Meeting discipline is the name for all the practices aimed at how and when meetings happen:
- Core hours: the team picks 3-5 hours as “no meeting” time, when everyone is expected to be present and working in the open workspace.
- Standups: the team holds a 5-15 minute standup meeting every day, to foster first-order communications that can lead to impromptu meetings.
- Leave At Will: if someone is not actively learning, teaching, or deciding during a meeting, that person should quietly leave.
- Same Bat Time: the team starts on the universal clock, regardless of who is or isn’t present.
- Two-Hour Limit: the maximum length of a meeting is two hours, with a 10-minute break in the middle.
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These five practices together amount to a pretty tight set of constraints, which is very much the idea: over and over you’ll find organizations that waste countless thousands of hours a year in useless and non-productive meetings.
Buy-In Is Easy…
Me, Watching Some Boring Guy At A Meeting
The gist of the meeting discipline concept is that meetings are extremely expensive, therefore we need both to reduce their quantity and increase their quality. This is an easy sell: there tends to be a near universal agreement that meetings are a problem.
I usually introduce the idea at the largest possible meeting, specifically so that it’s more likely senior bosses are present.
As always with me, there’s a joke. Once we discuss the leave-at-will practice, people will already start to wonder whether they can really pull it off. I tell them I have a guaranteed technique they can use to leave meetings that aren’t working for them. Then I jump up, cover my mouth with both hands, and run out of the room. “Nobody ever stops a vomiter from leaving the room.”
…Actual Practice Can Be Tricky
All well and good, as long as the meetings in question aren’t my special important meetings. It’s a rare meeting-maker who believes her own meetings are long, irrelevant, boring, and generally regarded as a waste.
This is a good place to play the temporary fiat card: for the next three iterations we’re going to adopt the meeting discipline as an absolute and unbreakable rule. At the retrospective for the third iteration, we give ourselves permission to change the agreements if we like.
Once the agreement has been made, it’s critical that we publish them up the hierarchy as far as we can. Print the agreements, plus the temporary fiat adoption of them, and go around and talk directly to every boss up the chain. Explain what you’re doing, and ask them to be tolerant or even participatory in the discipline for the three weeks.
Most will bite. Some won’t. Little to be done unless you have access and approval from their grandboss. 🙂
Modeling Is Urgent
No matter how much we know that some given meeting is going to be useless, it is extremely hard to leave or ignore a meeting called by your great-grandboss.
Here are some good modeling opportunities:
- Leave a meeting, having prepped the leader in the pre-meeting chatter.
- Hold a meeting, sort the agenda from most to least important, and have at it. If anyone leaves, thank them later.
- Be ferociously stern and controlling at standups that start to drift into problem-solving sessions. If we really need a problem-solving session, call it for immediately after standup.
The real key to all this modeling is to make sure people see you doing it. Don’t be afraid to go meta- with them about why you’re doing what you’re doing.
