Re-claiming Meetings as Powerful Generators for the realization of Human Potential

These days in business, at least here in the Netherlands, there is an idea going around that meetings are worthless. There is a whole movement that preaches getting rid of meetings in organizations in order to make them run better. Of course, it is still understood that sometimes we need to talk to one another, but meetings of more than an hour or even a half hour are discouraged. And “long” meetings are seen as nothing other than a herculean waste of time. I find myself having to work hard to convince people to get together for more than an hour. “Meetings are inefficient” they say, and in the quest for efficiency — they tell me — “we need to meet less.”

Now, given the way many meetings are run, I can understand the frustration people are expressing. Many meetings are exercises in futility. Often people come together with no understanding of what their purpose is, nor what the desired outcome of the meeting may be in terms of action. Often we meet to tell one another things that we already know. We meet because our agenda says that every Wednesday at 9:00 there is a meeting. We meet in ways that don’t engage us as people, and so of course people get bored, don’t listen to one another and feel that time and energy is wasted.