Ten years ago I expressed my distaste for the way that the IT industry generally conducts meetings. I haven’t changed my mind since. Meetings don’t necessarily present an organizational panacea.

Why do I feel so strongly? Once, a long time ago, I became an elected member of the local district council. It was in the evening after a particularly fruitless and frustrating council meeting that I sat with the council’s chief officer over a beer in the local pub, ‘Well, that meeting was a waste of time’ I muttered. ‘Not at all, it was very satisfactory’. He looked smug. ‘I got the budget signed off without any questions or amendments.’

‘I missed that.’

‘Most people did.’ He chuckled.

‘So you deliberately slipped in the important objective of the meeting so that nobody would notice it?’

‘Well you put it crudely, but we have a council to run. This involves providing services, arranging things, and meeting our statutory obligations. If you really believe that the elected representatives have any value to add to the allocation of the budget, then you’re in for a shock. Meetings are a way of giving a bunch of people who wouldn’t be able to agree even about the current weather a chance to feel that they are having their say. It gives them the illusion of control.’

There then ensued a long conversation that I cannot reproduce in detail but the method then in vogue was this:

You book a long meeting lasting all morning. You introduce into the agenda a number of trivial but contentious topics about matters that the attendees all understand, and about which preferably they will disagree about on tribal lines. (I remember that in this memorable case, wheelbarrows and mowing machines were heavily involved.) The important business is put at the end. You allow free-ranging discussion, choosing a weak chairman who takes time to call for a vote, and who is incapable of moving on quickly to the next item. At around twelve-thirty, you allow the smell of delicious cooking to waft into the room. At this point, blood-sugar is low, and tempers are frayed. You then introduce the agenda items for the approval for the budgets. The cerebral hemispheres of the members are saying ‘examine the budget in detail’, but the cerebellums are shouting ‘food! We are bored and low in blood sugar’. Wrapped in internal conflict, the members give cursory distracted glances to the budgetary details. You introduce the smell of freshly-roasted coffee. Within minutes it is all over. Whereas the purchase of a council wheelbarrow was argued heatedly for hours, the budget is approved in scant minutes.

A poorly-conducted meeting is like a website without security. It is an invitation for every malicious or manipulative person or faction to exploit for their own ends. Meetings that are badly run will undermine the group decision process, however well-meaning the intentions.