> When 2:50 rolled around and your meeting was supposed to end, do you think people actually ended the meeting? Noooooo. Absolutely not!
At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
In Finland the universities (and I believe in many other European universities have/had this as well) there was "academic quarter" which meant that if something was scheduled for 10am it would actually start at 10:15am. IIRC if they used precise time (10:00) then it would actually start at that time.
I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.
It also allows you to have "1 hour" classes that are at 10am and 11am, and you aren't forced to leave early or arrive late. A 5m gap isn't enough for huge numbers of classes in many campuses.
In Poland "academic quarter" has a sense that if the teacher didn't show up and it's 15 minues past, the students can leave. They still need to show up for the class at 00 every time and are scolded to varying degree if they showed up after the teacher started which they do right after they arrive.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
At Michigan State, I had a math prof (Wade Ramey) who would lock the door after class started. If you were late, you couldn't attend.
He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part.
>And he would give negative points on assignments.
I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!
I have a medical condition (autoimmune hypothyroid, extreme edition) which I wasn't aware of, but was suffering from severely, during my University years. Waking up was extremely difficult for me and as a result I was often late. At the time I couldn't understand why I seemingly had a problem that nobody else did, and presumed I just lacked self control. Nope, I just needed (a lot) of medication.
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
Fifteen minutes late used to be the academic standard in Germany (and other countries): it was noted by “c.t.” in the timetable, meaning “cum tempore”.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know).
However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
This is also fast becoming the norm in many big tech companies. The internal calendar tools will pretty much always start meetings 5minutes after the hour/half hour by default and end exactly on the hour/half hour by default (you can override if needed).
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
At my schools and workplaces, meetings or classes would begin when they began, and then several people who mattered would be chronically late, and so whatever we did in the first 5-10 minutes was an utter waste and went down the drain, because the leaders would rewind and repeat it all "for the benefit of those who just joined us."
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
At St Andrews University we have the concept of an “Academic hour” where every class and lecture begins at 5 past and ends at 5 to the hour. So your 10:00-11:00 lecture is actually 10:05-10:55. I believe this is mainly to give people time to get between their classes across town and to standardise how much time one has to set up between lectures.
UC Berkeley does this too. Nobody told us freshman, and in my very first class we were all dutifully early, wondering where the professor was, and at 8 minutes after the hour the whole lecture hall was wondering if we needed to bail. Then the lecturer came in and asked what we were all doing there, didn't we know classes don't start until 10 minutes after the listed time?
Our team did the same during the pandemic. They declared that the first 5 minutes of every meeting were for bio breaks.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
> The 10-minute transition time will move before the hour instead of after the hour. Previously a one-hour class with an official start time of 9:00 a.m. would begin at 9:10 a.m. Under the new policy, class will begin at the official start time but end at 9:50 a.m.
I've been doing this for years with my meetings and I wish Google Calendar had it built in. I have to keep manually adjusting start times and it's a pain.
I wouldn't even call it pedantic. I mean, they seem to be the only sane humans in the company. The most faulty is obviously Page, who made the decision that seemed nice and progressive, but was problematic because the subordinates cannot oppose stupid intrusions from above and ignore bad policies. 2nd faulty party is the author of the story, i.e. guys, who use the room when it isn't booked, i.e. after 50 minutes of the meeting. This is natural, of course, because indeed it always happens, it would happen if it was booked for 2 hours too. But the point is that they are in a booked room, and it isn't booked by them.
When I got to the bit about "I’d personally tell them that I wasn’t going to leave the room" that seemed crazy to me. I'm fully on the side of the 10 minute booking guys.
Ditto. I thought the punchline, i.e. the malicious compliance, will be booking 50 min and then booking 10 min more. Someone using an unreserved spot is that, booking a meeting.
A scoutmaster of mine had a theory. Everyone has their own different version of what "9:30" means- to some it's 9:25, to others 9:45. But there is only one 9:32. So he would use weird times like that, we're meeting at 6:07 today.
Saratoga, CA does something similar. The twisty part of Quito Road, between Bicknell Road and Pollard road, has a speed limit of 25 mph. But the sharper turns have advisory speed signs (the yellow diamond kind) with numbers like 17, 19, 21, and 22 mph to catch drivers' attention and get them to slow down on these turns.
Then there’s an aggressive driver who sees that and realizes it hammers home the point that the yellow speed signs (vs the white ones) are not enforceable.
And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because speedos don’t have ticks but every 5mph.
Not really the same thing, but in New Zealand, all speed limits are multiples of 10 (km/h), and all recommended safe speeds (e.g. for a sharp corner) end in ‘5’.
Initially I was sure you were talking about my Scoutmaster. (The details diverged in the end.) The expected arrival time for camping trips was always something like 9:59am - that way people would hopefully show up at 9-something or maybe just a few minutes late like 10:10. If the expected arrival time was 10:00, people would interpret it as 10-something and show up at 10:45.
If I was in the room, I'd be relieved. I always found that meetings at large companies dragged on unless there was a forcing factor (like a doorknock) that got someone to bring it to an end.
i was at a startup where meetings were stifling. i had code to write, but i was stuck in HOURS long meetings half the week while marketing and sales types droned on and on about stuff that was meaningless unless we had a product to sell. uh, guys? we have code to write
walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
This is a dadhacker post, including (especially) the "cow-orker".
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
I love this. Not only the reminders that time's a wastin', but also the unattractive aesthetic, making the meeting space a less pleasant place to linger, and maybe even taking people down a notch from their very important people meetings. The bird calling "cuckoo" could even be commentary on the discussion.
Seems like someone's ego is out of check; these tend to happen when someone needs to "hold court" or otherwise wants to feel important.
In general, your management should take care of this.
Otherwise, if they are unwilling, it requires becoming slightly antagonistic once the meeting runs long. In my case, as soon as someone mentioned another meeting I just interrupted abruptly and said, "We do not need another meeting." The groans of agreement got the point across.
Otherwise, if that doesn't work, you can do something like, "Everyone but [person droning on] needs to leave the room, now." Once everyone leaves, point out that "these long meetings are killing team productivity, morale, and are completely unneeded. Stop wasting the engineering team's time. We don't need to be here."
I noticed years ago that I start to tune out of any meeting that lasts longer than 45 minutes. So whenever I was the one running a meeting, I would always timebox it to 45 minutes. Never could tell if anyone appreciated or resented that. But it worked for me.
Now that I work 100% remote, I have more flexibility to mentally ignore the bits of all meetings that don't apply to me and can instead fill the time writing comments on HN.
Even remotely I try to get the team to keep meetings short and sweet. If it has to go over 45 minutes I’d book two separate meetings with a 10 minute break in the middle.
Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.
I found myself more on the side of the meeting crashers, even though the article paints them as the villains. I've been in vastly more hour long meetings that were longer than necessary than ones that were too short.
In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
I don't mind if a meeting is an hour, but I'm genuinely a bit peeved every time I'm in a 50 minute meeting that just automatically rolls over. If you want to do an hour, book an hour.
(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
I started replying "No agenda, no attenda" after being in a few too many meetings where things dragged on, or where I clearly was not needed. Didn't matter if I was telling this to someone at the same level as me, or someone at the head of the department: the humor in the wording lessens the sting of the implied "stop being disorganized" message. I made it clear that if there was not a clear agenda in the meeting invite, I would not be attending.
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
This works great except 95% of the places I've been with bad meeting culture, it comes from the top.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
I’ve worked at a couple places where someone had the balls to just get up and leave the meeting room at around 70-80 minutes to force a break. If we are going to be stuck in here I’m going to the bathroom and to get more coffee.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
I do this at 60 minutes, even though my meetings are all over zoom these days. "Sorry, I need to step away to get some water. I'll be back in a few minutes."
With my current team lead, 90-minute standups aren't common, but they've happened. 30 minutes is "short", and most take 45 minutes. The previous lead kept things to about 10-15 minutes. The new guy has apparently never in his life said "OK, let's discuss this after standup".
This is always because people would rather than twiddle their thumbs in meetings than work - so they drag it out as long as possible. Getting paid for doing nothing is a good deal. Meetings are never necessary, and usually the worst possible way to convey information.
The solution to the "50 minute meetings always stretch to an hour" problem is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am. If you schedule them for 9am of course nobody will stop at 9:50am.
Heh some people are on time, some people are late. It's seemingly a culture thing, and neither side understands the other. You say "of course nobody will stop at 9:50am" and that is exactly what I would do.
Unfortunately that isn't the solution. As the article correctly notes, meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out. This is a universal truth in office buildings.
> meetings continue, regardless of the wall clock, until the next group of people come and kick you out.
The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.
>The solution [...] is to start them at, say, 9:10am so there's a clean mental stop at 10am.
Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...
Our team collectively decided all meetings should start 5 min late and end at the half hour boundary (we do 55min instead of 50min).
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
Well that's the claim, isn't it. People tend to see an hour tick over and think "well, better wrap up". The impulse is much less strong at ten minutes to the hour. It's a bit like pricing things just below a round number because it doesn't feel quite so expensive. GP's comment makes sense to me.
My team does this, most scheduled meetings are scheduled 5m/10m after the hour. Meetings usually end at the hour or before. Our calendar defaults to start/end on the hour so sometimes one-off meetings will start/end on the hour but those are usually 2-3 people and focused on solving some problem so they don't usually last the full time anyway.
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
In most places I've worked it's de rigueur to give people at least 5 mins to arrive before proceeding. Do people really just start meetings the instant they get in the room?!
Think I'm with Larry on this one. Someone should chair the meeting and there should be some expected outcome (decision) from it within the alotted time. If we're 45 mins in and no closer to an answer it's time to assign some investigative actions and regroup? Malicious compliance in this context is good, because it creates an environment where meetings end and everyone gets to pee?
You're going to have to pick a word which means "a specific group of people get together for a specific period in order to do something which does not result in a specific decision", and be able to allocate time and space for those things, too.
Some examples:
- a class
- a briefing
- a classic "all-hands meeting"
- standup (if you haven't had a standup which ended in 45 seconds because everyone reported "no obstacles, no requests", your standups have too many people in them or your organization is under too much stress)
Long ago when I was a newb fresh out of college, I worked at a company that religiously enforced the standup rule “If it’s not relevant to EVERYONE in the standup, don’t discuss it in standup.” Then an exec walked in and started taking over the meeting and for some idiotic reason I chimed in with “this isn’t relevant to me, can you bring that up outside standup?” Things got super awkward and later I overheard my boss apologizing to the exec.
My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.
Yeah, IMO meetings without a discernible outcome are mostly pointless. It may not be a specific decision, but it should be "tangible". "students learned tech X" is tangible.
Two out of ten attendees talked for 30 minutes and didn't write anything down, really isn't.
For some reason, I'm seeing a lot more hesitance to record or document, and I don't think it is a good thing at all.
> generally to make sure everyone is on the same page
If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made.
The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team.
If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?
If we're being totally honest, a good percentage of meetings in many workplaces are work surrogates. Lots of people happily meeting and accomplishing nothing for the purposes of having the accomplishment that they attended a variety of meetings.
Oooh, my heroes! I hate when stated policy is treated as "just a paper" and ignored. I understand that sometimes it's temporary/transitional - OK, it happens. But when rule is present for long time and it becomes de facto standard to disregard it - either change the rule or start following it.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.
In the late 90s there was a manager where I worked at the time where you actually felt relieved she they scheduled a meeting for one reason: she scheduled meetings to be 50 minutes long and no matter what she would end them promptly at 50 minutes and then she would stand up and leave the room. I once saw her, politely but firmly, tell a senior exec a few rungs up the ladder from her that time was up when he was in mid-pontification and close the folio thing she always brought to meetings and then exit the room.
To be honest, just getting up and leaving is a bad way to end a meeting on time. You should be conscious of the time you have left, and start steering the meeting towards conclusion at 5-10 minutes mark.
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At U of M, they solved this problem by having classes officially start 10 minutes after the time they were advertised as. That is, a class listed as being 10-11am was actually 10:10-11am; nobody showed up until 10:10.
Sure, technically it's the same thing, but there's a pretty massive anchoring effect for things on the hour. Still being in the meeting room at 11:01 feels a lot later than still being in the meeting room at 10:51.
I've heard it dates back to when people didn't have easy access to precise time. It would allow students to hear the hourly bells and walk to the class.
For some lectures it was great, you really needed those 15 minutes to get coffee, go to the bathroom, etc., but for some late afternoon stuff, you just wanted to shorten the last three breaks to 5 minutes and leave half an hour early.
He also insisted students purchase a stapler and staple their homework. And he would give negative points on assignments. You could say "I don't know how to do X" for a step in a proof (0 pts), but if you put in something wrong, you would get negative points on that part.
He was a good prof, and I enjoyed his classes.
I remember reading (maybe from Nate Silver) of a professor who would use this technique to teach about uncertainty. You could weigh your overall grade with a proclamation about how certain you were about the answer. Right answers with high certainty could really amp up your grade, but conversely if you claimed 100% certainty on a question you got wrong, you’d fail the course!
Your Prof Ramsey would have penalised me for this unknown condition. This isn't behaviour to be celebrated.
When I studied it had already been mostly abolished. Sometimes starting times were explicitly marked “sine tempore”.
c.t. is still standard at many German universities (and at all Bavarian universities I know). However, I know at least one university of applied sciences where lectures start at full hours.
It's pretty obvious, you can't travel to a meeting instantly and 100% appreciated when you work in such a place. For those senior enough for all day back to back meetings you get toilet breaks!
If you work in a company that doesn't do this take note and if you're senior in a company you should start pushing for this to be implemented. A lot of calendar tools have options for meeting buffers by default and enabling it is all you need to do.
This was the worst part of being a person who is prompt and on-time for all meetings and events. If you're going to always accommodate people who are chronically late, then you don't respect my time or effort. You just slapped me in the face for being prompt when you rewound your lecture or repeated your introduction. You wasted ten minutes of my time to cater to other people who are [habitually] wasting ten minutes of everyone else's time.
It was horrible and reprehensible, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it or mitigate it. What was I going to do, be late on my own?
I learned about 25 years ago never to be late to anything, particularly an appointment or a job/volunteer role where I'm indispensable. I was fired as a volunteer from a very important role because I was late only once. It was a role which was strictly dependent on timing and promptness. I learned at that very moment, never to be late again, and riding public transit as I did, I always built-in at least 30 minutes of lead time so that I was super-early rather than on-time, or God forbid, late.
Now meetings actually start at :05 or :07. The prior meeting will often drag until that time, but you don't feel bad knocking at :00 or :02 and asking for the room to clear.
Unfortunately UMich ended "Michigan time" back in 2018. I always thought it was a great solution to the problem.
https://www.michiganpublic.org/education/2018-02-20/universi... / https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
Sad.
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"Malicious compliance" would be if the same team booked a 50min meeting then a 10min meeting in the same room.
If anything, the company saved money with optimizing meeting room capacity and the CEO's desire to give breaks was enforced.
The team pushing back against leaving at 50m was the only "malicious" party, and they weren't compliant.
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Dead Comment
And an enforceable sign could never be a weird number because speedos don’t have ticks but every 5mph.
I think I even saw a 5.25 mph sign once!
walking back from lunch with my cow-orkers one day, i realized we were passing a clock store. i went inside and bought a not-too-expensive cuckoo clock and installed it on the wall of our single large conference room
it would make whirring noises every 15 minutes. a few clicking sounds before the hour, and then CUCKOO, CUCKOO as many times as necessary. the marketing and sales folks did NOT like it, but:
- meetings got shorter and there were fewer of them
- the CEO of the company loved that clock. if i forgot to wind it, he or our admin did :-)
Are you just reposting or are you the real dadhacker?
Because if you are, I was reading your blog since I was like 14. Sad it's down now. But absolutely great stuff that helped prepare me for today's industry :)
In general, your management should take care of this.
Otherwise, if they are unwilling, it requires becoming slightly antagonistic once the meeting runs long. In my case, as soon as someone mentioned another meeting I just interrupted abruptly and said, "We do not need another meeting." The groans of agreement got the point across.
Otherwise, if that doesn't work, you can do something like, "Everyone but [person droning on] needs to leave the room, now." Once everyone leaves, point out that "these long meetings are killing team productivity, morale, and are completely unneeded. Stop wasting the engineering team's time. We don't need to be here."
Now that I work 100% remote, I have more flexibility to mentally ignore the bits of all meetings that don't apply to me and can instead fill the time writing comments on HN.
Nothing worse than meetings that drag on, where everyone starts to lose focus, and where one or two vocal participants sidetrack it into a 1:1 conversation. Just get shit wrapped up and have your other conversations without demanding the time of people who don’t need to be involved.
In meeting-heavy orgs it is really annoying to have meetings led by people who regularly run up to or beyond the final minute of the time slot. Those extra few minutes practically never produce anything worthwhile enough to compensate for the rushing between meetings and having to choose between being more late to the next one or taking care of a quick bathroom/water/snack break.
(All I actually do about this is be the person who pops up in meeting-chat at XX:51 with a "time-check: we've gone over".)
Following this with "What outcome should we expect at the end of this meeting? If there are next steps, what would we like them to be?" helps cut to the chase, and in my experience, things got better across the board. Sure, there were one or two folks who still struggled to create agendas for meetings - but it wasn't long before they were updating their LinkedIn profiles. Accountability can do that sometimes.
Long winded execs enjoying open ended meetings without any structure to constrain them. Which is to say, the kind of shops with micromanaging management who keep themselves busy with meetings with their own team.
Usually by this point the stuffy room and long meeting have people going in circles. Getting up, opening the door, getting the blood moving while one or two groups have a little sidebar, usually causes the rest of the meeting to wrap up fast.
Being late is viewed as rude or lacking respect for others by a lot of people.
Do people who are habitually late view prompt people as rude for being on time?
The meeting itself might continue, but as an individual, once the meeting passes the scheduled finish time, you stand up and say "sorry, I've got another meeting to get to". The worse your company's excessive meeting culture is, the better this works.
Unfortunately, I've been in a few meetings scheduled for 9:00 that only really started at 9:10. I think if they were scheduled for 9:10, they would've only started at 9:20...
Because all it will do is make you really good at time math.
I've seen it even back when people would set all their clocks in their car and home 5 minutes fast, they just got real good at doing five minute math.
But I agree with the parent, if you need to move something then move the start.
https://record.umich.edu/articles/university-updating-start-...
This can be easily enforced because other neighboring teams would knock the door at the half hour mark and you can't really blame them or be grumpy about it.
For the larger scheduled meetings, if they drag over the hour because of some conversation our culture is that people leave/drop if they're not interested.
Some examples:
- a class
- a briefing
- a classic "all-hands meeting"
- standup (if you haven't had a standup which ended in 45 seconds because everyone reported "no obstacles, no requests", your standups have too many people in them or your organization is under too much stress)
- lunch-and-learn
My point is, there can be rules about what is and isn’t allowed in a meeting, but the people at the top can always change those rules on a moment’s notice…and those of us who are less socially adept won’t catch on.
Two out of ten attendees talked for 30 minutes and didn't write anything down, really isn't.
For some reason, I'm seeing a lot more hesitance to record or document, and I don't think it is a good thing at all.
If everyone is on the same page then there should be a 'page' resulting from the meeting; something to look back at to represent what everyone agreed on. Those are the 'decisions' being made.
The worst meetings are ones where people share ideas, nod their head in agreement, then write nothing down. Inevitably this leads to an identical meeting later down the road, after people have forgotten key details and the game of telephone has distorted others. Then later it leads to upset people when they find, often close to delivery time, that their understanding conflicts with others on the team.
If there's no desire to have updated plans or documentation after the meeting has concluded, then I question the true intent of the meeting. Was it because the person calling the meeting felt out of the loop? Why was that allowed to happen in the first place? Why were the requirements and the team's progress not easy to observe at a glance?
A contemptible law breeds contempt for all laws.
Once people get used to bullshit everything turns into bullshit. They don’t get rid of those rules because it’ll hurt someone’s feelings. But our feelings get hurt all the time so clearly it’s whose feelings they care about.