There wasn’t even a fast-track entrance for VIPs. Ashok Khosla, Chairman of the New Delhi-based social enterprise, Development Alternatives, who is also the current President of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found himself grid-locked in a non-moving mass of humanity and was clearly about to miss his speaking slot. If you know sustainable development, you know of Ashok. He’s been described by the United Nations Environment Programme as ‘a legend in the realm of sustainable development, and an individual who personifies the hopes and dreams of billions trapped in the indignity of acute deprivation.’ This didn’t impress the slab-faced security guards. He only managed to queue-hop by distracting one of them by making a comment on her guard-dog’s condition.
Once inside (and many people gave up before they ever managed to enter), the problems were worse. The unlovely venue, wonderfully misnamed as the Bella Centre, seemed custom-designed to make you lose your way – a maze of small committee rooms and misleading signs.
There is a well-known YouTube film of the then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, sweeping confidently into what he thinks is a meeting room only to find himself in a cupboard. President Obama likewise had to go on a peek-a-boo treasure hunt through the corridors to find that his meeting with the Chinese delegation was already underway without him.
The Chinese premier was in the building (like Elvis) but famously refused to meet his US counterpart face to face. Brinksmanship? Diplomatic theatre? Or an unwillingness to have a real meeting?
Guardian journalist Mark Lynas was in no doubt: ‘The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.’
This was pure power politics – nearly meeting at its most blatant. Clearly at a meeting like this, each nation will have its own agenda to pursue. In some cases, minimising perceived threats to their economic growth; in others, like the Maldives, literally keeping their heads above rising seawater.
This need not have been a problem, had the participants really wanted to use this meeting to make the world a cleaner and safer place. But they did not. China and others clearly had no intention of playing anything but their own game. And as we are going to see a little later, intention is all.
The power plays of Copenhagen set the precedent for COP 17 in Durban in 2011, where we were treated to the unedifying sight of Saudi Arabia’s oil sheikhs holding the meeting – and the world – to ransom by insisting that they be compensated for losses they would suffer if the world stopped burning fossil fuels. As the Economist reported:
Most of the scores of diplomats present were appalled. Not least those from small island nations, like Kiribati and Tuvalu, which are likely to disappear beneath the rising seas long before the Saudis have drained their last well. But it mattered naught … After a fraught few hours of bickering, the Saudis got their wretched commitment.
That’s nearly meeting. In place of collaboration there is bargaining. An opportunity for joint action descends into a clash of competing ideologies. I was in a meeting recently where Trevor Manuel, formerly Nelson Mandela’s finance minister and currently the head of South Africa’s Planning Commission, summed up the limits of this approach. ‘Ideology means you know the answer before you hear the question.’ Instead of real conversation you get ping-pong rallies of pre-prepared attitudes and opinion.
The COP events are a particularly high-stakes own goal. But I would suggest that every nearly meeting we hold goes some way to destroying value in our world.
Nearly meetings are not just unproductive, they are counterproductive because they undermine our trust in the power of really meeting.
And really meeting can change the world …
* As US computer pioneer Alan Kay pointed out, ‘technology’ is a name we give to any technical advance invented after we were born. For my parents’ generation, the colour television came under the heading of technology. Not for mine. Television was as normal as plumbing. For us it’s laptops and wifi. Who knows what our kids will think of and see as technology? Looking back, though, there must have been a time when a table with four legs was the most advanced, jaw-dropping meeting technology on the planet. I’d like to have been there to see that.
One of the realest ‘real meetings’ I ever attended was held by a teacher and inspiration of mine, the enigmatic and bear-like Michael Breen. Pioneer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and a great business consultant, Michael is not a man of many words but you had better listen up, because the ones he uses matter.
Michael walked to the front of the room, looked at us with a smile and simply asked: ‘Any Questions?’
That was it. As it happened, there were a load of questions and the meeting was a fascinating one. Two hours shot by in a flash. But if there hadn’t been a question, Michael wouldn’t have continued. It would have been the shortest meeting on record. But it would have been real.
I am tempted to treat this chapter the same way. Having comprehensively savaged, mocked and character-assassinated all those ‘nearly meetings’, I am hoping that the value of really meeting is self-evident. And leave it at that.
However …
I have been working in business long enough to know that there will be questions. And they are going to come at you thick and fast when you start changing meetings.
To you it’s obvious that really meeting your fellow humans in an effective, authentic and elegant way will generate more value in your company, improve relationships with colleagues and customers, resolve conflicts at home, at work and in the world. You think it’s unarguable that genuine rather than fake meetings lead to better decisions, clearer actions, more interesting products and services.
You’d think. However, the questions and challenges will come. People don’t like mediocrity, but it is amazing how hard they will argue for it when you offer a change.
One person you are going to bump into on your travels is the Rolex Warrior. He (for it usually is a he) will walk – or rather weave – up to you in the bar at some point, wearing a striped shirt that makes your eyes strobe. And he’s going to ask you, point-blank: ‘What’s the point of this really meeting stuff?’
It’s a rhetorical question. He means, ‘There is no point. Business is the way it is. It may be mediocre, but there’s no way things are going to change.’
I look him coolly in the eye. ‘The value of really meeting? Ask your wife. Sorry, ex-wife.’ That’s in my fantasy anyway, where I am played by a bullet-dodging, black-coated Keanu Reeves. Back in real life, I’m gripping my beer with a polite smile and I probably point out that:
Really Meeting makes us Smarter
Once a month I walk out onto a theatre stage in London’s West End to sing an opera I have never learned, with music I have never heard, characters that are completely new and no idea of where the story starts or ends. It’s like that recurrent nightmare people have about appearing naked in public with no script, combined with the pathological fear others have about having to sing in front of an audience.
I should say I am not alone, but part of a group of fellow thrill-seekers who make up the world’s only improvising opera company, Impropera (www.impropera.co.uk).
It’s never comfortable, but what makes it hugely valuable every time is to experience what a group of people can collectively invent when they are put under real pressure.