Meeting skills

[dmaze]

I should figure out how to make people stop talking in meetings I'm running. (Either "what you're saying is irrelevant" or "let someone else talk".) This occasionally is a problem in the one group I'm responsible for right now; last night could have been a disaster but worked out to be mercifully okay.

Comments

[76trombones.livejournal.com]

My own signal-to-noise ratio was certainly lower than I'd have liked it to be. There are several reasons:

1. I wasn't well prepared for the discussion (and neither were most of the other participants). I'm not sure how that could have been fixed: even if things had been ready earlier, they wouldn't have been distributed outside of a meeting. Maybe having quiet time to read each whole document, then proceeding once everyone had finished?

2. I felt that I was competing for floor time. There was a point when I said "you should discuss this... oh, wait, maybe you already did, but in a previous section... oh, uh, then I guess you should make the connection more explicit, or say it here also, or something, uh..." (etc). Now, one reason I was fumbling so badly was the lack of preparation, of course, but the reason I kept going was that I felt like I had something to say, and eventually I'd figure it out, and I'd better keep the floor, because if I didn't, I might not get it again any time soon.

3. I wasn't entirely clear on our purpose. The general idea was obvious, of course, but... well, more on that in email, not here.

#2 is just a corollary of the problem you were already wondering how to solve, but I guess it helps illustrate the self-reinforcing nature of it.

[dmaze]

Yeah, I had something of an advantage during the meeting for having already seen one of the things being passed around and having done LaTeX work on the other. But that having been said, I got the impression especially at the end of the meeting that the person-in-question was saying things he thought were relevant without looking to see if they were already written down. (And I thought PiQ's SNR was on the reasonably good side, especially given what had happened pre-meeting in email.)

I think I understand the purpose now, but it wasn't clear to me until the very very end of the meeting. I probably should have asked narya to explain more; oh well. PiQ's statements did mostly line up with the purpose in the end, even if we got a fair ways off in the process.