Comment by mooreds
11 hours ago
Author here. I wrote about context being important for any advice you read years ago: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/01/13/context-is-kin... I could put such a disclaimer into any post I write, but I think that'd be a bit tedious.
I will say I've seen this work across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations (though, to be honest, I was embedded in a team as a contractor in that org).
I'm sure there are orgs where it doesn't work, which is why I said "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting".
I like your perspective--accountability is the basis; the meeting is one method, but I'm sure there are others. Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?
But you posted here under the overly broad headline (not "Meetings can be forcing functions", or "How to make meetings forcing functions") with its overly broad claims.
Also you asserted "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting" not "... can be a solution, under some conditions".
> I've seen this work across across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations*
and I've seen it fail across orgs as small as 15-person startups and as large as ~100k organizations; and sometimes work. How large was your sample size N?
> Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?
As I emphasized above, the mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" If there isn't any such person running/chairing the meeting/ or at absolute minimum reading its minutes, you just get a meaningless talking shop, which as other people here are saying is negatively productive and intensely annoys engineers, rightly so. a) A meeting is only as productive as the subset of people invited (or, equally, excluded). b) You can only enforce or appeal to as much accountability as the management chain intrinsically has (unless you or the senior mgmt or shareholders get them replaced, which is usually major power politics. As a consultant in particular, beware of fighting other people's battles, especially executives.).
(and to help answer the conundrum about who's actually incentivized to make a project succeed, I said you have to do some archaeology on what happened on their previous projects in that org (or previous orgs); the pathological case is if they failed repeatedly but kept getting rewarded, or developed an old-boy network around them.)
Sometimes, although not always, it might be (but certainly could never be) wise to hedge, maybe.
In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant.
We can be assured that assumption incorrect, in this case.
You don’t make a confident statement and then dismiss critique with “te-he, I could be wrong, Baka”.
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> In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant.
It's not cool to insult the readers' intelligence when someone makes a shaky overly broad claim. Better to retract or modify the claim. The headline "Meetings are forcing functions" is borderline clickbait. Most of us here have been in companies that meeting'd themselves to death, or at minimum, underachieved. And those companies had scheduled meetings too, so beware success bias and survivorship bias. My key positive message to OP is to emphasize cultural signs of accountability (or lack of), without which everything else (like standups and progress reports) is out the window. For example, how many of you have ever seen someone organizationally punished for accurately reporting status in a meeting?
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