Be More Effective – Attend More Meetings!
Peter de Jager is a provocative Speaker,
Writer and Consultant. His primary focus in on how we manage change,
technology and the future. In addition to speaking at conferences
worldwide, he's also written monthly columns for Municipal World and
Computing Canada. His goal is always to question what we
think is so, and in so doing perhaps open up new opportunities. If you'd like permission to reprint any
of Peter's articles, please contact him directly. You can contact him at Or sign the Guest
Book and he'll get back to you. 
pdejager@technobility.com
No. I’m not kidding. Nor has my cheese slipped off the cracker. I’m not necessarily suggesting we hold more meetings in our organization, but I am suggesting that meeting more often with our professional peers can result in a 100 fold payback on our investment in time.
One ancient example still motivates me in this area today. In the 1980s I was a member of ICE, the ‘Information Centre Exchange’, a relatively small association (300 members) of Information Centre Managers. At the time, IC managers were responsible for introducing Personal Computers into the corporate environment. We were at the bleeding edge of the PC revolution and every day we stumbled across challenging new problems.
Any one of these problems could easily consume anywhere from one to one hundred hours of frustrating time, energy and resources. We were all dealing with new technology, and we were all dealing with organizationally wide change management issues, as all our employee were being pushed to use the new tools.
What to do? One choice open to all of us was to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Tackling each problem, one at a time and eventually getting through the problem queues that were longer than we had hours in the month. To say that we had more work than we could handle was an understatement of the highest order.
Another choice was to carve out a day each month from our busy schedule and head to downtown Toronto and meet up with about 100-150 of the 300 ICE members. Taking time off to go to a meeting when we didn’t have enough time to do what was on our plate? What a radical concept.
The ICE meetings started in the morning, and for about an hour or so the agenda was typical association filler - they presented us with a variety of agenda items, from the usual association news, to presentations from both practitioners and vendors. … with no disrespect to the speakers (after all I am one)… Ho Hum.
What happened next was the reason for attending. Something called the ‘Round Table’.
Nothing fancy here. We went around the room and if you had a pressing problem, you described it to the group and connected with others who were dealing with the same issue, or even better, someone who had solved the problem currently draining your resources. This continued until everyone in the room had presented all the problems they’d arrived with.
I’m lazy. It’s my belief that re-inventing the wheel is a capital offence. It’s a waste of my employers time, and more importantly, my time, to try to solve something on my own, that someone else has already solved. I made a point of exploiting this willingness to share to the very limits of propriety. In my
defense? I supplied answers to problems presented to the group about 10 times more often than anyone else in the organization.
While ICE no longer exists, the need to collaborate with our peers hasn’t gone away. The old adage “Birds of a feather flock together” is as true today as it was when our associations were initiated. People associate with their peers to exchange information; to meet and talk with like minded people; to commiserate together; to “merely” socialize; to seek the recognition of their peers; to solve problems in common, etc.
Even with the internet none of this has changed. We’re social animals and will always flock together for the above reasons. Today, tomorrow or a thousand years from now, we will still associate with our peers.
It doesn’t matter what we do for a living, from being a hard core techie, to a middle manager in any organization, to being a politician at any level of government – this holds true. The problems we face are not unique to us. Our peers from coast to coast to coast have these problems in common – and trying to solve them all by our lonesome is an extremely inefficient approach.
Associations exist for every possible human endeavour. If you’ve got a job title, then chances are better than good that on Wednesday night somewhere, there are 30-60 of your peers in a room, feasting on something that tastes sort of like chicken, getting ready to share their experiences and in doing so, greatly decrease their workload.
Not all associations are as effective as they could be in sharing ideas and solutions, but that’s not an insurmountable problem. Associations become exactly what the members want them to become.
Of course today there are alternatives to actually meeting together (the chicken never was a draw), if you really can’t get to a meeting, Then get on a few (dozen?) online discussion groups, forums, listserves… and you’ll see a more up todate version of the ICE round table. Post a query to the online discussion group and receive answers from around the world. Even if your query results in no good solutions, at the very least you’ll receive new perspectives on the problem.
© 2010 Peter de Jager – Some truth in advertising here – as a speaker he relies on meetings for his living – that said? You don’t have to listen to him speak – you can just eat the thing that tastes like chicken. Contact him at
pdejager@technobility.com
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