Being part of the solution: Part 5: solving meeting problems: unconventional, radical thinking can solve stubborn meeting problems.

If you want to compile a record-breaking list of problems in a hurry, go out and ask some business people what's wrong with meetings. The complaints will keep on coming, faster than you can record them! Yet few will be able to offer any ideas on how to cure these ills. Here we present some notable exceptions: three successful solutions implemented by different individual and groups.

The Monday-morning stand-up meeting 

In one engineering firm, the weekly Monday-morning staff meeting had become a disagreeable, lengthy affair. Everybody was griping about the waste of time, the jockeying for attention, the displays of rank and influence--but they all went on contributing to those problems. Each Monday, they sat around a long conference table in two rows and talked at great length about thing that didn't concern the group as a whole, repeated arguments and ideas, and went off subject whenever the, felt like it.

One day, the head of the firm and a group leader were commiserating about the staff meeting. They decided to find a radical solution that would presets the benefits of facility-wide idea sharing but do awa2 with waste and politics.

First, why did people talk at such great length? Perhaps because they were too comfortable: here they were on a sleepy Monday morning, lounging in ergonomically designed chairs. What better way to while away a few hours? Now, take away those chairs, and their tired feet might send them an urgent message to get back to work!

Interestingly, once they thought of doing away with chairs, games of rank and politics also seemed harder to play. There wasn't any head of table, or "next to the head of table," etc. It was just a bunch of equals standing around and sharing essential information and some useful ideas.

And that's how it turned out to be: each Monday morning, for no more than half an hour, everybody assembled in the hall with a cup of coffee. Each group summarized progress made in the preceding week; then problems were thrown out free-style for quick brainstorming. The one thing that was not a problem was the weekly staff meeting.

Minutes you can read--and write

How often do you read minutes of meetings? Chances are, they are so long, you just don't have the time. In fact, we receive some committee meeting minutes that are scary just to look at--heavy, bound volumes that promise to chronicle the course of complex battles.

It's not just a problem of time. When people don't read minutes, or never get past the first, unimportant part, they may miss important reminders of what they are to do, how, and by when.

In one company, a group decided that both writing and reading of meeting minutes should be focused on what matters most: action. The most radical, and most effective, way of doing that was to write only action items. That way, nothing else had to be written, and nothing else read. For the writers, this meant a terrific time saving. For the readers, it also saved time--but more important, it increased the chance that decisions reached in the meeting were implemented.

Involving distant participants through interactive minutes

A common problem in any meeting or committee is that two or three people tend to carry most of the load, while others get hardly involved. Lack of involvement usually translates into lack of follow-through--a recipe for an ineffective group. This problem is usually multiplied in a telephone conference,

Cheryl recently participated in a TAPPI tele-meeting chaired by David Bentley, who found a brilliant solution to this problem. He asked that each participant e-mail him, directly after the meeting, a summary of the most important points. Dave then quickly edited these summaries and emailed them back to the group as the meeting minutes. It made short work of the minutes for him--and at the same time raised everybody's interest and commitment.

Cheryl and Peter Reimold have been teaching communication skills to engineers, scientists, and businesspeople for 20 years. Their firm, PERC Communications (telephone [phone], e-mail [e-mail]), offers businesses consulting and writing services, as well as customized in-house courses on writing, presentation skills, and on-the-job communication skills. Visit their web site at www.allaboutcommunication.com.