"Meet Is Murder"

"Meetings must be scratching some kind of itch, if only for fellowship and a reprieve from deskbound loneliness. And what an itch: Meetings are not just considered indispensable to many professions; they are almost coextensive with them. You can make a whole career of planning, holding and attending meetings and never dare contemplate the possibility of your being exempt. They can’t be avoided, but maybe they can be made bearable. I set out to see if anyone had a bright idea...

Robertson’s book, ‘‘Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World,’’ presents an engaging theory: minority voices need a forum to register problems others don’t see, and a company should function like an ‘‘evolutionary organism,’’ which sounds both gentle and scientific...

With the firm support of Slack, Under Armour, the athletic apparel company, has opted to turn to the software for meetings, abolishing virtu­ally all in-person gatherings...

Robert, the original meeting hacker, was prompted to renovate meetings in the 1860s, when a discussion of abolitionist politics at a Baptist church in New Bedford, Mass., devolved into chaos... A meeting run by Robert’s Rules can be a joy to behold — though it’s clotted by as much jargon as a Holacratic meeting."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/meet-is-murder.html

I think part of the problem is that we're just bad at communicating with each other. At least in my experience, offices are planning especially that don't accept our full humanity and don't make room for nuanced or human/emotive communication - or for the reflection that would give us the insights that might be communicated those ways. If a project isn't progressing, or a task is confusing and poorly organized, or a team member is having trouble completing something for personal reasons, it's important to be able to communicate this so that everyone understands what is happening and can think about how to address it. But those kinda of conversations just don't happen in offices. So we have these disjoint and frustrating and stressful work tasks and we can't even out a finger on exactly what the problem is, much less tell someone, much less address it. And out of this unspoken, unrecognized anxiety it will seem like the appropriate thing to do is to meet, so that the problems that aren't being recognized could theoretically be caught early, so that there are all opportunities for the heart-of-the-matter communication that probably won't happen, so that for a little while you can sit in a room with other people who are having the same feelings you are and for a little while you won't feel solely responsible for bearing them.

So, I think we need to learn how to be better at identifying our needs and problems, and figuring out how to communicate them to each other and hear them from others.