Conversation
John Schrag
jvschrag@hachyderm.io
An underrated public speaking skill is the ability to stop talking.
I'm in a meeting right now where several speakers in a row have made excellent points in the first 40 seconds, and then just kept talking, repeating the same information over and over in different words, adding nothing, for several more minutes. It's like watching a student pilot too terrified to land the plane. Just stop talking, it's okay.
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Josh Triplett
josh@joshtriplett.org
I have encountered such people, and I've been such a person. That particular practice can sometimes come from many years of trying to fix or head off misunderstandings, in conversations either with people who don't feel confident asking questions when they don't understand something, or people who feel *too* confident and charge forward without understanding. There's also substantial didactic value in explaining something in different ways.
Given a *very small* audience, it's *sometimes* possible to counter that by knowing your audience well enough or by strongly encouraging questions. Sometimes. But given a larger audience or one that you don't know as well, it may not be possible to ensure that everyone understands without at least a subset of the audience feeling like they got it the first time.
Given a *very small* audience, it's *sometimes* possible to counter that by knowing your audience well enough or by strongly encouraging questions. Sometimes. But given a larger audience or one that you don't know as well, it may not be possible to ensure that everyone understands without at least a subset of the audience feeling like they got it the first time.
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@jvschrag and this is why you need someone in charge of the conversation, without an MC a LOT of people tend to loop and spiral
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@josh @jvschrag meetings should have a QA process :-) it is the only asset in corps that is not too eagerly measured.
I.e. instead of arguing how meetings should or should not be there should be some way to measure their quality and continuously improve them like any other asset. I'd guess what works is something that has a time parameter and depends on company's overall state etc.
i think this is also major glitch of existing agile processes (scrum, kanban etc.). they are in the end of the day static and unrobust.
I.e. instead of arguing how meetings should or should not be there should be some way to measure their quality and continuously improve them like any other asset. I'd guess what works is something that has a time parameter and depends on company's overall state etc.
i think this is also major glitch of existing agile processes (scrum, kanban etc.). they are in the end of the day static and unrobust.
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@jarkko @josh @jvschrag I agree about meetings, but also agile is a scam, scrum is scam^2. Well meaning but scams nonetheless, imo.
Anyway, I think you can measure the value of a meeting in a very utilitarian way - take people's pay/hr (with appropriate multipliers for company costs), aggregate it, sum it to length of meeting, also calculate the revenue generated by employee/hr, add that to the cost and ask 'was this meeting worth that?'
One common failing you see in meetings is that it can be super beneficial for manager X who now doesn't have to chat individually to A, B, C etc. but while X and A speak {B,C...} are literally wasting their time, and so on.
This is a sort of laziness/costly efficiency from the point of view of a manager, whereas those meetings would do better as one-on-ones with a brief summary (via email ideally) describing what's going on.
There's a sort of intrinsic assumption that by just listening in others gain value, but this is simply inapplicable in the typical JIRA ticket assigned top down thing you get in modern software development.
Typically your manager tells you what to do, and you do it. I think many of the methodologies assume things are collaborative and grass roots controlled in a way that they simply are not (usually) in practice.
The most useful meetings are targeted and designed to give value to everybody present + respect their time.
However I think the clash between reality and corporate politics means that rationally assessing the value of meetings is something that just wont happen.
Anyway, I think you can measure the value of a meeting in a very utilitarian way - take people's pay/hr (with appropriate multipliers for company costs), aggregate it, sum it to length of meeting, also calculate the revenue generated by employee/hr, add that to the cost and ask 'was this meeting worth that?'
One common failing you see in meetings is that it can be super beneficial for manager X who now doesn't have to chat individually to A, B, C etc. but while X and A speak {B,C...} are literally wasting their time, and so on.
This is a sort of laziness/costly efficiency from the point of view of a manager, whereas those meetings would do better as one-on-ones with a brief summary (via email ideally) describing what's going on.
There's a sort of intrinsic assumption that by just listening in others gain value, but this is simply inapplicable in the typical JIRA ticket assigned top down thing you get in modern software development.
Typically your manager tells you what to do, and you do it. I think many of the methodologies assume things are collaborative and grass roots controlled in a way that they simply are not (usually) in practice.
The most useful meetings are targeted and designed to give value to everybody present + respect their time.
However I think the clash between reality and corporate politics means that rationally assessing the value of meetings is something that just wont happen.
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@ljs @josh @jvschrag Yeah, usually a great meetings is kind of "accomplish a mission" with those people who matter for accomplishing that goal. Then usually people say what they need to say because the whole thing is somewhat goal oriented. Does not need that much preparing. Can be compared to something like going to a bank to negotiate mortgage loan or similar scenario :-)
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