A day filled with meetings can be exasperating, but is far from a day wasted.
There are those who think an hour spent in a meeting is an hour spent somehow not working, but for me this suggests a lack of intention to be productive in the first place. And we all think we know a good meeting when we’re in one: a chair whips through a realistic agenda in good time, participants engage in relevant issues based on prior research, and a set of accomplishable action points are allocated.
But. But.
Sometimes the most useful meetings happen accidentally, and most informally. They happen in the corridor in only 2 minutes, with better arranged prior engagements dragging each attendee off. They happen under the influence of laughter, they happen while drifting off from a dry PowerPoint, they happen from frustration and disagreement.
This is because the best practice of office work is so often about good and influential decision making.
It’s not about bricklaying, it’s about architecture.
It’s not about knuckling down to complete the 500th row of the spreadsheet, it’s about always keeping open the possibility of a better way, perhaps realised by row 180. When under the influence of laughter, or frustration, or a daydream, or when in the corridor forced to focus 2 minutes of opportunistic energy on a single goal, good decisions can be made and a better way can be found. Always.
This is the space in which lateral thinking occurs, so it is the space in which architecture emerges. Good design – and in this I include service design, strategic thinking and development methodologies – solves problems better than brute force every time. This is why small teams can achieve more, it’s why people love Apple, why insight trumps facts and why we shouldn’t fret over meetings, however well or badly arranged.
Meetings are work, and in them we can often find better answers than when alone.