When meetings are outlawed, only outlaws will hold meetings

Photo by Tim Mossholder.

Just before the break, we were having some work done at home. The thing about old Toronto homes is that it's never whether you'll find something horrendous behind the wall, it's what and how much it'll cost to fix.

So when our electrician came to upgrade the panel, we suspected he'd find something. What he found was asbestos.

You know the old brain-teaser about getting the fox and the chicken across the water in a boat? The past week was like that. The electrical panel can't be upgraded because of the asbestos. But the asbestos can't be removed from behind live electrical.

Eventually, our electrician donned a hazmat suit to get everything turned off. Once the remediation crew cleared out the asbestos, the next step was to rewire everything. In a 100-year-old house. With circuits that have been used for everything from a basement apartment that no longer exists to a Jacuzzi tub that no longer exists. Without proper labelling, you have to do the slow version. The electrician turning each breaker off and back on and hollering up the stairs, "Did that do anything?"

Some were obvious. The entire upstairs going bright and us hollering, "Upstairs bedrooms are back!" But many were less obvious, like the outdoor plug next to the garbage bins. And then there were a few where we couldn't figure them out at all. Where they went off and on with no observable change.

For the ones we couldn't figure out, we left them off. No sense in reactivating things that don't matter. And, besides, if they turned out to go to anything crucial, surely someone would notice.

After a 16-hour day of wiring and hollering up the stairs, our electrician was packing up his tools. Confident that we had the important stuff wired back up. And the mystery stuff in a holding pen. We felt pretty confident, too, until one of us opened the fridge and noticed that it was still dark.

Try turning it off and back on again

A bunch of folks wanted to make sure we saw the Shopify thing about turning all their meetings off. We did. They wanted to know what we thought of the policy, which is being reported as no meetings of more than two people.

As people who spend a lot of time on startup management, there's often a lot of noise. Tech execs tend to be a loud, chest-thumpy bunch. The business press corps often has limited business experience and less management experience. They write breathlessly and uncritically, unable to distinguish smart policy from tech-culture-war-garbage.

The actual Shopify policy appears to be more nuanced than the headlines would have you believe. A periodic reboot of standing meetings, an encouragement to look more critically at whether to reinstate them or not.

But while the policy may have nuance, their public pronouncements beat a standard techbro rhythm. "Meetings are a bug." "No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings." Something something builder, yadda yadda individual work of lone technical geniuses.

This one-two punch of absolutist public statements and messier internal implementation isn't new. Like Spotify's squad/guild system, the public version is mostly a signalling and recruiting tool. Never mind that the internal reality is deeply different, and the people close to it would never use the public version.

But, as with Spotify's squads, it does sound good. Because who doesn't have meetings they hate, right? Who hasn't sat in a meeting, checking email because they didn't need to be there? Or muted their video and done the dishes while supposedly building alignment?

Don't we all a little bit agree that companies should be for makers, not managers? Doesn't it feel tempting to turn them all off and see what happens?

Say it out loud

Okay so, putting aside how badly-run meetings feel, what is the point? In the blissful moment of creation, before the agenda gets away from you and Tobias wants to sidetrack everyone for 10 minutes about some new RPG he's discovered. What were you trying to get done when you invited five colleagues to get together for 30 minutes?

Our hunch is that, whatever your answer is, it isn't "waste their time." Like, if it is, you're a bad person and should feel bad. But we suspect it isn't. We suspect it was more like, "get everyone on the same page." Or, "talk about the problem I discovered with our approach and talk through how we want to address it." We suspect it was about alignment. Or decision making. Or collaboration.

So here's a fun exercise. Go take those statements. From Shopify executives, or anyone else playing the same ridiculous game. And every time the word "meeting" comes up, replace it with, "collaboration." See how you feel.

"Collaboration is a bug."

"No one joined Shopify to collaborate."

"There's a kind of person who really likes collaborating. Otherwise you have to work."

You don't hate meetings. You hate shit meetings. You hate dead-end meetings that don't drive anything. We all do.

But when our electrician found a dead circuit, the solution wasn't to turn off power to the whole house. That... wouldn't make any sense. If he really insisted that that was the solution, we'd have to start wondering about his competence to do this job. A bad circuit is a problem, but not having any power in the house is a much larger one.

Not in my meeting

A core truth of what all this nonsense is getting at is that recurring meetings can lose the plot. They tend to accrete optional invites. They grow a calcified set of standing agenda items. The more successful and helpful a meeting is in its early days, the more will get strapped to it. Because Important People attend it and Important Decisions appear to happen there. In a pinch, it's not a bad idea to shake the crust loose on a meeting like that. Turn it off, and see what breaks.

But the long-term fix for bad meetings isn't no meetings, it's competence. If you run a bad meeting, you need to fix the meeting or cancel it. But if you run a company full of bad meetings that need annual reboots, you need to fix your management team. Because while collaboration, alignment, decision making, and unit cohesion can all happen outside of meetings, well-run meetings are a very useful and effective place to accomplish those things. Taking that tool out of your management toolbox might be prudent if you don't trust your managers to use it without hurting themselves or others. But it would be better if they were competent.

We once gave a talk to a group of managers where we made them shout, over and over, "Not in my meeting." Running an effective meeting means being opinionated about what it is and isn't for, and fierce about not wasting the time of your invitees. Someone wants to parachute an unrelated topic because most of the right people are already in the room? Not in my meeting. There are a hundred places where you, as the convenor, can either allow other people to mess with your meeting, or else defend its original clarity of purpose. Better meetings happen when you choose the latter.

You don't have to make it up as you go. There are helpful frameworks out there for getting diagnostic about meetings in particular, and gatherings in general. But you also don't need to feel bad about the fact that there are meetings you really like, or find valuable. That doesn't mean you aren't a maker, for fuck's sake. Or that you're insufficiently hardcore. It means that you are someone who sees value in live and lively collaboration. And when some exec wants to make a big public spectacle about shutting that down? You already know the answer. Not in my meeting.

- Melissa and Johnathan