Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time. David Pearl
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we’re more respectful of it—it’s not a disposable commodity
• we notice it repays our efforts when we take care of its vitality, rather than purely its efficiency
• we realize that shutting it in an airless, windowless concrete box in a hotel basement, sorry Business Suite, may not be the best idea
• we know it will have its good and bad days, just like us
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.”
To move to the left-hand side, close your eyes for a moment and become aware of what’s simultaneously happening in the interior you. Here you are a continuous ferment of thoughts, feeling, beliefs, pictures, senses.
To experience the top half, concentrate on all the aspects that make you unique and different from everyone else—the unique, separate you. And finally, as individual as you are, consider how many groups or “clubs” you are part of: human race, family, company, people with the same name/star sign/language/height. You’ve moved into the bottom, collective half of the Holon.
Taken together, it’s a map of all we are experiencing moment to moment. In life. At work. And in meetings.
A meeting has an outside (where things are said and done) and an inside (what is going on beneath the surface—the world of beliefs, politics, emotions, hidden agendas …). It is made up of individuals—each with their identity and role—who interconnect (more or less effectively) as a group.
Building on the integral model, I call these four areas:
Take a breather, have a stretch. When you are back we’ll look at each of those areas in more detail.
If you are in a meeting and wondering what am I doing here? it is time to pay attention to the top left quadrant.
Probably the most important moment in any meeting is one we don’t notice. We walk straight past it in our hurry to get the job done. It comes just after the start. You’ve arrived (or phoned in), settled in your chairs and are just discussing what the meeting is about when …
Stop.
Rewind.
There. Just before you say what the meeting is about. It’s the why moment. It’s the moment you can really energize the meeting, awaken, involve, and engage the participants. If you miss it, you are going to have to work that much harder for this meeting to succeed.
Even real engagement pros sometimes miss that moment. When the blockbuster film The Gladiator was first tested on audiences it had a so-so reaction. It was clearly a great action film, but the audiences felt something was missing. Then director Ridley Scott added a scene, right at the start. It goes something like this:
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