When you are really meeting, people don’t hang on to their own ideas but build on each others’. Instead of the plague of ‘buts’ that stifle nearly meetings and stop the creative process flowing, a real meeting is full of ‘yes’s’ as the participants accept what is emerging and build on it. It’s business jazz.
Ron the Consultant sounds more like a jazz improviser than a business professional when he says, ‘A great meeting is where you turn up with 20 pages but use none of them. Instead you get up, gather round the flipchart and together you deal with what needs to be done.’
There’s a stark contrast with the ‘every person for themselves’ character of the nearly meeting, as Pharma senior executive Thomas Breuer explains:
It’s a fundamental problem when you have a series of monologues happening. It’s so tempting just to leap in with your own idea. My colleagues and I have now trained ourselves to say ‘I paid a lot of attention to what you said – now let me build on this and give my view.’ You create much higher value when you really concentrate on what the previous person said, rather than go 180 degrees with a completely disconnected idea. We now make a conscious effort to create something of higher value by joining the dots. When we do this the output of the meeting multiplies.
When you are in flow like this, your individuality seems to be replaced by a group identity. The ideas don’t originate from the individuals but emerge in the space between them.
It’s as if you are individual fingers but on the same hand. You hear sportsmen talk about this heightened team feeling. Likewise, soldiers working with comrades under testing conditions. While it’s crazy to think of the thumb and finger competing with each other, that is effectively what is happening when we nearly meet.
If you look down on meetings from an imaginary bird’s-eye viewpoint – and I recommend this perspective whenever you get stuck – participants look less like human beings and more like components of a larger network. I think of many radio telescopes combining to create an array of receivers that’s far more sensitive than a single unit. Seen from this eye-in-the-sky angle, a meeting isn’t really generating ideas, it’s amplifying the ones it picks up from ‘out there’.
‘Out there’ is where the customer is, where the business is really taking place, where the future is forming and true innovation lurks. Addicts of the inward-looking process meeting would do well to ‘turn the dish’ outwards, because that is where the value is usually to be found.
Another word for this experience of flow is ‘ensemble’, a performing arts term – from the French word meaning ‘together’ – for a group of virtuosos who agree to play, write and perform together. Though the myth of the lone genius is widely promoted in the arts world, the majority of great work is done by ensembles really meeting and creating together.
Really Meeting Creates Clarity
One of the functions of really meeting is that we leave clearer than when we arrived.
I think clarity is a Holy Grail of business. Something that people want but requires a real quest to find. Clarity is hard to achieve by yourself. If you listen, your mind is a constant swirl of signals. When the time comes to be clear, your mind hasn’t made up its mind.
‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’ as the little girl asked. Real Meetings help us get clearer, collectively, than we could do individually.
A common criticism of religion is that it requires you to accept dogma in an unthinking way. I am not particularly religious, but coming from a Jewish background I can’t help noticing how un-accepting Jews seem to be when they want to get clear. The process is dynamic, argumentative and usually very noisy. Scholars studying the Talmud traditionally sit opposite each other on specially constructed tables and basically argue with each other about the meaning of every word and phrase. I don’t know if this explains why there are so many Jewish lawyers, but I think I understand why our family meals were so noisy when I was growing up.
When we really meet, truths aren’t dispensed but are hammered out across a table. The sacred texts are not accepted in a pre-digested, face-value way but only gather meaning through the to and fro of discussion. You only get clear when you get collective …
Really Meeting is Inclusive
There was a great moment in music history, in around 1300, when church choirs stopped chanting in unison and burst into glorious ‘polyphony’, where lots of diverse voices singing different lines weave together into a rich, complex harmony.
Really meeting is like that. It operates in quadrasonic surround sound. It enables all voices to be heard … even the quiet ones.
As Thomas Breuer explains, it can be a challenge, but it’s worth the effort:
When you put people together from very different fields and hierarchy levels you have to spend time to make sure that everyone really speaks up and each individual contribution is recognised. Hierarchy in innovative meetings is counterproductive. I imagine it’s a bit like how an orchestral conductor has to pay equal attention to the entire brass section and the solo piccolo.
If I have a lot of people sitting around me who are senior management peers, then fine. But if you have physicians, statisticians or analysts responsible for the data management of a project it is essential to encourage them to speak up and bring them up to a level where they can contribute.
I find that these people often have crucial insights to offer that raise the conversation or bring it down to earth. If they don’t speak up and instead leave the meeting thinking ‘Too bad’, we are losing value.
Everyone is used to the cliché there are no stupid questions, but to create an atmosphere where this is really the case requires a lot from the person running the meeting. Everyone has to know there will be no punishment for so-called ‘dumb’ suggestions. The creation of a common understanding, culture, platform is important. Management has to create a common language, a licence to operate, so that people dare to speak up.
I remember a safety meeting when the imminent swine flu pandemic and the expected distribution of tens of millions of vaccine doses was going to result in an exponential growth of safety events; 20 to 25 times more than the safety department could normally handle. We were starting to think about this. Who else can rapidly join the safety team? Can we get additional resources from other functions in- or outside the company? Then all of a sudden one guy spoke up. He is not very senior but he really knows our operation. He’s what I call a quiet voice. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘resource is only one way to approach this. Another way is to look at our processes and take fat out of the system. Why don’t we engage with governmental agencies and explore ways to stagger reporting on products which have been in the market for 15 to 20 years?’
This one comment triggered an avalanche of new ideas. That’s what I mean by a really inclusive meeting.
Really Meeting allows Real Conversations to happen
‘You don’t really want to have a war, do you, your Highness?’
It’s not a phrase that you or I might use too often. But it’s the sort of conversational gambit you might need at your fingertips if you happen to be the head of a global NGO like Oxfam. Dame Barbara Stocking is a fan of really meeting. She has to be when dealing with potentially explosive international situations.
There is a head of state I can think of who thinks the world is against him. He is constantly about to go to war with a neighbouring state. So recently I got on a plane. The fact that I took the trouble to go out there and visit him was already an important step. Sometimes just showing up is the key. We had a very human discussion and in the middle of it I just asked him point-blank if he really intended to go to war. After quite a pause he replied. ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’
Nearly meeting skirts the dangerous issues. When you are