There are two rules for an engaged meeting:

1. How well you plan, the meeting will always go wrong,
2. If the meeting does not go wrong, you had a sub-optimal meeting.

 

When I started working as an office clerk some 12 years ago nobody had told me these rules. Being at the bottom of the hierarchy I just went to the meetings that were assigned to me. And I sat there, kind of listening.

 

Strategies to stay awake

The meetings just after lunch were especially difficult. With my digestive system draining all the blood from my brains and my eyelids becoming heavy, I was asking myself what strategies others had to not fall asleep. Mine was imagining the strategies of others.

 

That was pretty easy for the president of the meeting: keep talking. And for the note-taker: keep writing. But for the others it was less obvious. It could be just anything. Commonplace things were reading through papers, doodling and asking irrelevant questions. But could your really fill a meeting of 2 hours with this?

 

One of my colleagues fell asleep every single weekly staff meeting (I envied that guy for being so bold). But he was already a senior guy close to his retirement, so I guess the manager was unable to do something about it. The more ambitious junior colleagues were noting everything that was being said. And I was daydreaming about saving the world, becoming a famous actor and getting all the beautiful girls.

 

The value of meetings where the unexpected enters

The interesting thing is that nothing really ever went wrong during those meetings. On the other side, nothing really went right either. They were hopeless and boring rituals. And they were all treated dead seriously as if the fate of the earth depended on their outcome. If only the fate of the earth could have depended on them…

 

So when I started facilitating meetings, I developed the 2 rules of an engaged meeting.

 

So plan well but don’t expect the meeting to go according to plan because engaged people want to influence the agenda of the meeting. If they feel the meeting is important to them, they will be vocal instead of daydreaming, doodling, sleeping, etc… The unexpected will enter the meeting. And it automatically means that if the meeting went according to plan, people were not engaged. Hence rule 2.

And if it scares you to engage people because of meetings going wrong, ask an expert. Harnessing the unexpected is not always easy but absolutely doable and so much more worthwhile.