Stephen Billing’s Blog

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.

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.

 In which I discover the blog of Chris Mowles and appreciate his take on how we might make the best use of time in meetings.

I have just discovered the blog of Chris Mowles called Reflexive Practice, who, like me, is exploring organisations as complex responsive processes. Chris and I did our doctorates together and he is now on the faculty of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire where we studied together.

Coincidentally, as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about how our theories of time affect our meetings.

In his latest blog post, Chris points to how our desire to ‘make good use of the time’ in the meeting can lead to over-planning and attempts to tie things down to the last minute. He makes a good point that it assumes that we can anticipate how things will unfold at a certain time in the future and that our current thinking is adequate for the situation we will encounter when we meet together.

Chris comes to the conclusion that our meetings never unfold in a linear fashion but emerge as we struggle with each other over what we think we are doing and who we are. Skillful discussants then will allow for episodes of reflection, be alert to suggestions and conflict, be tolerant of ambiguity and and have an expectation that important and unplanned things may arise as a consequence.

I have written in a similar vein from the point of view of facilitation that tolerates and encourages this reflection and ambiguity.

Thanks Chris, I am looking forward to reading more of your provocative work.

I am finding that people have recently been saying to me that conversations with me have been helpful, that they have helped them to see the situation differently. As an organisational change practitioner I interpret this as meaning that there are now different options available for proceeding from what there were before our conversation. 

While I feel flattered by comments like these, I have been struck how much more frequently they seem to be coming up at the moment. I am wondering about why this might be so. Although I would like to attribute it to some amazing insight or characteristic that I and I alone have, I also notice that these insights occur only through conversation and they do not occur in every conversation I have, or even in most conversations. They are rare enough to be noteworthy.   

As I reflect on these recent experiences I am realizing that I am developing an increasing interest in what is going on right now in my client organisations and in my own life at the present moment. This is quite different from the usual gap analysis approach that pays more attention to the desired future and how to generate a map to lead us there. The gap analysis approach leads us to concentrate on what we should be doing rather than what is actually happening now. 

I am more interested in exploring in detail what is going on now and then considering what the next step is. This requires considerable flexibility from both parties as the picture of what is going on can change dramatically upon reflection after significant events.  

I thank Ralph Stacey, the supervisor of my doctorate, for helping me to develop my ability to reflect on what is happening in my client organisations. 

This approach forces me to conclude that these positive feedback experiences are not be due to some intrinsic special characteristic of me that is innate, nor is it my particular professional skills, although undoubtedly my natural inclinations and professional training play a part. I am forced instead to conclude that the new perspective that emerges from these conversations about what is currently going on are a characteristic of the relating between me and the other person that leads to this experience of having been a party to a new way of thinking about the particular situation we are in together.

When workshops are conducted and one of the reasons for them is somehow to facilitate change, then the workshop must generate new conversations. If no change in the conversations, then no organisational change. Participants must be able to talk to each other and take up new themes of conversation in the session. If they are not talking to each other then new conversations are not happening; in fact no conversations are happening. And then no change can happen through that workshop. 

This leaves the facilitator with a problem. The problem of how to ensure the session’s objectives are met. This is a problem because the client, who is paying the bill, has expectations and intentions, and the facilitator has to deliver something that has been agreed in advance. And yet I am saying that the facilitator cannot control the conversations in the workshop. How can the facilitator deliver what has been promised? 

Many facilitators deal with this dilemma by attempting to design the interactions in advance in order to meet the objectives. Coupled with this, they attempt to create their facilitation style in advance, for example by selecting a combination of directive and non-directive exercises. John Heron has a good articulation of the possibilities, by describing a range of 6 dimensions and 3 modes of facilitation coming together in an 18 box matrix. 

On the other hand, I am saying that the actual style of facilitators arises from their intentions (including their intentions about what particular style they seek to have) interwoven with the various intentions of the participants and the interactions between participants and facilitator. Therefore the facilitator is still a participant in these interactions, engaged to a greater or lesser extent. And yet there seems to be reluctance on the part of many facilitators I know to be more engaged with group participants. The role of engaged participant is a different one and represents a change in the power dynamic between facilitator and group members. If the facilitator is strongly directing the activities, asking the questions and writing on the flipchart, then they are in a very powerful position and that power differential is emphasised by these techniques. The interactions that are possible in this dynamic will be different from those where the power differential is not so obvious. 

If the facilitator participates as an engaged member of the group this de-emphasises the power differential and exposes the facilitator to some risk. There is the risk that the conversation might go into areas where the facilitator does not know the answers, and hence might not be seen as authoritative. There is also the risk that the group might lose confidence in a facilitator who does not know the answers. 

Facilitators would do well to reflect on their willingness to risk venturing into this unknown territory where the power balance is not tilted towards the facilitator. Likewise clients would do well to question people they engage as facilitators as to the degree of involvement with their participants that they profess to have. And then monitor practice to see whether it matches up.

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