Stephen Billing’s Blog

Meetings are clearly important in organisations. Van Wree’s study of meeting manuals charts the development of meeting practice for parliaments, voluntary societies and local councils, in a first phase from 1845 to the 1950s and a second phase from the 1950s where meetings in business settings with smaller groups of people resulted in a relaxation of rules and a more informal meeting procedure developed. The role of the chair correspondingly changed, moving from mainly watching over and applying procedures, to varying leadership style according to type of meeting, controlling tensions and conflicts neutrally and smoothly, based on their insight and feelings. Van Wree argues that meetings have become the pre-eminent route to power, income and status, and that the higher the individual is in the hierarchy, the greater the number of meetings they attend.

I am sure this is true in your experience as well. Most CEOs and senior managers need personal assistants to manage the tyranny of their diaries.

In spite of their predominance in the lived experience of those working at senior levels in organisations, meetings or sessions are still seen as separate events which stand outside of normal organisational life. They are treated as ‘necessary evils’ or timewasters that must be attended, and as being separate from ‘the real work’. They are often seen as distractions from or obstacles to getting on with the job in hand. The sessions then need their own set of measurable objectives and a skilful chairperson or leader responsible for driving the group forward to achieving these objectives. Otherwise the time will not be used productively, it might be used up in conversations or interactions which do not instrumentally achieve or at least move towards the desired outcomes.

The meeting becomes a focus of analysis and planning as a separate entity or event in its own right in terms of certain, predetermined outcomes, to move the group from where they are now to where the facilitator and manager want them to be. It is my experience, and I am sure that of other facilitators, to be asked at a week’s notice to facilitate sessions that have already been scheduled, but for which a facilitator has not been booked.

Schein’s seminal distinction between process and content leads to the expectation that an expert facilitator with group facilitation and process skills can come in cold and facilitate a process to achieve an outcome, without needing much context with the group’s business. However, in the same way that Tannen says one cannot “understand the full meaning of any sentence without considering its relation to other sentences”, one cannot understand the full meaning of a group session without considering its relationship to other events going on in the organisation. A change facilitator must therefore be considering the meetings and workshops they facilitate as part of this larger weave, rather than as an end in itself.

Ask your change facilitator how they view this meeting in the context of other organisational conversations. I think the answer will be revealing.

Schein E, (1999) Process Consultation Revisited, Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley

Tannen, D. (1987) “Repetition in Conversation: Toward a Poetics of Talk,” Language 63:3 pp 574-605.

Van Wree, W. (2002) “The Development of Meeting Behaviour in Organizations and the Rise of an Upper Class of Professional Chairpersons,” in van Iterson, A., Mastenbroek, W., Newton, T. and Smith, D. (eds) The Civilized Organization: Norbert Elias And The Future Of Organization Studies, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company