Finding the real work that meetings are good at
Summary
It’s too easy for people to thoughtlessly take each others’ time, occupy standing slots, show off with performative teamwork, and generally suck your energy. Meetings typically bore most participants — the greatest sin in knowledge work — and when they’re over, nothing has changed except us all being that much closer to retirement. Her hypothesis borrows from Druckers’s Landmarks of Tomorrow and expresses success in knowledge as being not the facts we know, but by how good we are at judging the truth of uncertain things, and suggests that in a healthy workplace, the whole system promotes higher-quality knowledge production, above and beyond what any individual could achieve alone… Contrasting that with the almost ubiquitous sense that organisations don’t learn, Elizabeth leans heavily on Argyris On Organizational Learning to assert that pretty much everyone finds the interaciton of individual and organizational learning very hard. Her call to action is: Elizabeth closes by asserting that the common meme of “meetings aren’t work” completely reinforces (and is therefore reinforced by) the capitalist / Taylorist split of employees between “thinkers” and “doers”: I found this a timely piece of reading - although I am currently focused on how we can help colleagues get better at their individual sense-making, that is but a step on the journey towards a better collective sense-making around shared challenges. Elizabeth’s post contains some bold links to some very big philosophical (and other) concepts - to be frank without her familiarity with those writings I found it a little hard to follow the thread at points.