‘Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’

      ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’

      ‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’

      ‘That was the curious incident,’ remarked Sherlock Holmes.

      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Silver Blaze

      This section is about giving you a map of what’s really happening in meetings, not just on the surface but behind the scenes and beneath the waterline. With this insider knowledge of meetings you can design them better, and next time things start going awry you’ll know where the problem is and how to fix it.

      Fix is probably the wrong word, by the way. If this laptop goes wrong I can fix it. Actually Carlo or Guy can fix it – I can just swear at it. You can fix objects, but people aren’t objects. They are complex living organisms. And when they get together in meetings, things get even more complex.

      Some aspects of meetings are clear to see and hear. Others are invisible and have to be sensed. To really understand meetings you need to keep track not only of what is happening but also, like Sherlock Holmes noting the dog that didn’t bark, what isn’t happening and should be.

      Meetings don’t come with a Haynes manual and can’t be ‘fixed’ like a leaking pipe or wobbly shelf. I mention this because, in these mechanistic times, we tend to forget.

      It’s a material world we live in, particularly the business world. Just look at the language businesses use to flat-pack lots of messy human stuff into neat-sounding concepts like ‘process’ and ‘mechanism’, ‘resource’ and ‘management’. It’s like linguistic IKEA. When we tidy up our language the world seems so much more more ordered and easy to handle.

      Businesses also like to make uncomfortably invisible things reassuringly physical. So, organisations are described as if they were solid objects, with a top and a bottom, breadth and depth. There’s a back office and a front line, internal zones and external ones. There’s even a temperature gauge, with burning platforms and perma-frost. Metaphors are very useful. They help us make the abstract more real or ‘put a tea-cup handle on a cloud’, as someone deliciously described them. Using this metaphorical language about business can be very helpful provided we remember that organisations are not machines, people are not resources, and meetings, unlike wobbly shelves, cannot be fixed with a tool.

      If you are a tool-lover, I offer these two pieces of advice.

      Giving people a tool is no guarantee they’ll use it.

      I know businesses that have more tools than a DIY superstore but where no-one ever picks them up.

      Don’t give people a more powerful tool than they can handle. They could take their leg off.

      I am thinking, for example, of the people I have seen who have just discovered MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator – a psychometric test) or some other personality typing ‘toolkit’. Like any born-again convert they’ll stop you in the corridor with that faraway look to ask if you are ‘a T or a J, a Red or a Yellow, a Summer or a Winter’. I did once know a performance coach who became a little zealous about ‘appreciative enquiry’. When his wife phoned from a distant airport to say she had missed her plane and was stranded there with their one-year-old daughter, his reaction was to ask, ‘And what do you learn from that?’ Like I said, you could lose a leg. Or worse.

      When I tried to buy a chainsaw from my local Italian hardware store, the owner looked me carefully up and down. Clearly English. Clearly no idea about the havoc a ‘moto-sega’ can inflict. He thrust some chain-mail reinforced trousers across the counter and made it clear he wouldn’t sell me a power tool without the power protection. It was a case of ‘No chain-mail? No chainsaw.’

      So, people are not objects. And meetings are not collections of objects. Which is why I want you to start thinking of meetings not as things at all but as living beings. Clients often find that a strange idea at first – especially given how inert many of their meetings are. But it’s a powerful one.

      When we think of a meeting as ‘alive’:

      Treat it as another metaphor if you like. For me, after many years of doing this work, it’s a reality. If I am observing a six-person meeting I’ll see seven actual participants: the six people present plus the meeting itself.

      If something goes wrong, I ask people not to blame each other, but to look up and pay attention to what the meeting needs. Is it getting over-heated or over-pressured? Is the meeting running out of energy? Does it need a break? With very little practice this exercise greatly increases your awareness of what’s really needed in a meeting, moment to moment.

      So, from here onwards, I want you/us to think of a meeting as a living being. And that we are not fixing them but keeping them healthy and vitally alive.

      Unfortunately living beings don’t come with instructions. And if we want our meetings to function well we do need a way to keep track of all that’s happening – the obvious and not so obvious, the dogs that bark and those that don’t. Fortunately, I found one. In Peru.

      I was in Lima with my circus-cum-opera company (long story) and wasn’t looking for a multi-dimensional meeting map. I was there to sing, eat gerbil and get altitude sickness. One morning, our director David handed me a book he’d found on a shelf at his hotel. Please forgive the cliché, but Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything is genuinely a life-changing book. At least it was for me.

      I urge you to read it if you have ever had the feeling that everything is connected but you are not sure how. The Integral approach (www.integralinstitute.org) that Wilber has pioneered is now being used the world over to help us think, act, govern, work and live in much more holistic, healthy ways. Back then, what struck me was how it could help us have great meetings.

      At the heart of the book is a simple diagram. The really great ones are simple. It’s a two-by-two matrix (aren’t they always?) dreamed up by the novelist and science writer Arthur Koestler, who called it a ‘holon’.