The title of this blog post is taken from a
Freakonomics Radio podcast by Steven J. Dubner, and I recommend listening to all 42 minutes of it. But if you can't find the time, here are some of the key points.
How terrible are meetings?
Steven Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist, says research has shown that around 70 percent of senior managers view meetings as unproductive. And these are typically the people calling the meetings.
The higher up the chain of command they go, executives attend more meetings. Rogelberg estimates most professionals in the U.S. attend 15 meetings a week.
"But what we know from the research is that left to just the standard
protocols of people talking, that a decision better than what would
have just been produced by the best individual in the room only occurs
20 percent of the time.
" He has written a book on the subject,
The Surprising Science of Meetings.
Why are meetings so terrible?
Most meetings are done on a schedule, out of habit, and have no purpose, says Helen Schwartzman, an anthropologist at Northwestern University who wrote the book The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities. "I would say that meetings are the organization. Which is to say that
instead of having the meeting as a place to solve problems, we need to
have problems and crises and decisions to produce meetings." If there are no problems to be solved, there is no reason to meet.
