Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Spotting Field Sabotage in Meetings (2011)

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104 pointssigna1136 comments

The endless rehashing of this list is tiresome. Sure these techniques are effective, but they exist because the behaviour they co-opt is often useful and desirable.

Not ragging on this piece in particular. It's just that people referring to this manual rarely add anything approaching guidance on how to expedite meetings and facilitate effective decisions. People shouldn't think of sabotage when something takes longer in a meeting, they should think of how the issue can be resolved quickly.

Tools I've found to resolve or prevent long discussions:

1. Ask every attendant their opinion in turn, so that people need not discover the other's take through discussion but have it explicit up-front. This is also very effective to break discussions where multiple people are constantly interrupting each other.

2. Make it clear when people talk about different things. "So you see technical issues #1, #2 while you see ethical issue #3?" Discuss the issues separately.

3. Keep the current best proposal for resolution visible for everybody, and change it as soon as anybody suggests amendments. Rarely split proposals into multiple variants, only if people favour clearly distinct options. Make the reservations explicit. "So you don't accept this resolution because it goes against (other decision)?"

And finally:

4. Accept that people can discover issues and change opinion during the discussion, this is an important function of a meeting after all. Make it explicit when it's happening though so everybody takes notice. If somebody keeps dredging up minor issues or matters already decided or discussed, ask them why they think it's relevant. Often it's enough to "add this to the minutes."

Interesting, you view the list as an amusing take on things to avoid.

I view it as sport to keep me going at the corrupt, horrifically depressing companies I’ve had to work at, and have been unable to escape.

I don't see how acting that way would make the companies less depressing overall.

I think this could actually be a manual for promotions at such organizations.

It totally is. Another point is to make no contributions during the whole meeting but at the end be the last one to speak, make sure to summarize what everybody has said. the meeting is yours and you are automatically the insightful leader.

I have seen this done by a couple different people. They were not recognized as insightful, and more often recognized as annoying. They also often don't summarize properly but it's easier to let them conclude and pretend they were useful than to debate with them.

The more important thing is the actual meeting notes are accurate. (I also strongly believe that a meeting without published notes is largely useless and irrelevant, but that's a while other topic.)

Of course, that will never work in any sane place. The point I was making is all these "sabotage" behaviors are actually the sorts of things that get you promoted at toxic places.

I don't think the place has to be that toxic. In most larger companies there is a lot of political posturing going and these strategies all can be very useful under certain circumstances. The good players are just not too blatant about it.

One reading is that if a lot of key decisions are being made in meetings you're already in trouble, and rather than trying to improve the meetings you should cut them down and -- as far as possible -- let individuals make decisions.

Obviously, this goes against some currently-fashionable ideas like "the team decides"...

Operational decisions, sure. The appropriate manager or executive should make those. But some decisions have to be made (or at least approved) by a board in many organizations.

Sure. But keep that set to the absolute minimum.

Most people can't run (chair) meetings well. Indeed, most people have never experienced a well run meeting.

A good chair makes it look easy. Anyone can do it. Oops, chair is out sick, need someone to fill in. Chaos.

This list makes sense but it also reminds me why I hate the meeting culture. Instead of scheduled meetings people should have more informal conversations to hash out things and let them take as much time as needed. In scheduled meetings either developing ideas are interrupted because the time is over or they drag on for too long.

Funny thing is that in modern open office setups it's really hard to have a real conversation.

Meetings really should not be the place to "hash out things" as you say. Meetings should be where groups of people make decisions (this is advocated by DeMarco in Peopleware)

I would also add:

Have a deadline by which some task before the committee must be completed.

Have a single decision-maker for the committee.

Citrine or "ABC of Chairmanship" is a very good guide to formal meeting practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_of_Chairmanship

> Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments. When possible, refer all matters to

This one struck me. I have two colleagues in particular that come to mind. One loves to spin anecdotes into metaphors to basically repeat what someone else has already said, killing meetings. The other loves to use an awful lot of big words to describe all the things he’s recently read and has latched onto a ‘collaborator’ to ‘work’ on. Of course this completely derails the meeting.

Some of this is about the competitive business of being noticed. The people who quietly solve problems are overlooked. The people who discuss them out loud are noticed. In some companies this is one of the few ways to get noticed by the upper echelons

" competitive business of being noticed"

I love this phrase. So true.

Some people just really like the sound of their own voice.

time contributions max 4 mins :-)

Someone I know had an interesting technique used on him. He was on an important but unpopular project, and was presenting the facts making this project necessary. Hard to schedule meeting with lots of important people.

So a high-ranking exec says: Your numbers are wrong. He didn't get answer on why this was stated or what the correct numbers would be. The whole raison d'aitre for the project disappeared under his feet. They lost a lot of time in the discussion about numbers, and the meeting was over before it even got started. A month of time lost before next meeting, and everyone pissed of.

So afterwards another exec pulls him aside and said he was victim of a classic meeting sabotage trick, that was used on a regular base by that specific high-ranking exec.

I once had a project manager say in a meeting, "It's my job to play devil's advocate right now." I immediately explained to him that, no, his job was to coordinate our time and resources. Devil's advocate was for the requirements engineer.

Very true - but I wonder if it that case the requirements engineer was failing to do that? Or the company was one where they regularly didn't challenge the engineer to explicitly and publicly take that role?

No, the re is great. It's the pm who causes the most bikeshedding.

If its the PM's job to deliver their project it is absolutely their job eg stop the requirements being bikeshedded.

Maybe with more context I'd have enough information to agree with you, but with the info I actually have, I can't say it wasn't their job to play devil's advocate. Maybe they had good reason to be skeptical of the direction things were going and needed to ask enough questions to be sure it was right in order to best represent the concerns related to their role on the team.

The modern equivalent of this are “virtual communities” in the form of internal forums or distribution lists.

I’ve lost count of the amount of “community building initiatives” I am enrolled in automatically due to my role or background, and sometimes wonder what amount of useful work I would actually be able to do if I participated in half of them.

Seems to me the document itself was probably the saboteur:

1. Write a document describing natural yet annoying things that happen in meetings.

2. Let the document be discovered.

3. Watch as the enemy wastes time and resources looking for the saboteur which is hiding in plain sight on that sheet of paper.

That seems more sensible than actual disruptive behavior potentially burning a spy's identity.

I suspect that the people assigned to write this manual decided to have some fun, and inserted a satire that probably applied to their own work environment.

Who knew my co-workers were CIA trained.

channels, delegation in to sub-groups and presentations can be very necessary...

There is just good and bad ways to do it. Short meetings need delegation when discussions break loose, presentations for communication between departments, channels for repeating things like support escalation.

Those are all signs the meeting was unnecessary.

On the contrary, if a meeting is unnecessary, you can afford to spend the time on whatever tangents and pet causes the attendees want to bring up, so you don't need to bother with channels and delegation. If a meeting has been convened for an important purpose, it has to be protected against people trying to hijack it for less important things, by deflecting those things to other channels and other groups. (Of course you can't get sucked into the morass of authorizing and organizing subgroups right there or it doesn't help much.)

No a clever chair can shunt unwanted discussion of to a subcommittee or defer it to another meeting.

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