I’m gonna pull a Hanson here. What makes you think group meetings are about decision making?
I think the primary goal of many group meetings is not to find a solution to a difficult problem, but to force everybody in the meeting to publicly commit to the action that is decided on. This both cuts off the opportunity for future complaining and disobedience (‘You should have brought that up in the meeting!’) and spreads the blame if the idea doesn’t work (‘Well, we voted on it/discussed it’). Getting to the most effective solutions to your problems is secondary to achieving cooperation within the office.
Most group meetings are power games. Their main purpose is to, forcibly or not, create long-term cooperation by the people in the meeting. This is why they are often ‘dull’, or ‘long’, or ‘ineffective’ - the very cost you incur by attending is a signal of your loyalty and commitment. Trying to change this would make meetings less effective, not more effective.
Most meetings are not just power games. They are pure status games. Only in such group meetings can you show off. Power plays are one way to show off.
You will speak quickly and confidently, while avoiding to make any commitment to action. If you attend someone else’s meeting, you quickly interrupt and share your arguments in order to look confident and competent.
The low status meeting participants are mainly there to watch. They will try to quickly join the highest status viewpoints to avoid loss of more status, thereby causing cascades. As high status person you can deflect actions and delegate actions to a low status participant, thereby further boosting your status.
Being seen as the one who made the decision is nice. Deliberately delaying a decision by arguing for more data is also fine. Visibly polarizing an audience to your viewpoint is an amazing status spectable!
Most meetings are status games. They are boring for the low status participants who have little chance to gain status. But these meetings are what keeps the high status participants going. And it’s an opportunity for careerists to grow in status. All decision making and cooperation is irrelevant or a side-effect.
I certainly expect status games, above and beyond power games. Actually saying ‘power games’ was the wrong choice of words in my comment. Thank you for pointing this out!
That being said, I don’t think the situation you describe is fully accurate. You describe group meetings as an arena for status (in the office), whereas I think instead they are primarily a tool for forcing cooperation. The social aspect still dominates the decision making aspect*, but the meeting is positive sum in that it can unify a group into acting towards a certain solution, even if that is not the best solution available.
*I think this is the main reason so many people are confused by the alleged inefficiency of meetings. If you have a difficult problem and no good candidate solutions it is in my experience basically never optimal to ask a group of people at once and hope they collectively solve it. Recognizing that this is at best a side-effect of group meetings cleared up a lot of confusion for me.
As another commenter noted, there exists an alternative strategy. Which is to organize a lot of one-on-one meetings to build consensus. And then to use a single group meeting to demonstrate that consensus and polarizing the remaining minority. This may be a more efficient way to enforce cooperation.
Anyway, I wonder if there is a good method to find out the dominant forces at play here.
I don’t dispute that the phenomenon you’re describing is real, but purely as a data point I’d offer that in the majority of my recent experiences working with organizations as a consultant, managers have not explicitly sought to use meetings this way, and in a few cases they have proactively pushed for input from others. It’s certainly possible that the sample of organizations I’m working with is biased both because a) they are mostly nonprofits and foundations, and b) if they are working with me it’s a signal that they’re unusually attentive to their decision-making process. But I don’t want people reading this thread to be under the impression that all managers are this cynical.
But I don’t want people reading this thread to be under the impression that all managers are this cynical.
I think it’s a mistake to see this as simply being about being cynical. A CEO might justly believe that infighting within his company is a bigger problem then decision quality and focus on using meetings as a way to get people to cooperate better with each other.
I’m gonna pull a Hanson here. What makes you think group meetings are about decision making?
I think the primary goal of many group meetings is not to find a solution to a difficult problem, but to force everybody in the meeting to publicly commit to the action that is decided on. This both cuts off the opportunity for future complaining and disobedience (‘You should have brought that up in the meeting!’) and spreads the blame if the idea doesn’t work (‘Well, we voted on it/discussed it’). Getting to the most effective solutions to your problems is secondary to achieving cooperation within the office.
Most group meetings are power games. Their main purpose is to, forcibly or not, create long-term cooperation by the people in the meeting. This is why they are often ‘dull’, or ‘long’, or ‘ineffective’ - the very cost you incur by attending is a signal of your loyalty and commitment. Trying to change this would make meetings less effective, not more effective.
How about another angle.
Most meetings are not just power games. They are pure status games. Only in such group meetings can you show off. Power plays are one way to show off.
You will speak quickly and confidently, while avoiding to make any commitment to action. If you attend someone else’s meeting, you quickly interrupt and share your arguments in order to look confident and competent.
The low status meeting participants are mainly there to watch. They will try to quickly join the highest status viewpoints to avoid loss of more status, thereby causing cascades. As high status person you can deflect actions and delegate actions to a low status participant, thereby further boosting your status.
Being seen as the one who made the decision is nice. Deliberately delaying a decision by arguing for more data is also fine. Visibly polarizing an audience to your viewpoint is an amazing status spectable!
Most meetings are status games. They are boring for the low status participants who have little chance to gain status. But these meetings are what keeps the high status participants going. And it’s an opportunity for careerists to grow in status. All decision making and cooperation is irrelevant or a side-effect.
I certainly expect status games, above and beyond power games. Actually saying ‘power games’ was the wrong choice of words in my comment. Thank you for pointing this out!
That being said, I don’t think the situation you describe is fully accurate. You describe group meetings as an arena for status (in the office), whereas I think instead they are primarily a tool for forcing cooperation. The social aspect still dominates the decision making aspect*, but the meeting is positive sum in that it can unify a group into acting towards a certain solution, even if that is not the best solution available.
*I think this is the main reason so many people are confused by the alleged inefficiency of meetings. If you have a difficult problem and no good candidate solutions it is in my experience basically never optimal to ask a group of people at once and hope they collectively solve it. Recognizing that this is at best a side-effect of group meetings cleared up a lot of confusion for me.
As another commenter noted, there exists an alternative strategy. Which is to organize a lot of one-on-one meetings to build consensus. And then to use a single group meeting to demonstrate that consensus and polarizing the remaining minority. This may be a more efficient way to enforce cooperation.
Anyway, I wonder if there is a good method to find out the dominant forces at play here.
I don’t dispute that the phenomenon you’re describing is real, but purely as a data point I’d offer that in the majority of my recent experiences working with organizations as a consultant, managers have not explicitly sought to use meetings this way, and in a few cases they have proactively pushed for input from others. It’s certainly possible that the sample of organizations I’m working with is biased both because a) they are mostly nonprofits and foundations, and b) if they are working with me it’s a signal that they’re unusually attentive to their decision-making process. But I don’t want people reading this thread to be under the impression that all managers are this cynical.
I think it’s a mistake to see this as simply being about being cynical. A CEO might justly believe that infighting within his company is a bigger problem then decision quality and focus on using meetings as a way to get people to cooperate better with each other.