Short audio preview

If anyone can heal your meetings, it's David Pearl. He's a business impresario - an ex-opera singer who helps organisations to think creatively and disrupt the unhelpful habits of office life. His team includes musicians, martial artists and healers. And for this event, all wore white coats, with Pearl himself greeting attendees to the Lewis PR centre wearing a stethoscope around his neck. In the preceding weeks, we'd filled in questionnaires about our meeting habits, and now we were going to receive our diagnoses.

"Meetings are not about what's on the materials," he said early on. And the best ones make sparing use of Powerpoint. The problem with presentation software is that people use it as a prompt, so it's often advisable to project presentations onto a wall behind the audience rather than let it distract everyone while you're speaking. To drum this point home, he addressed us with a slideshow running on the giant screen behind him, flashing up messages such as: "You need me, earthlings!" The one thing that Powerpoint is good at, Pearl said, is summarising information. So, for example, it was an appropriate way to display the results of our pre-event survey.

Asked to describe what was wrong with our meetings, we had responded in a variety of ways. "Too long, 'a necessary evil,' no open discussion about issues being raised." The last comment here was particularly poignant, Pearl suggested - he knew from his experiences as a consultant that business people tend to talk around issues rather than tackling them head on. Some of us had complained that people arrived at our meetings poorly prepared, and that we had to waste time bringing them up to date. Others confessed that they often ended up "winging it". Pearl told us that one of his clients once said: "My staff need to relax more." To which his response was, "Really?... Very often the problem we have in a meeting is that we don't recognise we're a part of [the problem]. We project stuff out and then we blame the meeting. I'm not sure that's fair."

Asked to identify the one thing we would most like to change about our meetings, we showed more agreement. "I would like to be able to dictate the pace better, to prevent procrastination or deviation," said one attendee, to which Pearl replied that the "art form" of meeting management had to be learned through practice. For another, the priority was "full participation and commitment from attendees". "This has got a lot to do with whom you invite," Pearl responded. "And whether they should be there. How many times have you been in a meeting that's trying to enrol you in something and it's not relevant to you?" A further comment that got everyone nodding in agreement was this: "I would like to get rid of the assumption that all meetings should last an hour." Pearls's suggestion here was that the diary functions of software applications such as Lotus Notes, which often default to one-hour durations where meetings are concerned, had given us the false impression that one hour was an immutable standard, when in truth it is just a bad habit.

Overall, 67.5% of us felt we spent too much time in meetings. More surprising were the statistics that Pearl revealed about the cost of wasted time across the UK as a whole. "One hour wasted per week for middle- to senior- managers costs British industry $6bn [a year]," he said. "There are companies in the States who've done studies on this - Amex is one of them - and they don't even know how much they spend on meetings, but there was one that said they know within $800,000. That's the closest they can get within nearly $1bn. So the costs are enormous, not just financial but also in terms of our energy and lives... There's value being created, or currently wasted, whenever you meet people."

The best leaders, Pearl suggested, are those that recognise the importance of meetings and train their staff accordingly. For example, Andy Grove, the president of Intel, said "Meetings are nothing less than the medium of management," and reportedly spends 10 hours per week teaching his staff how to hold meetings more effectively. "If a meeting isn't building value, it's wasting value," Pearl stressed. "The idea that it's neither one nor the other, but just all right - I don't think we should accept that... If you're in a meeting with your team and you're not enrolling them, they're disengaging from you."

Additionally, he said, there's a simple diagnostic tool that can help you to plan meetings of any type more effectively. It has four steps - intent, connect, context and content.

1. <li>Intent
2. <p>The purpose of a meeting is often a clear objective. The intent of the meeting is its underlying rationale. So, for example, if you're meeting to plan an advertising campaign, the intent might be to improve the reputation of your brand. "If you don't know what the intent of the meeting is, how do you know who should be there?" Pearl asked. The way to deal with an invitation to a meeting that you don't want to go to, without seeming rude, is to ask the following question: "What is the intent of this meeting, and how do I specifically add value?"</p></li>
3. <li>Connect
4. <p>Determine who needs to be at the meeting and invite them based on specific criteria: why they need to attend, what they are expected to contribute and for what part of the meeting they need to be present. It is utterly wasteful, Pearl pointed out, to make people sit through a meeting of several hours if their presence is only needed for 15 minutes.</p></li>
5. <li>Context
6. <p>Without a clear business context, a meeting has no meaning. Equally, it needs the right physical context if it is to be sufficiently engaging. Pearl lamented the fact that so many function rooms at plush hotels are in the basement. A poor venue will compromise a meeting, he said.</p></li>
7. <li>Content
8. <p>It is content that should govern the schedule of a meeting, Pearl suggested. Otherwise, people will be more easily distracted, in anticipation of the next coffee break. Each segment of a meeting should end only when the relevant item on the agenda is complete. "The most highly explosive question is, 'When is the break?'" he said. And we shouldn't give a precise answer, because "unless this is a tea convention, what we're actually here to do is business." Equally, he pointed out, "Why do we wait for the break to feed ourselves? Why don't we have water on the tables all the time? Nuts? Things to graze on? Why oppress ourselves? The reason is that the last time this happened to us was school. We're basically recreating the school, the army or prison, depending on where we've been. It doesn't have to be that way."</p></li>

The problem with most meetings, he concluded, is that they're not designed but assembled. It's like barbecuing a kebab - you stick as much as possible on a skewer, undercook it and then gulp it down, indigestibly. The reason is that we tend to design meetings in the wrong order: we think about the content first, then pick a venue, then consider whom to invite and only then stop to consider why we needed the meeting in the first place. The steps should be the other way around: intent, connect, context, content.

Pearl concluded the event by dispensing some some key bits of advice. For example:

• <li>"Be Barbados."
• <p>In other words, lead by example when it comes to enthusiasm. "If you go off to Barbados and have a wonderful time then you come back, and want to transmit this joy to your colleagues," Pearl said. You want to show off your photographs and your tan. If you can be equally enthusiastic about meetings then the other people there will be "energised".</p></li>
• <li>There is no "out there" out there.
• <p>In problem-solving meetings, people tend to blame external factors for whatever issue they face. "Very often the source of the problem is [we believe] outside the room, so the meeting turns into a kind of gossip session." Even if the source of the problem really is outside the room, it's a good idea to imagine the whole of your business being present, Pearl said. Gossip is futile: you need to make what progress you can with the people at hand.</p></li>
• <li>Everything's a meeting.
• <p>Meetings don't have to happen in a designated room, Pearl pointed out "When you meet the receptionist it's a meeting, when you have a coffee it's a meeting... I'm not saying you constantly have to be engaged, that would drive you nuts. But why wait for the meeting to have the meeting? Every interaction is an opportunity to generate value."</p></li>
• <li>Substance wins over spectacle.
• <p>Spectacular presentations, especially ones produced in Powerpoint, are a thing of the past, Pearl said. "As 21st Century people we're less impressed by spectacle. Even in America they're less likely to be hoodwinked by a good set."</p></li>
• <li>Sloppy is the new slick.
• <p>"The moment you think is the worst moment of the meeting is usually the best moment," Pearl suggested. This is because a good meeting is one in which everyone behaves like themselves, not as if they're on parade. "While you're desperately worrying the night before, trying to make sure the mistake doesn't happen, the mistake very often is the great moment," he said.</p></li>

Ultimately, the way people perceive your business is down to the way you hold meetings. "People think, if I could just get the meeting out of the way then I could get on with my job," Pearl cried. "But I've got a chastening thought for you: the meetings are the job."