Cultural issues in meeting preparation

A story is told of the middle ages, when people were allowed to graze animals on common land. One piece of common land could support two animals per householder without risk of overgrazing.

However, a few of the surrounding householders realised that they could easily put a third animal onto the common and increase their income. When others observed that people were doing this without sanction, they too chose to introduce further animals.

Sadly, this meant that some of the existing animals were not getting the same amount of grazing as before. And so some of those who had previously adhered to the ‘two animal policy’ introduced third and fourth animals to adjust for the loss of fattening in the first two.

Eventually the common became drastically overgrazed, and most of the animals died.

The story, known as ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, is based on an essay written by Garrett Hardin to illustrate human behaviour around unregulated situations where individual gain may be at the cost of common good. It is a story which neatly highlights global issues around shared resources like fish stocks, pollution, etc.

It also illustrates management behaviour around meetings in most organisations. In the management situation, the limited resource is ‘time’ rather than ‘grazing’. And the ‘animals’ we place on this resource are events and activities which consume the time to deliver us outcomes (progress against our objectives).

The ‘tragedy’ begins when we make choices which increase the efficiency of our use of time to the cost of the efficiency of others’ use of time.

How do we do this in meetings? In practice there are a number of ways that this happens, and different organisations may have each to differing degrees:

• When people are late for the start of a meeting because something else is overrunning, do they: a. Reschedule what is overrunning and take the inefficiency hit on their own agenda; or b. Turn up late to the start of the meeting and pass the inefficiency hit on to others?
• When there is pre-reading to be done for a meeting, do people: a. Adjust their own schedules to make sure the pre-reading gets done; or b. Expect the meeting to fill in the gaps in the pre-reading even though it would repeat things for others who had been more diligent?
• When there is some one-on-one agreement to be reached in order to complete an action for the meeting, do people: a. Schedule time with the other person to finish things off so that the conclusion can be reported succinctly to the meeting; or b. Take up everybody else’s time in the meeting as bystanders to the final agreement?
• When spending two hours thinking about the design of a meeting could either make a two hour meeting of ten people either 10 per cent shorter, 10 per cent more effective, or both, do people: a. Find the time to invest in the design of the meeting; or b. Save the time in their own diaries and accept that the meeting may not be as efficient or effective as it could be?

The problem of the tragedy of the commons is that it is insidious. It begins with one or two people who gain personal efficiency from the (b)-behaviours listed above, and thereby deliver additional time pressures to everybody else.

But then, if the behaviour of one or two individuals is not addressed, those time pressures cascade onto others. And they adopt the (b)-behaviours as a survival mechanism. Thus, before long (b)-behaviours are the culture of the organisation.

Time becomes ‘overgrazed’ and everybody is overworked and stressed by the inefficiencies that result. The same behaviour is often evident in the forwarding of emails.