In this article in the new york times, Professor Reid Hastie writes that “every organization has too many meetings, and far too many poorly designed ones.”
I was in a meeting recently and I counted 35 people, 28 with their laptops open. About 10 appeared to be following the talk going on at that time. Every talk is a powerpoint-style presentation where the speaker essentially reads the slides to the audience. The question periods after each talk are the one redeeming feature, but they don’t fully redeem most meetings, not even close.
I think that with the large size of our organization, it is necessary to have a lot of meetings for coordination and dissemination of information, but the current number of meetings we have on ATLAS is staggering (about 5,000 in 2007). I checked and there were about 6,800 in 2008 with 30,000 presentations.
In the article linked above, two of the author’s guidelines are:
- Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives.
On ATLAS we have weeks (like the current one) every few months where we review the progress of the past few months and lay out the plans for the next few months. Since these are high profile meetings, everyone wants to give a talk, and the meetings wind up being long and unfocused. One meeting this week was scheduled to go from 9am to 6:20pm. And one of the grad students from my group had the talk he had prepared postponed due to lack of time (it was already 7:30pm when this happened)!
- Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting: How many participants are really needed? How long should the meeting last?
People often attend meetings out of a feeling of obligation. And very few meetings end on time.
Fortunately for our productivity, with wireless internet in most meeting rooms, most people are just doing the work they would have been doing in their office, on their laptop in the meeting. And in fact I think this is the ultimate cause of the explosion in the number of meetings. I gave a presentation this week, and it was pretty dispiriting to look around the room and see mostly tops of heads instead of faces as people were looking at their laptops.
So the solution is simple. There would be many fewer, very productive, meetings if one simple rule was enacted: No laptops in meetings! This is not going to happen. Good thing I have a good laptop.
But seriously, the solution is on the way. ATLAS has formed a committee to review ATLAS meetings and hopefully reduce the number of meetings. And this committee on meetings has scheduled some meetings in the near future.
Adam, thanks for posting this! I was thoroughly amused when I saw the announcement that we had a “Meeting Optimization Committee” – it made me wonder which meetings would be chosen as signal and which as background for input to TMVA… Seriously though, I think the only way to change this is for people to speak up about meetings that run too long, or are not productive. For the same reason that people feel obliged to attend meetings, they feel shy to criticize meetings that run too long. People who organize meetings need to be told when their meetings are not productive. So, if I ever organize a meeting that you find unproductive – please tell me!
Hi Adam,
There was another recent NYT article that gave me similar thoughts:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17corner.html
See question 2. Given that we all have the technology to see the slides for a talk in advance, what’s the point in actually reading through them in front of people? We could save a lot of time by reading the slides in advance and then just asking questions.
Sometimes it’s most useful to go to a talk because you have a question that would be good to ask at then end, for discussion. For this purpose, it is highly beneficial when people who already know the material being presented bring their laptops and do work during the presentation, until Q & A at the end. I think laptops at meetings are highly useful — one stops and listens when one needs to. That’s why this situation has grown, it’s not necessarily such a bad thing.
I have to say that ATLAS is a typical European socialism style collaboration. Look at that absurd “ATLAS meetings optimization” email sent by spokesperson. It’s exactly what we called “big government”.
This is really helpful to me: I have a meeting tomorrow which I’d 75% decided not to attend (nothing to do with physics: an AGM of an organisation I belong to). I have now 100% decided. Thank you!
Dear USATLASer, your comment sounds clever, except that I don’t know what you mean at all. Could you please be a bit more explicit what you think is so absurd in the attempt to gather input in order to streamline meetings better. Not to mention that I’m sorry not to know what you mean by ‘European socialism style’….