Big Meeting Syndrome in Facilitation

Transcript of this video:

I want to talk about a thing I call big meeting syndrome.

I’ve often seen organisations when they have to tackle some difficult issue, deciding the thing to do is to have a big meeting about it, and because this is a big meeting involving lots of people, it has to be planned several months ahead, so a venue is booked, or at least it was in pre-COVID times, and for the next few months, elaborate plans are made for this meeting.

People fly in from far away, and because it’s a big meeting and a lot’s at stake, a lot of anxiety goes into planning it, and we have what my friend Viv calls meetings about meetings, where a variety of anxieties and plans are shared and deconstructed and put together, and so all in all, an enormous amount of effort goes into worrying about the meeting, often the meeting rather than the underlying issue.

And of course, in the time between now and when the meeting takes place, all actions on the issue, all experiments on the issue are postponed, because of course, we’ve got to wait for the big meeting before we do anything about it.

And when the big meeting arrives and the room is full of often jet-lagged participants, an enormous amount of effort goes in to make sure it’s a success, because after all this time, it would be tragic for it to be a failure, so everyone taking part is under enormous pressure to pretend that it has been a success.

So often there’ll be a wall of post-it notes and agreements by the end, and then you get what I call a commitment ceremony when everyone resolves to do things differently from now on, and then by the time everyone’s gone home, there’s a tendency for everything to revert to normal and as it was before. And that, I think, is the danger of big meeting syndrome. It might be better to think of change as a more conversational, slower, more organic and experimental process with fewer of these set piece meetings and a lot more experiments along the way.

Photo by Klara Kulikova on Unsplash