Standing up: the secret to a good meeting?

You can't do this very long.
Photo credit: scratch.mit.edu

Derek Lowe's post yesterday about the tradition of useless dog-and-pony-show meetings drew a number of interesting comments. Apart from comments about the banning of Powerpoint (potentially contributed to by me) and the people who just don't go, there were a number of comments about removing the chairs, quoted below:

Anon: Perhaps if we removed the chairs from the room and turned off the Heat/AC it mights shorten the show.

Robert Bruce Thompson: Best way I know is to get rid of the conference room table and chairs.

And something slightly more meaty, from Fraxas:

Software development, as a discipline, has had the 'Agile' buzzword sweep through in an attempt to reduce (among other things) this kind of administrative overhead. Specifically, the idea of a *daily* in-team stand-up meeting where everyone says (1) what they're doing (2) what they're having problems with. Every team holds a stand-up, and every few days the leads of those teams hold their own metastandup. Slides and so on are not allowed; any sub-discussion that's not interesting to the whole team or that's taking more than 2-3 minutes is tabled for a different, one-off meeting.

I found this comment interesting, because it reminded me of a passage from "Moving Mountains", by Lt. Gen. "Gus" Pagonis, USA (Ret.); in this book, he describes the logistical thinking behind the 1991 Gulf War.* In his "Building Blocks of Leadership" chapter, Pagonis suggests exactly the same meeting that Fraxas describes. To summarze Pagonis's style, I've laid out his strategy below:

• It is held every morning
• Anyone (regardless of rank) is welcome to attend
• Used to reinforce "free-and-open exchange of information within the command"
• One representative of "each specialized function" (usually commanding officer) required
• Everyone is required to stand 
• Only Pagonis and his note-taker sit
• Starts precisely on time, ends no later than 30 minutes
• No agenda
• Originally for quick status reports and clarifying questions
• Depending on the week and the most relevant challenges, different groups' concerns would be dominant

Pagonis describes why the stand-up is effective:

Early on, I discovered that making people stand up keeps the ball moving at a quicker pace. People speak their piece and then quickly yield the floor to the next person. On the rare occasion that someone starts to get long winded or wax philosophic, an unmistakable kind of body language begins to sweep through the crowd. People shift from foot to foot, fidget, look at their watches -- and pretty quickly, the conversation comes back into focus. It's an interesting phenomenon. I can't recall the last time I had to crack the whip. The peer group has great power.

Communications flowed in every direction, including some unexpected ones... once it became apparent that certain people could always be found at the stand-up, other people began attending the meeting to catch up with those individuals.

I don't think Pagonis' stand-up model would be particularly effective in a long-term month-to-month progress report manner; also, I think this model wouldn't work well in an environment where medium to long-term research concerns were most important. However, for a small day-to-day research/production atmosphere, I suspect that the stand-up meeting would probably keep everyone well-informed.

*I told you I was going to buy it!