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Dr. Strangemeeting (or: how I learned to stop worrying and enjoy the donuts)

by Geoff Hart

Previously published, in a different form, as: Hart, G.J. 2001. Dr. Strangemeeting. (or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the donuts). Intercom July/August:56.

“Their business… was over, … and they all knew it; the magic moment had arrived when it was understood that nothing more would be established, discovered or decided today. But… the engines of protocol had enormous inertial mass; once set in motion, they took forever to grind to a stop. [They] proceeded to dutifully chew the scraps of the agenda until all had been gnawed to nothing-at-all.”—Michael Swanwick, Stations of the Tide

Experts claim you’ll spend 1500 hours in meetings during a typical 30-year career—that is, if you can duck some meetings by looking busy and if you can retire early. If you duck slowly or plan a long career, you could easily spend more time in meetings than you spend working. Fortunately, a little planning and some quick thinking should let you turn meetings into a blessing—or at least a tolerable evil. Here’s how:

Learn which meetings to avoid: If the “come join us” memo has no clear statement of purpose—and that purpose should take 10 or fewer words to state—the odds of the meeting accomplishing anything useful decrease drastically as the length of the “mission statement” increases. Bow out gracefully if possible. If you really can’t afford to offend the person who called the meeting, borrow a pager and ask a friend to page you 5 minutes into the meeting. Pagers are “cool”, and give you the appearance of a busy, important person, but best of all, they provide a valid excuse to leave. “Sorry, Dick! Jane’s paged me. It must be important.”
Play “lingo bingo”: Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, popularized the phrase “buzzword bingo”, which works as follows: Before the meeting, distribute a series of bingo cards based on your company’s key jargon (e.g., proactive, cutting edge). Whenever a buzzword emerges, tick it off on your card. The first person to fill a row or column wins. Just don’t shout “bingo!” too loudly, unless you specifically want to earn the speaker’s wrath. Or try my variant: pounce on anyone who violates any of several pre-arranged prohibitions, such as using sentences longer than 20 words, using words with more than six syllables, or stating that “experts claim” anything. Failing to inform the speaker of the rules adds a certain zest to the game. Correct alternatives to shouting Bingo! include guffaws, thrown objects, and all-out assaults with SuperSoaker water guns. (The latter approach works better at a software development company than at a Fortune 100 bank. Know thine audience!)
Make the downtime productive: A meeting is a place where “minutes are saved and hours are wasted”, but technical communicators can avoid both problems by volunteering to record the minutes. The cool thing about taking the minutes is that you can summarize hour-long discussions in fewer than 100 words—often much fewer. All you need to do is record the original problem statement and the final consensus; if you’ve missed anything during the discussion, simply ask “so what’s the consensus?” whenever the conversation slows, thereby eliminating the need to pay attention to the actual discussion. Meanwhile, bring some real work to do on your laptop; the more you seem to be writing, the more impressed people will be when you boil all that information down into a 100-word summary. (Taking on the unpopular task of writing the minutes earns you serious bonus points. Redeem them at strategic moments.)
Outlaw PowerPoint: Software improves productivity only when it accomplishes something you couldn’t accomplish equally fast manually. Establishing a PowerPoint-free zone forces speakers to focus on content, not flash, and that’s surely a good thing.
Love thy donuts: Donuts offer a trump card once you learn to savor them. If someone glances your way and gives you “the look”, you’re going to be asked to contribute. Grab a mouthful of your donut just as they gather breath to speak, and start chewing slowly. Often, they’ll simply move on to the next victim and let you eat in peace; if not, a mouthful of fried dough buys you time to come up with something intelligent to say.
Never add to the agenda: The person chairing the meeting may open the floor to suggestions. Don’t make any. After all, it’s their meeting, not yours. If pressed, offer to e-mail your suggestions “once I’ve had time to think through the implications”.

These suggestions may seem seditious at first glance, but it’s the meetings themselves that pose the problem: You were hired to work—and meetings prevent you from doing so. In a way, subverting meetings is the highest form of loyalty, and that’s surely a noble thing. Even if they don’t serve donuts.