Comment by AdieuToLogic
15 hours ago
> 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".
Y'all are saying the same thing over and over with slightly different words proposing that the different way of saying it has a meaningful impact on the message. It doesn't.
>"too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction".
>it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication
^^ there's no meaningful distinction between those two, discussions that devolve into such things suck all potential value out of a thread.
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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.
That's certainly one way of looking at daily stand-up. The other way is that humans aren't perfectly spherical communicators so sometimes daily stand-up really does manage to bring up blockers for the manager to actually resolve.
Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message.
Step back and think if a dispute over the usage of the word is necessary or helpful in this context.
Amusingly this is where a lot of communication goes to die, loss of the big picture and discussion of how to use particular words.
Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insisting on using different language to express the same idea.
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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...