Silent Meeting - Session 2 - Problems with Meetings
All information presented below is not original content, this is a summary of the content that was presented by David Gasca in Medium blog entry The Silent Meeting Manifesto v1 :
“Silent Meetings” are meetings where most of the time is spent thinking and discussing the topics at hand David Gasca
Problems with meetings today
- No agenda
- No shared reading material for the whole group
- Unequal time-sharing
- Bad presentations — too slow, too fast, and meandering
- Most meeting attendees don’t comment
- Reading is faster than listening
- Favors native speakers
- Bad for remote attendees
- Rambling questions
- Comments from the meeting often get lost and aren’t captured in any doc
Silent meetings fix all of these issues
- Prepare an agenda and choose a Facilitator
- Create a “Table Read”
- Read and comment in the Table Read
- Facilitator helps synthesize comments and leads discussion
A meeting with these four components constitutes a Silent Meeting
Silent meetings don’t solve
- Do you even need this meeting?
- Do you need all these people?
- Is there a clear decision making process?