Insomnia

I spent last week away at a meeting and I can say without a doubt that it was the oddest meeting in my career. First, this meeting was odd because of its scope. There were 17 attendees at that meeting from 3 separate companies. The attendees were all related to the same project but spanned the full range of people that make a project: programmers, sales, lawyers and executives. Many of the attendees had to fly in from somewhere else (including yours truly) and most of the people there all had another focus in their work than this meeting. The opportunity cost created there was huge. My thought was it was in everyone’s better interest to make the most of it.

But, what made this meeting really odd for me was that, with only a handful of exceptions, everyone had a laptop computer opened. Once the introductions were over, slowly, one after the other, people started typing away. (Except of course for the person that had the floor at the time) A quick glance around the table confirmed that they weren't typing notes. Most of them were typing emails in Outlook or even engaged in IM conversations. (the room was wired) The ones that didn't arrive early enough to get a seat at the table were sitting around the room in the cheap seats typing away on their Blackberry.

Surprisingly, by the end of the week, we had accomplished a significant amount of work. Still this whole experience left me with a bitter aftertaste. My company had invested a significant amount of time and money (flight, hotel, opportunity cost) to go to a meeting where people talked but hardly anyone listened. I was kinda peeved and I swore to myself that if I ever had the opportunity to host such a meeting, the internet connection in the room would be "unfortunately out of service" and that I would hide all the powerbars except for the one that powers the projector.

Now that I have slept on it for a day or two, I am not sure that it was all bad. Because of the scope of the meeting, there were periods of time when the executive level people couldn't care less about this conversation and, similarly, other discussions where the technical guys would have preferred to go through a root canal operation than to sit there and listen to business people discuss contractual issues. This is where the access to email mitigated that opportunity cost.

When all is said, this was probably a symptom of a meeting that needed refactoring. A little like a programmer that writes a function that is called validateAddressesAndSend() for an email client. In that case, the inability to choose a simple action verb to be the name of the method illustrates that the method might require some refactoring. In this case, the fact that only a segment of the attendees were participating in any given discussions was probably a hint that the meeting could have been refocused.

Labels: work

• 0 Comments