find the meeting’s purpose by asking: what’s the downside of canceling it altogether?

Hey! Don’t plod through another standing meeting that feels blah and leaves you and your crew deflated.

Instead, try this:

• Ask yourself: if we didn't have this meeting, what are the downsides? This is a sneaky way to discover what the point of the meeting is in the first place. The downside is what you lose by not having the meeting.

  • If this is a standing meeting that occurs every x days or weeks, put a trigger in your calendar 5 or 10 days before the meeting. You are prompted with the specific question: what is the purpose of having this meeting five to ten days from now? 

• Write down the answer to the downside question. The downside of not having the meeting - this is the reason for having the meeting. It’s what the meeting is for.

  • If there is no answer, no downside, cancel the meeting. Save yourself and everyone else the time! People are usually quite grateful for this.

• Now, plan a meeting that explicitly and specifically delivers that thing. Trim time and agenda items that don’t directly achieve that purpose.

If the meeting you’re fixing is a standing meeting, give yourself permission to revisit and reshape it in each instance, for a while. What you need the time for week to week or month to month might vary. That’s ok. 

Keep doing this until a pattern starts to emerge in how you use the time, based on the downside analysis of not using it at all.

Two common results of the downside analysis

Social purpose

In hybrid and remote workplaces, one common downside folks identify is not having time together. Maybe the real purpose of this meeting then is team bonding. The goofy, distracting threads in the chat? Maybe that’s actually the point of the whole thing! If so, consider discarding boring “updates” and do something fun or personal like Zoom games or prompts for sharing personal stories.

Unclear purpose but people seem to like and get something out of it

You run the downside analysis and find yourself inclined to cancel all of these meetings. They feel kind of dumb to you. Yet, you know people on the team want them to happen.

With this info, the possible purpose for the meeting is people's disappointment in the meeting's cancellation will not occur if we have it. 

This is a signal that they're getting some value from the current thing that maybe you’re not tapping into enough. If this is so, consider identifying and optimizing that thing with more insight from your people. Use your five to ten day triggering routine as a prompt to ask your team. When the trigger comes, send out a super quick informal survey to people asking what they want out of the meeting. Then build the meeting to deliver that.

You're the one who is in charge of finding purpose for the meeting. So this is not a democratic process by which you just give everybody what they want, but it will inform what you decide is right for the team. 

-Ben