How to Make Meetings Less Terrible

(Ep. 389)
by Stephen J. Dubner
Produced by Matt Frassica
September 18, 2019 @ 11:00pm

In the U.S. alone, we hold 55 million

meetings a day. Most of them are
woefully unproductive, and tyrannize
our offices. The revolution begins
now — with better agendas, smaller
invite lists, and an embrace of healthy
conflict.
50 percent of meeting agendas are recycled
from other gatherings. Perhaps not Listen and subscribe to our podcast
surprisingly, 70 percent of senior managers
at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or
consider meetings unproductive. (Photo:
Pixabay) elsewhere. Below is a transcript of
the episode, edited for readability.
For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links
at the bottom of this post.

* * *

I’d like you to be particularly open-minded today. I’d like you to entertain
the possibility that two absurdly disconnected stories may in fact have a
deep connection — and that if you’re willing to see it through, this
connection may yield insights that substantially improve your life. Or not.
But let’s try. The first story is set in the Okavango Delta in Botswana.

Hallie WALKER: The Okavango is absolutely beautiful. It’s the world’s

largest inland delta. So it’s surrounded by desert, and it’s this kind of
emerald jewel in the middle of sub-Saharan Africa.

Hallie Walker is a Ph.D. student.

WALKER: I study behavioral ecology at the University of Idaho.

When we spoke, she was in Mozambique.

WALKER: Yeah, right now I’m studying three species of spiral horned
antelopes.
In the Okavango, Walker was studying a species known as the African wild
dog.

WALKER: So what’s amazing about this study site is these dogs have
been followed for 25 years. So they are raised with vehicles right
there. And they’re so habituated that they really don’t recognize the
vehicle.

This allows the researchers to get close enough to record really good
video.

WALKER: So the recordings are pretty intimate.

In the videos the dogs lie around, keeping cool in the shade. Sometimes
they pile on each other and play. And sometimes the dogs make these
strange sounds.

WALKER: It’s really odd. The sounds they make are unvoiced, kind of
like sneezes.

Here’s what it sounds like.

WALKER: So sneezes really only happened in those rally events that I

was observing.

And what is a “rally event”?

WALKER: Yeah, a rally is— African wild dogs are incredibly social
animals. So they spend their whole lives in packs.

In each pack, there are dominant dogs and less-dominant dogs. Let’s say

the pack has just been lying around, and the dominant dog gets up.

WALKER: And he greets other dogs. Just like your dog greets you
when you get home from work. They try to recruit other pack
members to stop resting and sleeping in the shade, to go hunt. And
that either ends in a successful rally, where the whole pack leaves the
resting site and goes to hunt, or an unsuccessful rally, where they lie
back down.

And the sneezes, remember:

WALKER: Sneezes really only happened in those rally events. The only
other sneezes that we observed, it was 15 percent of them, looked like
they were just sneezing because they got dust in their nose.
 they were just sneezing because they got dust in their nose.

So what did the sneezing have to do with the rally events? Were they
some kind of communication? Well, consider our second story. It’s about
this person:

Priya PARKER: Priya Parker. And I’m a group-conflict-resolution

facilitator.

How does one become a group-conflict-resolution facilitator?

PARKER: One grows up in complicated family.

Specifically:

PARKER: Well, I’m biracial. I’m half-Indian, half-white American. And

when I was nine, my parents divorced and they both remarried other
people, who were radically different from their original marriage. And
they had joint custody. So every two weeks I would go back and forth
between these two households. And my mother’s household was
Indian and British, Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, liberal, democratic,
vegetarian household. And my dad and stepmother are white
American, evangelical Christian, conservative Republican, twice-a-
week churchgoing, family. And I was part of both families.

So: plenty of opportunity for conflict resolution in a family setting. Parker

went on to formally study conflict resolution and she ultimately resolved
actual conflicts, or at least tried to, in Africa, India, the Middle East. These
days, she’s hired primarily by companies in conflict. Companies, it turns
out, often try to resolve their conflicts by holding meetings. And a lot of
these meetings are unsuccessful. Why?

PARKER: There is a belief, sometimes spoken, sometimes unspoken,

that all meetings should be de-risked. Yes there is an opportunity to
kind of be embarrassed or to lose face. But we have so over-indexed
on not wanting that to happen that we’ve drained the meaning and the
relevance out of so many of our meetings.

Have you ever been to a meeting where no one says what they really
think? Of course you have.

PARKER: But unhealthy peace can be as threatening to human

connection as unhealthy conflict. And in my experience, because of
the norms of our culture, and particularly in the U.S., most of our
gatherings suffer from unhealthy peace, not unhealthy conflict.
 gatherings suffer from unhealthy peace, not unhealthy conflict.

So Priya Parker likes to introduce healthy conflict into meetings. To turn

the meeting from a time-wasting orgy of passive-aggression into a well-
oiled decision-making machine. If you were looking for a model to do the
same, you could do worse than copying our friends, the African wild dogs.

Remember, the sneezes happen when one of the dogs rallies the pack to
go hunting. Hallie Walker was trying to discern the difference between a
successful rally and an unsuccessful one. It turned out the sneezes were a
strong indicator.

WALKER: In successful rallies, there about seven times more sneezes

than in unsuccessful rallies.

Could it be that the sneezes are how the dog pack votes on whether to go
hunting? That a sneeze means “Sure, let’s go hunting now!” And no
sneeze means, “Nah, let’s lie in the dirt for a while.”
WALKER: So our research actually didn’t establish any direct causality.
That’s the kind of subtlety I definitely want to get across. So we have a
very strong correlation between the number of sneezes, so it could be
that they’ve already decided and they’re clearing their nasal passages
to leave. It is a cue. We know for sure that it’s a cue. But we don’t know
for sure that it’s a signal. If that makes sense.

But Walker did find a relationship between the number of sneezes and the
status of the dog that attempted the rally.

WALKER: When a dominant individual was the one that got up and
started the motion—

Dominant as in … the boss. Picture a meeting at your company. It’s being

led by the global sales manager.

WALKER: When a dominant individual started the motion, then it only

required three sneezes to guarantee success for them to leave the
area. And if it was a sub-dominant individual—

Now picture: same meeting but instead of being led by the global sales
manager, it’s the assistant to the regional manager.

WALKER: If it was a sub-dominant individual, it required more than 10

sneezes for them to leave. So we drew from that shifting quorum
threshold that your vote matters, but some votes just matter more. So
if the dominant dog wants to leave, it takes fewer individuals to add
 if the dominant dog wants to leave, it takes fewer individuals to add
support to the motion to leave. But it takes a lot more momentum to
convince the dominant individual to leave their resting site.

Have you ever been in that meeting? Yes; yes, you have. You have been in
every kind of terrible meeting there is. How do we know? Because we
asked Freakonomics Radio listeners for their meeting stories, and here’s
what you told us:

Hagai SCHACHOR: I have no idea what I’m doing there because it’s
not relevant to my work at all.

Gina LIM: Most of us ended up working late because we had to be in

the meeting most of the day.

SCHACHOR: And to add to that, the guy who invited all of us said, “I’ve
got to run, enjoy the meeting,” and he just, poof, left.

JOHNSON: Until they were literally climbing up on the table and each
had a knee on the table, shaking fists and screaming at each other.

LIM: My boss berated me in front of everybody for being disrespectful.

JOHNSON: And I didn’t really understand, thinking, “This is what I’ve

got myself involved in, in meetings like this?”

* * *

There are of course many kinds of meetings, with different rules and
customs and outcomes depending on where they’re held and with whom.
You’ve got community-board meetings and family meetings and the
weekly floor meeting in a college dorm. You may belong to a knitting club
or a rugby team or a religious group that meets regularly. With such
variety, there’s no way this episode can be remotely encyclopedic. So we
will focus on the most standardized meetings: the ones held by
professionals in offices, whether it’s a construction company or a tech or
healthcare firm; whether it’s a non-profit or an academic or government
department. Because all those places have a lot of meetings.

Steven ROGELBERG: The best estimates suggest that there are

around 55 million meetings a day in the U.S. alone.

That’s Steven Rogelberg.

ROGELBERG: Most professionals attend approximately 15 meetings a

week.
 week.

He’s an organizational psychologist at the University of North Carolina,

Charlotte.

ROGELBERG: And as you move up the organizational hierarchy,

individuals spend more and more time in meetings.

He’s written a book called The Surprising Science of Meetings.

ROGELBERG: Basically, it’s the examination of meetings as a

workplace phenomenon — trying to understand why they go bad,
trying to understand the dynamics that emerge in meetings, and trying
to figure out how to make them better.

Which is important because — again, 55 million meetings a day.

ROGELBERG: And it’s not a surprise to find executives spending

anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of their time in meetings.

DUBNER: So does that fact mean that the people who end up running
companies or institutions are basically the people who are good at
meetings?

ROGELBERG: Oh, I wish that was the case. But, no, that does not
appear to be the case. Some of the research I do looks at satisfaction
with a meeting. And if you survey people immediately after a meeting,
one person is invariably more positive than everyone else. And this one
person is the meeting leader. The person who’s leading the meeting
says, “Hey, this is really good.” And why wouldn’t they feel that?
They’re controlling the whole experience. They’re talking the most.
They’re like, “Hey this is nirvana.” But everyone else is reporting much
more negative experiences.

DUBNER: So in other words, you don’t have to be very good to be

considered even, let’s say, top quintile.

ROGELBERG: That appears to be the case. So when you consider the

fact that “too many meetings” has been identified consistently as the
number-one source of frustration at work, the number-one time-
waster at work — you know, research has shown that around 70, 71
percent of senior managers view meetings as unproductive. Now this

is jarring, because senior managers are the ones calling the most
meetings. So if senior managers are calling them unproductive, we
 know we have a problem.

Bad meetings have just been accepted as a cost of doing business. I

give these speeches to senior H.R. leaders and talent leaders across
the Fortune 100 companies, and I ask them, “How many of you have
any content on your employee-engagement surveys that covers the
topic of meetings?” Do you want to guess how many people raise their
hands?

DUBNER: Two percent.

ROGELBERG: Hey, that’s a really good guess. Yes — that’s right. There
is no organizational intentionality around this. And with no
organizational accountability, leaders are just part of this system,
where bad meetings are just the cost of doing business. Like the rain is
in London. So I study meetings because I dislike them tremendously. I
study them because I know it is a source of frustration for so many
people.

Okay, so: we hold a lot of meetings even though most people don’t like
meetings and consider them unproductive. But there’s a wrinkle:

ROGELBERG: Well, we know from the research that people actually

want to have some level of meeting activity per day. And if you ask
people to design their perfect day, it’s very rare that they say zero
meetings. And this shouldn’t be a big surprise. We know from social-
psychological research that humans are inherently social creatures.
There’s value of interaction and engagement with others.

So maybe we pretend to dislike meetings even more than we actually

dislike them. In any case: just about everyone agrees that meetings could
use some improvement. So let’s start by taking a step back and asking:
what is a meeting, exactly?

Helen SCHWARTZMAN: A meeting is a gathering, let’s say, two or

more people, who assemble for a purpose that’s ostensibly related to
the functioning of an organization or a group.

Alright, that sounds pretty sensible.

SCHWARTZMAN: Meetings seem to be a communication event that is

basically neutral.

That’s Helen Schwartzman, an anthropologist at Northwestern University.

 SCHWARTZMAN: It’s just a place where you come together. You have
a problem, you solve it. You have a decision to make, you make the
decision, you whatever. And when you actually study organizations,
you find that that’s not really the way that it works.

In 1989, Schwartzman published a book called The Meeting: Gatherings

in Organizations and Communities.

SCHWARTZMAN: I would say that meetings are the organization.

Which is to say that instead of having the meeting as a place to solve
problems, we need to have problems and crises and decisions to
produce meetings.

Jen SANDLER: We actually have vastly superior technologies to do

exactly the things that people say go on in meetings.

That is Jen Sandler, another anthropologist who studies meetings. She’s

at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

SANDLER: So the question of why we continue to meet becomes really

important. So one answer to that is that we don’t need to. And the
other answer is that that’s not what meetings are for. That might be
what we tell ourselves that they are for. And most of us have this
experience too, where we go into a meeting that is ostensibly to make
a decision, but it’s clear that that decision has been made prior to the
meeting. And then we might ask as participants in that meeting, why
are we even meeting then? We’re meeting maybe to legitimize that

decision or for somebody to say that that was a collective decision

even though it wasn’t.

Okay, it may not come as a shock to you that meetings do not always
serve their advertised purpose. Or that there was barely a purpose at all.
We heard this sentiment from several listeners — including, here, Michael
Conklin, who used to work in the oil-and-gas industry:

Michael CONKLIN: After coming back from a short vacation, my boss

came into my office frantically and said, “You just missed three
meetings in the last two days.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I must have
missed so much. Tell me all these things that have changed.” And the
boss froze and said, “Well, nothing really changed. Just keep up the
good work.” I figured that was a pretty good indication those meetings
did not need to take place.
So let’s hear what the experts say about meeting basics: establishing a
goal; setting an agenda; deciding whom to invite; even determining the
length. What would you guess is the average length of a meeting?

ROGELBERG: Magically, the average length across the world is one

hour. And there’s just there’s no reason for that. This is a modern
phenomenon that has emerged due to calendaring programs like
Outlook and Google Calendar.

DUBNER: So if you could invade everybody’s calendar on earth and

have a new preset that was not 60 minutes, what would it be?

ROGELBERG: I just want the leader to think about how long the
meeting should be. So give it a set of goals. Make a decision. This is
particularly important given something called Parkinson’s Law. And
Parkinson’s Law is this idea that work expands to whatever time is
allotted to it. So if you schedule an hour, it’s going to take an hour. But
if you schedule 48 minutes, it’s gonna take 48 minutes.

If you doubt the legitimacy of Parkinson’s Law, consider this story from a
listener named Chad Wiebe. He’s a financial planner in Canada.
Chad WIEBE: So my boss at the time said, “Let’s have a four-hour long
meeting,” which is excruciating. So at the end of this planning meeting
we had half an hour still to fill. I put my hand up and I said, “You know
what, I think it would be really appreciated if we just cut everybody
loose a half hour early, let everyone get back to the office a little bit
earlier.” And I was met with silence for about 10, 15 seconds before
one of my other middle managers piped up and said, “You know what?
I just brought in a client who’s a magician.” And so, we hired a
magician. For half an hour. It was unbelievable.

Here’s Steven Rogelberg’s advice: rather than hiring magicians to fill out
your scheduled meeting time, set a tight time frame and use that
tightness to your advantage.

ROGELBERG: Psychological research shows that when you add a little

bit of pressure, it creates more focus on optimal performance. So if
this results in you starting your meeting at 1:12 p.m. and ending at
1:50, so be it. You are in control. Make choices.

PARKER: We go into autopilot and we follow specific scripts and we

don’t actually think about asking the first question of all meetings,
which is, “What is the purpose of this meeting?”
 which is, “What is the purpose of this meeting?”

Priya Parker again. Her book is called The Art of Gathering.

PARKER: So it’s our Monday morning staff meeting, it’s our

Wednesday afternoon sales meeting — that is not a purpose, that is a
category. So what is the primary purpose? What is your desired
outcome of the staff meeting? If you are having this on a Monday
morning, what do you want to be different for this week? If we weren’t
to have this Monday morning meeting, would anything be different?
And if nothing would be different, scrap the meeting.

ROGELBERG: If a leader truly recognizes that they are inherently a

steward of others’ time, they do meetings differently. They think
carefully about what the meetings should cover. They think carefully

about how that meeting should be facilitated. And we do this all the
time when it comes to meetings we have with customers. When we
meet with a customer, we think about that in advance. But when it
comes to employee meetings, we just dial it in. We rely on habits. And
a great example is the research shows that 50 percent of agendas are
recycled. We would never do that with customers.

PARKER: My biggest piece of advice is, if you’re going to get people

together in person, when time is limited and resources are limited,
gather around the things that you can’t figure out over email.

ROGELBERG: So when you are thinking about your agenda, consider

framing it not as topics to be discussed, but consider framing it as
questions to be answered. By framing it as questions to be answered
it’s easier to determine who needs to be there because they’re
relevant to the questions.

DUBNER: I feel like every time you call a meeting that involves a lot of
people from different arenas, you are inevitably asking each of them to
waste a lot of time.

ROGELBERG: Meetings are getting larger and larger and larger. And
this phenomenon is not happening out of bad intentions. Typically we
just don’t want to exclude anyone. And at the same time, technology
makes it so easy for us to just hijack someone’s calendar. And the
research shows that larger meetings are just filled with additional
dysfunction. While people generally complain about having a meeting,
they complain just as much if they are not invited to a meeting. Given
they complain just as much if they are not invited to a meeting. Given
this reality, there’s a couple of things that we can do. So first of all, we
can actually design the agenda such that part of the agenda is
relevant to a large group of individuals, and then part of it is relevant to
a smaller section of that. So a big group attends for part of the
meeting and then people leave. And then it’s a smaller group that has
additional discussion. And what a leader can do is once they start
thinking about meeting attendees as being core vs. secondary, that
can be a very useful distinction.
PARKER: Most of us have been raised with the age-old adage “the
more, the merrier.” And for most gatherings, unless it’s literally a rave,
a soccer match, or a concert, the more is the hairier or the scarier.

ROGELBERG: If you go to those secondary individuals and you tell

them, “Hey, I’m having a meeting. Here are the topics we’re going to
talk about. If you have any input on these topics, please feel free to
email me. I will also show you the minutes of the meeting. And at any
point down the road you want to go to future meetings you’re more
than welcome.” And people really appreciate being given arguably, the
best gift in the world right now. Which is time.

PARKER: The more specific your purpose is, the more people can
actually see themselves and say, “What I do is not actually relevant to
that.” So don’t make exclusion personal. Make it purposeful.

DUBNER: Okay, I need some personal advice, because I try to avoid

meetings as much as possible, so I’m showing my bias. I don’t typically
enjoy meetings. But also because of what I do for a living, I just want
my days unencumbered. I want my days for reading, writing, thinking,
and interviewing people, and I don’t want meetings. So, sometimes
they’re unavoidable, and sometimes they’re great and useful. I don’t
mean to rain on them. But one thing I don’t like is when you arrange a
meeting with someone, it’s usually via email, and then they send me a
calendar invite. But I don’t want somebody else’s software living on my
computer. And then every time there’s an update to it, I get another
alert. I don’t want the distraction. I took the time to plan the meeting. I
know how to plan a meeting. I put it in my calendar. I’ll be there. You’re
not — you don’t feel my pain. That’s okay. We can move on.

PARKER: I actually think it’s actually very deep. So we live in an age

where — you’re talking about software, but basically we live in a
multicultural, diverse, “everybody is kind of their own island but also all
sorts of other things” world. And we’re all gathering all of the time.
 And gathering at some level is a form of imposition.

DUBNER: At some level? At every — no, sorry, yes, yes, sorry, no, no,
no.

PARKER: Well, actually what I love about how you’re talking about it is,
it should be thought of as a form of imposition. And you only take the
meetings or the gatherings where you think that you are willing to
tolerate that imposition. And what you’re talking about is, I actually
think your instinct to say, I want to have my days free, I want to think, I
want to write, I want to interview, is a much healthier instinct, because
you’re raising the bar for anything to get through to you. For many of
the companies and organizations I work with, I don’t say gather more, I
say gather better. In many cases that means gather less.

* * *

Steven Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist, and Priya Parker, a

group-conflict-resolution facilitator, are trying to make your meetings less
terrible. Okay. So how should you start a meeting? First example: how not
to start.

ROGELBERG: So, it starts late. A person arrives 10 minutes late, and

then the leader says, “Okay, we can start now.” Or worse yet it’s the
leader herself or himself that shows up late. And then they start the
meeting with a whole bunch of news and announcements. Things that
clearly could have been communicated in other mechanisms. Then the
leader says, “I have a really important issue to talk about.” And they
start talking about that issue, and they dominate the discussion. And
then another person in the meeting starts to dominate the discussion.
And, next thing you know, the leader looks at her or his watch and
says, “Oh gosh, we’re out of time. But you know what? Let’s run 10
minutes after the meeting time, just to see if we can close the loop.”
And says, “Okay. Look, I’ve heard from you all.” But in effect, they’ve
only heard from one or two people. And the other people either didn’t
have a chance to speak or were completely irrelevant to the
discussion. So the meeting ends 10 minutes later than it should. The
leader thinks that there was a good decision made, but no one else
feels that way. And they go back to work and they go, “Oy vey. What
just happened?” It’s called Meeting Recovery Syndrome. What we find
is that when people have bad meetings, they don’t necessarily just
leave it at the door. It sticks with them. They ruminate, they co-
 ruminate, and they even report it negatively affecting their productivity
after the meeting.

Or you could start your meeting like this.

PARKER: Don’t open it with logistics, open it the first 5 or 10 minutes

connecting people in a specific way.

Here’s an idea Parker got from someone who ran a weekly staff meeting.

PARKER: She started her meetings by saying, let’s everybody do a

rose and a thorn, which is sort of this old exercise of like, what’s the
best part of your week, what’s the worst part of your week. And that’s
just the first 10 minutes, the rest of the 50 minutes was used for
“business.” And she called me up and she said, my meetings have
transformed. And I said, why? And she said, well first, our team has
changed over time because the risks people take vary week to week —
some people share silly stuff. Some people share deep stuff. Some
people share stuff from work, some people share stuff from over the
weekend. It’s actually changed what’s allowable in the conversation.

She’s like, but the second thing that has been most interesting is, I
didn’t realize this, but people have started to say more real stuff in the
context of work, because by starting the meeting with including a
thorn as the base default, I didn’t realize I was playing a role as
cheerleader, and they didn’t think that I could handle or wanted to
have 50-50 thorns. It’s changed the norms of what’s acceptable and
what we talk about for the rest of the meeting.

DUBNER: So Priya, you write that businesses tend to “run on a cult of

positivity.” What do you mean by that, and how do you counter it?

PARKER: Whether it is panels that are asking guests to talk about all of
their successes or launch a product, or whether it is a meeting in
which you’re talking about how wonderful or how great things are. And
so part of the unwinding of the cult of positivity is to go back and ask,
what is the purpose of this gathering? And often, positivity prevents
progress.

DUBNER: Talk about the difference between generous authority and

ungenerous, or as you term it, imperious authority.

PARKER: Part of the role of a host is to practice generous authority.

And I define generous authority to do three things with your guest.
 And I define generous authority to do three things with your guest.
First is to connect them to each other and to the purpose. To protect
them from each other. And to temporarily equalize them. Because in
any type of group people will fall into the default patterns that they
always fall into. Whether they know people or not. And your role as a
host is to temporarily allow them to behave in a way that helps you
collectively go to that purpose.

ROGELBERG: So if I’m a meeting leader, I can do different things.

Instead of asking people to prepare in advance, you allocate the very
first part of the meeting to reading the preparatory materials because
at that point at least you know everyone has done it. And then there’s
other unconventional tools. Even if I have a large group of folks, and I
want them to engage strongly on a topic, if I have people pair up and
work in dyads, even just for a few minutes, and then come back
together as a group, me having folks work in dyad changes the whole
dynamic of the large group discussion. The level of communication
and passion will be much higher. But what we know from the research
is that left to just the standard protocols of people talking, that a
decision better than what would have just been produced by the best
individual in the room only occurs 20 percent of the time. So, most
typically, meeting performance is just not optimal.

The problem with meetings is that the proportion of good use of time
and bad use of time is out of whack. That’s the critical issue. It’s just
figuring out how can we increase the proportion of good time over bad
time? Good time is when the attendees of the meeting are interacting
in a genuine way such that the decisions and solutions being
generated might surpass what any one individual could have done by
themselves. And that time is not necessarily free of conflict. In fact, we
want conflict in meetings. What we don’t want is personal conflict, but
we want conflict around ideas. So if you have a group going to battle
with incredible passion around ideas — that is a fantastic meeting.
Especially if it’s a safe environment and people go “Wow, that was
amazing that we could have this level of disagreement. But in a way
that does not castrate everyone in the room.”

Or, as Priya Parker put it earlier:

PARKER: Unhealthy peace can be as threatening to human connection

as unhealthy conflict. And most of our gatherings suffer from
unhealthy peace, not unhealthy conflict.

So sometimes, Parker has to invent some healthy conflict.

So sometimes, Parker has to invent some healthy conflict.

PARKER: I was brought into an architecture firm — a 70-years-old

architecture firm — to figure out their vision for the future. And they
were debating whether to maintain being an architecture firm — which
meant, in their case, whether to continue to be bricks and mortar,
building buildings — or whether to pivot and become a design firm.
And there was real disagreement in the firm. But you wouldn’t know it
by being in the room. And anytime someone would say something
even related to one of the possible visions, everyone else would shrink
back. They weren’t willing to go there. And it was very polite.

So during the coffee break, my client said to me — he literally

whispered to me, “Priya, we need more heat.” And so we paused and
thought, okay, basically the norm of politeness in this context is too
strong for good controversy to happen through the way they normally
meet. We quickly, in Photoshop, took two of the photos of the
architects’ heads and slapped them on wrestlers’ bodies. We printed
them out and put them on two walls — one side was the head,

meaning design, and the other was the body, meaning the future
would be architecture, bricks and mortar. And the architects came
back. And we basically said, “Welcome back to the cage match. In one
corner” — I was the emcee, I was like — “In one corner you have the
body, and the other you have the head.” And fortunately for us, the
two architects were game. And so they started jeering and raising their
hands over their shoulders. We assigned coaches to each of the sides,
they threw white towels around their neck, we played the Rocky music,
right? We interrupted the script. And I said each side has two minutes
to say the strongest possible argument for the future of the vision of
the firm, whether it’s architecture or design. And then they get two
minutes for rebuttal. And everybody else — this was the key insight —
everybody else has to physically choose a side. No neutrality and no
wallflowers. And what that did was, it broke the norm of implicit
consensus, which there wasn’t.

DUBNER: And what was the outcome of this architect cage match?

PARKER: So at the end, the group voted, and the best argument was
the body.

DUBNER: And that choice considered binding?

PARKER: That choice was considered recommendational. But people

 PARKER: That choice was considered recommendational. But people
knew that ahead of time. The deeper outcome of that meeting is that
they have a shared memory that they are capable of this, they are
capable of speaking in this way. In any room, there’s troublemakers
and smoother-overs.

DUBNER: And the troublemaker plainly says, what I learned today is

that we have too many meetings. That’s the nature of the
troublemaker?

PARKER: Well, the troublemaker is a really useful role. Would you think
of yourself as a smoother-over or a troublemaker?

DUBNER: Who, me? You haven’t figured that out by now? I’m plainly
the troublemaker.

PARKER: So I think, in healthy contexts, if you share a common

purpose, “troublemakers” can actually be really helpful. And one of the
things that I often do in groups is have people raise their hand, who’s a
troublemaker, who is a smoother-over, and then I ask, who’s both? And
people who are both — and there are always a few in a group — are
the ones who are most likely to be part of transformational
conversations. And that’s because as a troublemaker, you’re willing to
poke and prod and you’re not afraid of a little heat. But as a smoother-
over, you’re also interested in repair and coming together. And going
back to our earlier conversation, most human connection and
gatherings suffer more from unhealthy peace than from unhealthy
conflict. And in those contexts, if you’re a group of smoother-overs, I
can diagnose immediately that this is a very unhealthy place.

I am happy to report that our listenership includes plenty of troublemakers

as well as smoothers-over. They’ve told us about some very successful
meetings:

Elise PIAZZA: My name is Elise Piazza and I’m a cognitive

neuroscientist at Princeton University. I’m actually pretty lucky
because I often hear people say, “That was an awesome meeting.” Lab
meetings are opportunities for scientists to come together and share
their latest data and then brainstorm next steps for the project, and
occasionally we also discuss a recent sometimes controversial journal
article. I often come away feeling energized because I’ve thought of a
new question to test or an algorithm to implement. And sure, maybe
science is inherently more fun and exploratory than other careers, but
one of the reasons these meetings are so effective in general is that
 one of the reasons these meetings are so effective in general is that
people with distinct skills and perspectives are coming together with
the shared goal of helping their colleague improve.

And we heard about some less-successful meetings:

Al CHEN: Hey guys. My name is Al. So one of my one of the worst

meetings I’ve attended was when I was working on my startup. We

came together for our weekly team meeting, and the goal was to come
up with new ideas for our mobile app, and we just ran into a creative
block. We weren’t coming up with any good ideas. And I forgot whose
idea it was, but one of my teammates suggested that we go outside
and smoke some weed to get more creative. So we went behind the
building in the loading dock, all of us got really high. And smoking
weed was supposed to make us more creative, but in reality it just
made us really unproductive and we just started hanging out and
joking around, and I guess it made us better friends, but it wasn’t really
a great meeting.

We also heard from some listeners who’ve taken an entirely different path.

John COSGROVE: My name is John Cosgrove, and I live in

Minneapolis, Minnesota. I moved here from Ireland 20 years ago, and
about seven years ago I started a company ironically in the meetings-
and-events industry. And in the last seven years we have not had a
single meeting, and our company seems to be running very
successfully.

Indeed, the reputation of meetings is so poor that many people simply

avoid holding them — Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, for instance. Some
companies have instituted “no-meeting” days, to give employees a
chance to do their work without being dragged off to the conference
room. But still: 55 million meetings a day in the U.S. — that’s the reality.

Steven Rogelberg has found some other small measures to alleviate the
pain. Snacks (of course). Getting people to switch out of their usual seats.
Using anonymous surveys so people can raise objections without fear of
reprisal. The research shows that just asking attendees to rate a meeting
raises the quality of meetings at that firm. And what about when people sit
through meetings staring at their phones?

ROGELBERG: One of the counterproductive behaviors we focused on

was this idea of multitasking and really trying to understand why
 people multitask despite the fact that clearly it tends to bother others.
But then the other piece of it is multitasking as a coping mechanism.
When an employee walks into a meeting they are relinquishing control.
And so how can you get that control back? Well, you can daydream.
You can make lists. Or you can multitask. That’s how you can reclaim
your power. So one of the techniques is trying to build a break in the
middle of a meeting. So if I tell them, “Hey, I promise you in 30 minutes
you can check your phone,” that’s going to help put their minds at
ease.

And one final, important thing: how do you end a meeting?

PARKER: First, issue a last call. So the same way that a bar has a last
call, they flash the lights or you literally say, “last call.” And most
meetings, most gatherings, don’t end — they stop. We run out of time,
and then everyone scatters.

ROGELBERG: You know when to end the meeting because the

questions have been answered. And if you can’t come up with any
questions, you shouldn’t have a meeting.

PARKER: But then to help people understand, when we go back out

into the world, who’s doing what? What was decided here, and are we
all aligned?

ROGELBERG: People want to feel that their time was well spent. And
this becomes a cue to tell you that indeed it was. If you know you have
absolutely answered these compelling questions, then you leave there
saying, “Ah, I accomplished something.”

PARKER: And to have a good memory at the end, which is what do you
most want people to remember, and don’t end on logistics. End on
what you want people to remember.

All right — job done, then. Thanks, Priya Parker and Steven Rogelberg.
Thanks to our anthropologist and behavioral ecologist friends — and the
African wild dogs, of course. And a big thanks to all the Freakonomics
Radio listeners who sent us their meeting stories.

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes
Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt
Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt
Hickey, Corinne Wallace, and Daphne Chen. We had help this week
from Nellie Osborne. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers;
all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to
Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get
your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this
episode:

SOURCES

Hallie Walker, Ph.D student at the University of Idaho.

Priya Parker, group-conflict-resolution facilitator.
Steven Rogelberg, organizational psychologist at the University of
North Carolina, Charlotte.
Helen Schwartzman, anthropologist at Northwestern University.
Jen Sandler, anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst.

RESOURCES

“Sneeze to Leave: African Wild Dogs (Lycaon Pictus) Use Variable

Quorum Thresholds Facilitated by Sneezes in Collective Decisions,”
by Reena H. Walker, Andrew J. King, J. Weldon McNutt, and Neil R.
Jordan (Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 2017).

EXTRA

The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team
to Peak Performance, by Steven Rogelberg.

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, by Priya

Parker.
The Meeting: Gatherings in Organizations and Communities, by
Helen Schwartzman.