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My favourite kind of meetings are the ones that happen spontaneously. If I could, I'd put myself in the place where I'm likely to see my favourite people all the time. There'd be tea and cakes, probably, and a loosely framed agenda.
But you can't run the world like that. Things have to be organised and efficient and recorded and audited. Still, it occurs to me that meetings, especially work meetings, are just not the best use of time. They spin off at ridiculous tangents, they soak up more of the day than they're ever allocated, and a lot of the content could be solved by a quick volley of well-worded emails.
People get really formal as well, sometimes. Give them a label like 'secretary', or 'chairman', or 'scrum-master' perhaps, and they conduct the whole affair as though it's an emergency convention of the UN security council. Either that or they go the other way and slide into irrelevant nonsense. I was in a meeting about charity giving days once and we ended up discussing the best way to work out how many spherical balls with a given diameter would fit in a plastic tube. Fascinating maths, but no-one had the sense to interrupt.
I think we Brits suffer from two conditions which make our meetings inefficient. We're polite and we're easily bored. The politeness prevents us from rudely dragging the meeting back to where it was supposed to be, and the boredom drags us away again. I think a lot of meetings drag on because these two things are constantly at odds with each other.
In fact, that's probably one reason why we need agendas. Someone realised long ago that meetings were getting hijacked by people who were bored with what everyone else was talking about and wanted to talk about what they wanted to talk about. The Bored People made their favourite topic fit somehow with something somebody said and tangentialised the whole thing until we were all clamouring over their own personal hobby-horse. If only there were some way of stopping them getting distracted from the point...
The Polite People need to be a bit more assertive, I think. That would help too.
[Sales Guy]: Well of course, the financial year graph doesn't prove anything set out by the big cheeses (chortle) because the trend line is only drawn between two points in this quarter here, instead of three, and that one. It's a bit like saying Einstein worked out relativity by just guessing.
[Boron the Engineer]: Well he did in a way. You do know he used to do thought experiments?
[Marketing Millie]: Thought experiments, really? What do you mean?
[Boron]: He used to imagine himself sitting on a photon, travelling at close to the speed of light. Then he'd imagine another light particle at similar speeds next to him and...
[Polite Paul]: Shut up, Boron. What's that got to do with anything?
Alright, Polite Paul's probably not going to be known as Polite Paul for much longer. They'd have to call him something less pleasant. He may even find his computer wrapped in clingfilm one of these days, but at least he can console himself that his meetings don't go on for half the day.
There are better ways to do this, of course. I'm not really advocating being incredibly rude to people at work meetings. I'd just like them to be a bit more focused, and relevant to the people who are actually there.
I was a bit worried that David Mitchell was going to interrupt my daydreaming by turning to me and asking me what I thought about his idea for designing the authentication user interface. He didn't though. I don't think clever people like that value my opinion on such highfalutin matters.
Either that or he's just far too polite.
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