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

Re: an observation

[narya.livejournal.com]

There are two rules I've found to be true in practice and also useful to keep in mind.

First, every meeting has a certain amount of structuredness. This ranges from a free-for-all complete with chocolate pudding to the very formal roberts rules style of discussion. Once you've embarked on a discussion or a meeting, you've picked a point somewhere in this range. There is then only so much you can succeed in increasing the level of formality during the course of the discussion.

To a large extent, this is equivalent to what ukelele said about setting up expectations. But the point is that you need to think about the maximum level of formality you would need to keep a handle on things and work backwards from there. This is especially true for the group you have in mind, where any attempt to increase the formality mid-meeting will just get trampled on.

The other thing is that everyone needs to be clear what the point of the discussion is. I think one of the things that caused last night to go better than I expected was that the point of the final discussion became "convince narya that my argument should go in this report" rather than "reach consensus that this argument should go in this report." Although it was unintentional, I do think that that helped.

I also agree with what 76trombones said. I think also that the person she has in mind cannot really interpret the difference between other people understanding his arguments but still disagreeing with him and other people disagreeing with him due to not understanding his arguments. He doesn't seem to totally pick up on the cues that most people would use to make this distinction.

Furthermore, when he is arguing that "A implies B by rule X", often everyone in the meeting will agree that B is true and X is a logical rule, but A is not the case or simply not relevant to the current situation. But he'll interpret their arguments to be arguments against X, particularly when A is something that we don't have data about anyway. I believe that this caused a certain amount of confusion on his part in the past, because he would simply state B and X and everyone would agree, but later he would get disagreement when he took it as a given that adding A into the picture was logical.

I think the net result of all of this is that he doesn't necessarily feel that he knows when other people agree with him and so he feels like he needs to go through a lot of argument for everything. I find it annoying on many levels, but I suppose it's less annoying than when there was confusion.

In any case, these aren't the easiest meetings to keep control of and fwiw I do think you're doing a good job. For all my advice, your meetings are running a lot shorter and with a better signal-to-noise than mine ever had :).