Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
Was at a planning workshop recently. The official event ended but the unofficial continued on well into the evening.
Before imagination runs wild.....the unofficial event involved a couple of us huddle around a table al fresco, conversation going and ideas thrown left, right and centre.
I found that for a great many instances, the "real" conversations outside of a formal meeting seem to be:
- more candid,
- laser focused on what appears to be root causes of issues and/or
- offer up solutions that would work but may be considered wee too oddball.
This really shouldn't be the case, though. It seems like some meetings skirt around the issue needed to be discussed and people still choose to resolve problems "offline" in an informal setting?
Looks like we are all attending to a fair number of useless, no-value-add formal meetings then.
Cos we end up sorting things outside of those meetings anyway. I.e. getting real work done. This might also explain why for some of us, our schedules are choked full of meetings.
Time to either remove those useless formal meetings or infuse what was done in informal discussions into the formal meeting.