Comment by heyalexhsu
14 hours ago
Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.
> Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating.
This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild.
> Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate.
Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.
> Then everyone will be listening.
Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced. Neither meetings nor their duration are contributory to this skill.
You can spend too much time communicating and not communicate enough at the same time. Effectiveness is the key here.
> Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced
communicating is also a skill
learning to communicate effectively can be perfected too
> This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild.
I have totally seen infinite meetings where nothing is achieved, nothing is really said, but someone socially isolate just talks and talks and talks because it is his only chance to interact.
You've missed the point and agreed with the GP.
Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening.
(i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)
Maybe this is just my interpretation but OP effectively argued "too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction".
The commenter above argued that the problem was slightly different, it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication. A meeting in itself does not create communication (of information and exchange of opinions etc.) and the commenter wanted to increase the number of meaningful meetings instead of/in addition to just cutting down meetings by numbers. The criticism of not enough time spent on communication is in the same vein, both agree on the issue of "too many unnecessary meetings".
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> Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening.
This is where I think we have a different definition of communication.
> (i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)
Hence my clarification of:
For example, if a project kick-off meeting consists of the highest ranking managers talking and everyone else having no contribution, listen to what they are saying; their "vision" is all that matters.
Another example is when product and/or engineer managers use "stand-ups" to ask each engineer the status of their deliverables. Listen to what they are saying; we micromanage and do not trust the team.
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I don't think "attempting to communicate" - or especially not "attempting to LISTEN" as in the title here - would be the stated reason for many meetings. "Pitching people on your shit" or "making sure shit gets done the way management wants it to" is much more accurate for most corporate dev and B2B/B2C sales/product meetings.
For the typical "agile" process for software:
- standup: this fits, attempting to communicate status and request help with blockers
- backlog grooming: attempting to figure out what to do with artifacts of generally-async communication (tickets from a backlog, either created by you in the past or by others). attempting to fit them into the process best. Communication is often seen as a necessary evil, and this process often goes faster with fewer people. if people bring up questions, there may be some attempts to communicate in explanations.
- sprint planning: work assignment and time management/estimations. similar to above, questions could spark attempts to communicate, but it's not the primary purpose.
- sprint retro: improve the team dynamics and the flow of the process. communication is usually assumed here, but in practice it's "people saying things, they get written down, then the next sprint happens same as the last." there often isn't effective communication to the people who could change things
I think if the goal of meetings was more specifically "we are going to communicate until our mental pictures are exactly the same" you'd end up with faster/better actual work from everyone on the team.
But in big orgs that's usually not even what's wanted. If the plan sucks, but it's a VP's pet project, it's not good for various whole teams in that org to all effectively communicate with each other to realize it sucks but not have the political skills or pull to change the VP's mind...
I’ve been in so many meetings where the outcome is to plan another meeting, and include even more folks. Whichever team brings the most folks steers the decision in their favor, and thus manages hire more unnecessary employees for political will (which then increases the need for even more meetings).
The way out is creating a singular vision (eg leadership) and assigning teams goals they can work independently on towards that vision. It is to remove dependences between teams (and thus the need for them to communicate as much), not to increase communication or Jira tickets or Gantt charts or RACI matrices.
Critical issue is that it expects leaders to actually lead. Common yet fatal flaw in many plans.
In my experience in software architecture, drawing a diagram often saves you >60 minutes of discussion and potentially multiple meetings. This works even with a badly drawn but truthful one.
Use an Ai agent + Mermaid.js for a quick scribble if you are in a remote meeting. Use white boards or pen + paper in a local meeting.
Diagrams are so much clearer then words, especially if the concept or logic in question is not trivial.
Yes, it helps to keep the bigger picture (pun intended) in focus and something tangible to criticise. Same for design docs. Otherwise, the conversation‘s spotlight just keeps moving around and might even follow whatever thread one of the more prolific speakers just came up with, which carries the danger of derailing the whole thing and adjourning without a decision.
I have feedback in the past that people don't like diagrams upfront, because it presents a finished solution.
Spending time "on" communicating is not the same thing as communicating.
I think this is, more often, that we are spending too much time pretending to communicate. Far too often I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have a quorum, but people try to have the meeting anyway. Even more often than that, I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have the sufficient pre-requisites to be useful. It will just be some AI slop document dropped in front of folks, with little to no regard for coherent thought or responsibility. It's 30 minutes of gaslighting the readers, trying to make them feel stupid for "not getting it", followed by 10 minutes of "this meeting was a waste of time" course-correction (we read our docs in the beginning of meetings).
And the problem is that the communication (or alignment) is the thing that the meeting is supposed to be about, sharing well-considered thoughts and cohesive direction, soliciting meaningful feedback against clearly-articulated assertions. Instead, we're all-to-often addressing someone's attempt to turn their job into a group project, the stone soup of the modern business world. You can lay this bare by asking "what is the aim of this meeting?" early on, to level-set that the meeting owner isn't just setting up a study group.
Birds-eye-view-only managers only see work get done in meetings, so they assume that the meeting is where the work gets done. They don't understand all of the work that went into what came before the meeting to make it a successful one. If you rush the "communication" before you've found the clarity of thought, your meeting is just noise.
There's a simple but powerful response to this sort of persistent malaise, one that strikes fear in the hearts of the secretly inept: "I don't know, but let's figure it out right now."
When it's time to slow down and walk through the problem, I hold folks to an ordering of dependency: Why, What, How, Who, When... If you don't know all of the things before (e.g., Why, What, How - if you're trying to figure out Who), you cannot proceed. I don't care if you're an intern or a VP. No short-cuts to bullshit hand-wavy answers.
Decompose the problem, do the thinking, reason through it right there, and, if the team doesn't change its behavior, find another team. In the right environment, some folks are willing and able to step up to the plate and act like grown-ups working together to craft something better. Sadly, quite a few can't (or won't) answer the call to be responsible adults.
So they call another agenda-less meeting.