Meeting Management “Kills” Creativity

Planning for the new year, you may have already noticed that a good bit of your time will be consumed in meetings. Nothing wrong here, we’re talking about one of the well-know daily duty of any respectable middle-manager. In an ideal world though, you may want these meetings to be as enjoyable as possible. Unfortunately, out of the lot, many are not giving you satisfaction, well… at least not enough to your taste.

And who could blame you for that? Stale, quiet, the only voice that these meetings can hear is often and only yours. Participants present in the room are just passive, absent, not “there” or pretending to be. Each meeting is a repetition of one-another, with a feeling of “deja-vu”, nothing new, nothing refreshing, no place for creativity… ideas! What’s wrong? You’re feeling the legitimate need to find out It may be time to get back to the basics.

Fortunately, “Meeting Management” is one of most fundamental and well documented management skill out-there. So you’re picking-up from your library the first “self-help” management book that comes at hand. Yes… you did think of throwing it in the bin once… but right now, you’re happy you didn’t. You quickly locate the chapter of interest to your case: “Meeting Management”, and read it like if it was the first time. This is even better than you thought. Everything is there in a nutshell. The best meeting management practices are laid-out in front of your eyes to a point where you would nearly regret not reading this book more often… A total of 10 to 20 rules (depending of the book you’re reading), all reasoning in your mind as words of infinite wisdom. Everything is now looking so bright; the obvious solution to a problem haunting many middle-managers for many years.

When is the last time you communicated an agenda in due time before your meetings? When is the last time when you introduced a meeting and established its ground rules? When is the last time you’ve assigned the roles of Minute Taker, Facilitator, Time Manager to your participants? When is the last time you selected these participants based on their affinities? For all these questions there’s likely to be only one answer: “far too long”. But after this refresher course, there’s little doubt left and you’re thinking: “Structure and Discipline are the way to go!”… How naive can you get. But nothing will stop you; with such an abundance of Meeting Management literature, what sort of middle-manager would like to live the shame of conducting any meetings without having someone to write-down minutes? …someone to look at the clock and speak-out when the time is up? …a ‘chair’ that doesn’t allow anybody to side-track and regulates participants’ exchanges? You can’t imagine how a meeting structured in such a way could be anything less but a complete success.

So you try these “best practices” for a week, a month maybe… and inevitably, reality calls you back and it all fails… A couple of reasons for that: (1) You never, EVER have the time to prepare your meetings. Oh, you would like to, but you can’t. (2) You’re not always in control of who’s invited in your meetings. (3) People seem to be “slightly” more complicated than you thought and hardly fit “psychological stereotypes”. (4) You discover that appointed Minute-Takers don’t have pens, Facilitators make things more complicated than they really are, and that Time-trackers are not looking at their watch.

“allow creativity to flow at any point in time in your meetings”

Dead meetings, no interest, no excitement, no passion, nothing new happening. You’re back to square one. You feel like grabbing another “self-help” management book from your shelves, just to see if you missed-out on something, but you decide to pay a short visit to your favorite middle-management blog instead. Good choice, you seek to hear something “different” and that’s why Akof is there.

You see, one ancestral assumption of today’s Meeting Management best practices relates to an old-school management myth; that “chaos” is a dangerous impediment to success. To prevent “chaos” in meetings, nothing best but to give a rigid structure to your agendas, with a view to enforce participants to behave the way you WANT to. The “good-old-military-way”. Better controlling your audience instead of facing the insecurities of a group of people opening-up and expressing their thoughts freely. If allowed so, time would go out of tracks, conversations would be erratic, or worse!

But did you ever witness how far this so-called “chaos” can go? Did you ever try to face it? Did you ever try to bring your participants in a room and stay quiet until someone speaks-out? Did you give your participants a chance to speak out about what immediately MATTERS TO THEM? …without looking at the watch? Did you ever witness your people interact for MORE THAN AN HOUR? You would be mesmerized at the speed an agenda would come-up.

We’ve been told to fear “chaos” in meetings like the plague, forgetting that originally, that was precisely the reason to schedule meetings! Creating brain power by putting your best minds together! Getting ideas to be exchanged and collide them to create… new ideas! We lived through so many reunions based on the classic Meeting Management frameworks that most of us are traumatized and live a “routine”. For some, stale meetings following a rigid structure is a great way to not commit themselves, take risks, think out of the box. You’ll even read that there are distinctive “types” of meetings; Information meetings, Decision meetings, and you’ll discover that creativity in meetings is relegated to so-called “Brainstorming sessions”.

“chemistry between ideas, between people, sparkle when you expect it the less”

DISMISS THESE ANCIENT RULES for a while and allow ideas to flow at any point in time in your meetings, whatever type or form they take. You see, “chemistry” between people sparkle when you expect it the less and these short-lived chaotic moments NEED to be captured and exploited on the spot. These moments support creativity and innovation, re-ignite passion and give sense to your meetings. These magic instants justify alone why you bother scheduling meetings.

So bring your participants together in a casual way. Make them feel at ease but make the moment “important”. Reformulate exchanges, fuel the debate, disregard time-constraints. Reconvene until it works. Meeting Management kills group creativity, so use it with moderation and prefer a more modern “managed chaos” to it.

One last thing: “Blend” with your participants until your meeting ends. Don’t attempt to “regain control”. You don’t have the duty of closing-off your meeting by gathering a list of “actions”; just let your participants do it. You’ll discover that they do it very well. When this happen, your meeting is a complete success and you accomplished something rare: fostering creativity and change in your organization.