In the previous post I pointed out the significance, for generating new ideas, of conversations with diverse people – people with different backgrounds, ways of looking at things, and professional affiliations, for example.
Any leader in an organisation, or entrepreneur has to engage in interactions with others in order to get a business going or keep it running. The entrepreneur or leader may have clear goals in mind, or may be in the process of shaping up his or her intentions, exploring different options and potential paths. Either way, it is through interactions with others that these plans take shape and are brought to fruition. The others that the entrepreneur is interacting with have their own intentions, goals and plans. The entrepreneur has to respond to these different goals and intentions, as they emerge in the course of these interactions with others.
Some of these interactions will take place during meetings that might be quite formal and have agendas that are known in advance, written down and followed quite closely during the meeting. Other important interactions will take place much more informally – sometimes in response to an unexpected opportunity, a chance meeting or as a result of a casual conversation over coffee. It is important for leaders and entrepreneurs to be looking for such opportunities and paying attention to what is going on.
A colleague (Diana Jones) told me the other day that there is quite a lot of interest in so-called agendaless meetings. Rightly so, in my opinion, because most interaction does take place in agendaless meetings, in more informal settings, and through casual conversation during which no formal agenda is ever put together.
But it would be for many people working in organisations, quite risky to get together a group of senior people to meet without having a formal agenda. At the same time, many would find this idea appealing, recognising the opportunity for generating ideas, relatively free flow of information and learning what people really think.
In such meetings, the traditional chairing skills and formal meeting procedure would not be very useful. What is important in such meetings is facilitation, such as making sure everyone has the opportunity to speak, handling conflict productively when it arises, listening to others, expressing your point of view, noticing the patterning of the conversation especially when something new happens, finding ways to take advantage of unexpected opportunities that arise.
Such informal "agendaless" meetings are given far less prominence in the leadership literature compared to the weight placed on presenting and chairing at meetings. This is somewhat strange given that, although leaders and entrepreneurs will have to chair formal meetings with agendas and follow meeting procedure, the bulk of their interactions take place outside such formal settings. And the formality of such settings can reduce the range of acceptable contributions that people make to the meeting.
If you are trying to generate new ideas, innovation or creativity, you actually want to stimulate a range of diverse input, rather than reducing the kinds of contributions that people make through formalising them.
Therefore, as a leader or entrepreneur, do pay attention to the casual conversations you are part of, and recognise how important they are to your results as a leader or entrepreneur. And consider convening some group interactions as "agendaless" meetings to see how you go. Of course, the term "agendaless" refers only to the lack of a formal agenda. There is no such thing as a truly "agendaless" meeting because all the participants will have their own intentions, interests and goals (or agendas) that they want to pursue. This comes with the territory of being a human working in an organisation.
Having a formal agenda doesn’t do away with the goals, interests and intentions of the participants. Such goals, interests and intentions of the participants are unlikely to make it onto the formal agenda of a meeting anyway.
To find more posts on this blog about formal and informal meetings, click here.

I have had more than one situation recently in client organisations where a person "Angelica" has had a problem with person "Boris" or something they have done. Angelica then emails or talks to Boris’s boss "Charlie," (and sometimes a range of other people) explaining the situation and seeking resolution.
Gergen is not using the term "romantic" in the way we think of romantic love. Rather he is referring to a view of the world that prevailed at its height in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s, which is known as the Romantic period. During that period, the view was that what was important about people was their personal depth – passion, soul, creativity and moral fibre.
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In my consulting work I often find that clients who tell me of a problem or issue they want to resolve, often have great difficulty explaining what is going on and what it is that they see as the problem. They know that there is a problem and they know roughly what it is – they definitely know who is involved. It’s just so darned hard to articulate the multitude of factors and the complexity of the problem(s)
As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends."
A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by