Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

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This is a great start and far more than most people do. The other thing that most meetings fail at is having someone run the agenda. Someone who keeps the meeting to the agenda, prevents people from getting off topic, makes sure the discussion is pushing towards the stated purpose. The problem is that no one generally wants to be the "bad guy" and they just let the meeting happen. It is also true that sometimes the meeting might be to review a document but people will show up without having read it. This is a waste of everyone's time. But the meeting runner doesn't want to break social norms and call people out. "So you didn't prepare for this meeting Mike, so your time is more important than everyone else's time who did read the document?"

In the end, it is about culture. You have to decide that these things matter. You can have productive 5 minute stand-ups or non-productive 60 minute stand-ups. You have to build the expectation that the point of all meetings is to get on the same page as a team or to make sure you stay there. Most meetings do fail at this.

It's a similar issue in presidential debates. Someone needs to have the authority that something is off topic or off the rails or whatever, but they have to balance that against things that need to be said. And the choice has political implications, big or small politics.

The whole point of structure in these types of dialogues is to reveal the nuggets worth talking about, not cover them up in favor of following the rules.

It is definitely a skill that the meeting runner needs to have. You don't need to keep it completely choked off but you do need the ability to call a spade, a spade. When someone is just repeating someone else to kiss up, then they can move the conversation along.

We have someone who always brings up some story about some company he worked at 20 years ago and blah, blah, blah. But it isn't a "We solved this at company X by doing Y, should we try that here?", it is more like a 15 minute chest pounding of "Back when I ran the largest logistics company providing dental products to all the Fortune 500 and the government, I was in charge of 5K employees. When we faced challenge X,...... blah blah blah". This is where someone needs to step in. Again, most people don't want to be the jerk and so everyone sits there listening to this person talk about himself and wasting everyone's time.

[Politics]

That was why I liked the CNN debates in July. (Democratic presidential primary candidates in the US.) The moderators kept the debate on topic and politely (as best as they could) cut off the candidates when they went off topic.

The next day, a lot of the political coverage complained that the moderators got in the way too much! Sigh.

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