Ethan Hunt: This is going to be difficult.
Mission Commander Swanbeck: Mr Hunt, this isn’t mission difficult, it’s mission impossible. “Difficult” should be a walk in the park for you.
Mission: Impossible II (2001)
I love those movie scenes where the unlikely hero, or even better a group of misfits, discover why they have been called to adventure and what their mission is. A man from covert ops with a pipe points at a map or model explaining why this has never been attempted before. Or a shadowy spymaster describes a new target on grainy film as a projector whirs in the background.
I feel we are at that point as we gather for our adventure into, around, over, and under the Weird World of Meetings.
Here is a bit of a preview of what awaits us, how to prepare, and what essentials to pack.
It’s a Jungle Out There, So Stay Alert
There are lots of books on meetings which are duller than the meetings they are trying to improve. I have no intention of adding to that list.
It is a jungle out there. But it’s a jungle of dullness.
So here’s the question I’ll be asking myself throughout—it works well for meetings too. “Is this more interesting than food or sex?”
Let me explain.
Most people I meet in business could be having more fun. One reason for this is they keep quiet when they are bored. It is considered rude to speak up or leave the room. So they suffer in silence.
It’s all a lot less polite in the performing arts world I grew up in. Stand-up comedians know instantly when they have lost their audience. And if they take no notice they’ll get talked over, heckled, and eventually have bottles thrown at them. That’s what you call direct feedback.
It’s an honorable tradition in theater.
Picture yourself in an 18th-century opera house. Opera was then what the movies are to us today—the most dramatic, sensational, sound- and music-filled experience available. And to insure it stayed that way, opera houses were constructed as a series of “boxes.” One side of your box faced the stage and the other opened to drinking, dining, and wooing facilities when and if the stage action became dull. This meant opera audiences voted with their feet (and other parts of the body) if an opera failed to engage them. This resulted in operas that were eye-catchingly, heart-snaringly full of delight, intrigue, dance, storms, shipwrecks, divine skulduggery, and human frailty. It was only when theaters started to be constructed in serried rows, where it was difficult to leave when you were bored, that things started to get boring.
If we were actually meeting I’d suggest the same thing to you as I do to my clients. If anyone is going on too long, we use a thumbs-up signal which means “I got it, move on.” It’s visible. It’s immediate. It’s kinder than the hand slicing across the windpipe action that people often use to indicate you are overrunning.
As we are not in direct contact, can I just suggest that if I lose your interest, you put the book down, stretch your legs and grab a bite?* The sex thing is entirely up to you.
If I bore myself, I will do the same. Deal?
Some useful terms
Here are some words and phrases I’ll be using as we voyage into Meeting Land and their meanings.
“Meetings”
I am not going to restrict the book to formal meetings of eight or so people sitting around a big wooden desk. We’ll look at meetings as small as two and as large as 1500. We’ll focus on live meetings but include virtual ones. A lot of my clients are wrestling with virtual meetings currently. The bottom line is that everything you need to do for a live meeting, you need to do even more for a virtual one.
“Your meetings”
When I say “your” meetings I am including those you lead and those you attend. When we look at them from the highest level (and we will) they are indeed all “your” meetings—whether they feel like it or not.
“They”
“They” are the people who are causing the problems. They are not going to read this book, which is why you will have to do it for them. They sat in the middle rows at school and were proud of their pencil cases. They are the boring folk. Not us. Let’s keep it that way.
“Clients”
The ideas in this book are based on many years’ working with businesses around the world. I have mentioned some people by their real names. Others I have disguised, as they are still operating as meeting revolutionaries in their organizations and I don’t want to blow their cover. I will just refer to them by their first name and role, for example Ron the Consultant or Dominique the CEO. You are also going to be hearing from people outside business like Dame Barbara Stocking, the Head of Oxfam UK, the environmentalist Ashok Khosla, the scholar and activist Jim Garrison, and others. These are people with a stake in real meetings that goes beyond business and out into the world.
“Tried and tested techniques”
All the tips, tricks and tools I offer in this book have been rigorously tested in the field. Well, nearly all. I couldn’t help myself. I have included some which have never been tried and could explode without warning. I know that won’t bother an adventurer like you. Indeed, I am hoping you are going to go farther than I have, being more daring and experimental. Just let me know what you discover on your journey. I’ll be waiting in eager anticipation for your report: [email protected].
“Business”
I refer a lot to business in this book, but that doesn’t mean we need to restrict ourselves to commerce. The work here can be and has been applied to public sector organizations, government, NGOs and even schools. Will There Be Donuts? is relevant wherever two or more people are meeting together in a world that’s getting busier by the day. In writing the book I assumed that people in business also have home lives (I know that’s a bit of a bold assumption) and will find a lot of these techniques useful in personal life as well.
“The Arts”
You’ll see I often refer to the Arts or Performing Arts. This is the point where I have to put up my hand (you can’t see me, but it really is up) and confess I am a business outsider. That’s probably why people call me into their businesses. My background is the Arts. All my life I have been involved (as performer, director, writer, producer) in creating experiences for people in music, theater, opera, TV, and film.
I didn’t expect to be working in the business world, and if one of the world’s leading consulting companies hadn’t asked me to help them stage a spectacular operatic team-building experience in the early nineties (more of that later), I might not have been.
I have spent a couple of decades wandering around in a world I wasn’t trained to understand and have discovered how wonderful it is to be an outsider on the inside. It allows you to be permanently puzzled about why perfectly normal people behave in such peculiar ways when they are at work.
People ask me, “When did you leave the performing arts?” and I answer that I didn’t. To me businesses are theater and meetings are their stage. Some of the companies I know are every bit as dramatic and bloody as the schlockiest opera. Businesses run on creativity. Creative ventures need to be businesslike. Shakespeare, remember,