Thursday, November 03, 2011
How Bad Plans And "Good Ideas" Ruin Meetings
Fast Company: Have you ever hear a well-intentioned manager start a meeting with the question, "OK, so who's got a good idea about this?" What is the assumption here? Before any evaluation of what's a "good idea" can be trusted, the purpose must be clear, the vision must be well defined, and all the relevant data must have been collected (brainstormed) and analyzed (organized). "What's a good idea?" is a good question, but only when you're about 80 percent of the way through your thinking! Starting there would probably blow anyone's creative mental fuses.
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6 comments:
Wow this is a pertinent article. The author alluded to not studying decision making since 5th grade and I feel that I agree with him until I came to CMU. I feel like we study decision making every day. I feel like I have really improved on that over the last 3 semesters. Now when it comes to group decision making, this is my beef. A group of people sit down to solve a problem. They get to 80% of the solution and someone says. “What if we go at this from this completely different direction?”. If there is not a strong enough leader in the room to say, “No we have come to a consensus on this 80% finished solution”. Then everyone has to give the late idea some validity so we are all still working “together”. Then we waste tons-o-time doing this two or three time. There is one time in ten that the new Idea IS the right idea and you do not want to miss it. But that situation is rare.
This article does a very good job of telling us why planning ahead can prevent things from going wrong and keep a project going smoothly, but what I'm often most trouble by is how much a person, or group, should plan for *when* things go wrong. It would be far too optimistic to assume that, even with a large attention to planning and detail, every step involved in a process is going to go off without a hitch, but knowing this does not make planning for these hiccups any less difficult, as it would take some level of mind-reading. I would love to know how this author approaches a situation like this.
I like that this article makes a point to state that asking for a good idea should not come until much later in a meeting. People in meetings should be open to hearing all ideas, even the most ludicrous ones, because oftentimes that's the best way to get to the "good" ideas. I think that although planing is not always useful prior to meetings, a person can do homework and research and adequately prepare for these meetings, and that each project is different. I think that stating "prior planning is bad" is just as dangerous as "you must plan prior to the meeting."
The return of David Allen, and Getting Things Done...He always does a really nice job (for me) at laying out exactly what the steps are to a process. A lot of self-help books tend to lay out all of the steps of a process, when most of those things we do subconciously. Yes, it is good to be aware of those things, but if it's not broken, why fix it? About the success of a meeting or not...this will CONSISTENTLY be a debate that everyone has, but it all boils down to: "If there isn't a problem, or something that needs to happen with all of those people, why waste time?" Mr. Allen lays out the process you should follow in a meeting through those five steps, but I think that the leader should go through those five steps when determining if the meeting should actually be useful.
Woah! So there have been a lot of meeting improvement articles over the past few weeks and apparently meetings are often a huge waste of time. I'm incredibly disappointed that so many of these types of articles are necessary. It seems fairly straight forward to me that if everyone prepares for a well organized meeting, that a lot can be accomplished. I'm probably missing something if there are this many problems with meetings. I'm a huge believer in organization and preparedness in order to have fewer and more efficient meetings. Meetings can be so useful and are an integral part of collaboration. It's a shame that this is such an issue.
I actually found this article so useful and spot on. I feel that it is incorrect, but often so much easier to, when starting a project, ask, "whats a god idea?" If the only goal in a project is to make something "good", then what is the purpose of your project? And what exactly does "good" mean? We view something that is good as being successful. Nevertheless, we must not worry about the product, the process is so much more important- because the only way you will be affective in fulfilling a project would be by allowing energy, brainstorming, and solidifying of a purpose to allow for that project to evolve and mold into it's own. We must allow for these preliminary steps to take place- If we just focus on a perceived hope of success, we are losing all the potential for such a project to be the best that it can be.
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