In the last 36 hours I have been to 5 hours worth of meetings. That is a much higher than average amount of meetings for me. And you want to know the thing that I have learned from all of these meetings?
Nothing.
That’s right. None of the issues that I went into the meetings hoping to get solved, did get solved. The first meeting was about this woman at work who completely lied about me. So the meeting was about how to make her happy with the software that I’m writing for her. We brought in some experts to look at what I had done. And you know what? They said that my software looked amazing. Just like the liar-woman had said herself a few months ago. But then, right after the meeting, we tried to get a hold of her. No luck. Not responding. What a shock. At least I think my boss now understands that I have been telling the truth about her and the situation.
Meeting the 2nd was at Dad’s work, to figure out an issue for how they do inspections and how we are tracking them in a piece of software I am writing for them. And you know what? After three hours, nothing was solved. If anything, we were further away from the solution than we were when we went in.
The third meeting was today. A planned follow up meeting about the liar woman. But she still hasn’t responded, so the meeting was basically pointless, and just ended up being over an hour of my boss talking about other things. It wasn’t bad, because I like my boss, but it didn’t solve the issue at hand. We actually even discussed stuff from the meeting I had at Dad’s, but we weren’t able to come up with any other solutions.
So I guess I’m just wondering, what is the point of having meetings? Do they accomplish anything? I’m not sure that I’ve ever really been in a meeting that has accomplished anything. In fact it seems like most things get accomplished when someone just goes and does something, and then faces the consequences later.
Which brings me to the point that I’m trying to make. I think that China has a very good possibility of bypassing the US in a lot of ways, such as technology, because at the end of the day the government can just say “Go do this. Build elevated trains in that city.” Here we have meetings and decide that we’ll put off things until the next meeting. Democracy.
Democracy has failed.
One Comment
The meeting at work was part of the process of bringing a large group of people along a common path. We’re trying to get folks who are resistant to change to do something in a very different but standard way. We need to understand their concerns, some legit – some not, but all real and then push them to a reasonable solution. You didn’t fully understand the problem, nor did I, but we figured out how to finish this up last night and now we’ll push forward. I think that the 3 hours were very valuable.
I could have required that they do it my way in the very beginning (act like a dictator) but I don’t believe I would have the buy-in that I expect to get. There is some amount of time that is too much but 3 hours was a small investment to achieve success.
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Nathan Reply:
August 30th, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Oh, I agree. I was clearly exaggerating.
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