and people rush out to get to another meeting.
7. Occupy the conference room for another 4 minutes until the next crew evicts you.
8. Call another meeting to pick up where this one left off. "We were so close to resolving the problem! A half hour will be enough."
9. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I'm not picking on Amazon. We actually run meetings fairly well. This is how many of the meetings in my past have played out. At the end of it you're left with the thought that "I'm not going to get that hour back."Can we do better? Of course we can -- there is always room for improvement.Did we do a good job?I think so!  :-D