Useless Meetings and Metrics

Many of us would argue that organizations underperform if they don’t have effective meetings and metrics.

Effective doesn’t mean more. Effective means effective. There are forms of meetings and metrics that are not useful. Even though they might look good on paper, they don’t have the power to get us anywhere new. They maintain the status quo. They distract, derail, and divide us. They do not bring out the best in us — individually or collectively.

Meeting and metrics are ineffective when they are assumption-based. Assumptions are guesses, speculations, and opinions. Even when they come from people with the most experience, expertise, or power at the table, they are still assumptions and root causes of ineffectiveness in any domain. Hours of discussions, deliberations, and debates cannot make anything new happen if they are based on the trade and competition of assumptions.

The call for more meetings and metrics is a call for more status quo when any of these are based on assumptions rather than questions. It doesn’t matter how much lip service leaders give to change imperatives.

It also doesn’t matter how fashionable we make assumptions appear, referring to them as strategic, agile, powered by AI, or whatever the latest management fashion is.

Assumptions are not intrinsically bad. They become prime assets for effectiveness when we translate them into new, actionable questions.

It’s quite easy to make any meetings or metrics question-based. It doesn’t require advanced degrees or positional superiorities. It only requires naming our conscious and unconscious assumptions and turning them into questions. More questions will lead to better questions.

While assumptions limit us, questions expand us. Questions optimize communication, decisions, and keeping promises, commitments, and agreements. There are no intrinsic correlations between the quality of our questions and our expertise, experience, status, gender, or pay grade.

More questions lead to better — new and actionable — questions. New, actionable questions have the power to move us from uncertainties to new realities.

Uncertainties are ubiquitous. They are intrinsic to meetings, metrics, and leadership. They bring out our assumptions we can turn into questions.

If this sounds like being effective is easier than all the hype and drama would argue otherwise, that’s because it is. All meetings and metrics can be effective as long as they’re question-based.