Charting the social order of meetings


Presented at The Gothenburg Meeting Science Symposium,

May 23-24, 2017, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden


Ib Ravn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Graduate School of Education

Aarhus University (Campus Copenhagen)
Denmark


Abstract

Meetings are occasions for the construction of social order between meeting participants. I Identify four pure types of meeting order or style that mix empirically: (1) the managerial style, which relies on the somewhat authoritarian management style of yesteryear, (2) the parliamentary style, with its cumbersome rules safeguarding formal-democratic decision-making, (3) the collective–egalitarian style of community-type meetings where anyone can speak anytime about anything, and (4) the facilitative style, in which a facilitator guides the meeting conversation with a firm hand such that all participants feel included and results are produced. The first three types are well-known and well-worn, while the fourth type, the facilitative style, holds promise for meetings of the future.

Meetings may be considered occasions for the construction of social order (Berger and Luckman, 1966). Over decades and centuries (cf. van Vree, 1999), business, political and other meetings have sedimented norms, roles and institutions that render them highly ordered and ritualized. Yet, despite being so ordered and regulated by agendas, speakers’ lists, conventional turn taking, etc., meetings continue to frustrate meeting participants and fascinate observers by their multiple, apparent dysfunctions (e.g., Kauffeld & Lehmann-Willenbrock, 2012; Rogelberg et al., 2014; Geimer et al., 2015).

Only recently has the study of meetings received sustained scholarly attention. After the pioneering work of Schwartzman (1986, 1989), a trickle of studies appeared during the next two decades (such as Bluedorn, Turban & Love, 1999; Romano & Nunamaker, 2001). In the past few years the pace has quickened with the publication of collected volumes, such as the special issue of Small Group Research (2012); the Cambridge Handbook on Meeting Science edited by Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock & Rogelberg (2015), and the meeting ethnographies edited by Sandler & Thedvall (2017).

In its relative obscurity, the field of meetings invites approaches in the classificatory manner of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. In this short paper, I shall focus on organizational meetings in Western cultures, typified by work meetings, but including meetings in voluntary associations and community settings. I observe the Wikipedia definition of a meeting (which I was pleased to volunteer seven years ago): “A meeting is a gathering of two or more people that has been convened for the purpose of achieving a common goal through verbal interaction, such as sharing information or reaching agreement.”

Empirical studies of meetings (Ravn, 2007; 2011) allow for the identification of three common types of meeting order or style, as well as a fourth, rarer and emerging type that may be contrasted with them. They may be called the managerial, parliamentary, collective-egalitarian and facilitative types, respectively. Needless to say, in empirical meetings these Weberian ideal types mix. They inform the practices of meeting participants and meeting moderators, in ways largely unbeknownst to them and, thus, often beyond the reach of interviewers. The meeting orders to be outlined may be useful in ascertaining the behavioral dynamics of meetings (suitable for scholarly purposes), as well as in determining how meeting behaviors may be challenged, refined or developed (suitable for activist purposes).

1. Managerial order

The managerial type of meeting order is well known from meetings in corporations and other hierarchically structured places of work. A typical meeting in a corporation is called by a line manager, who gathers his or her subordinates for orientation or discussion. Managers chair their meetings by speaking liberally themselves, calling upon particular meeting participants to speak (whether they have indicated or not), stopping them again and generally controlling and limiting the flow of conversation, finally drawing conclusions as he or she sees fit, before moving on to the next item.

Meetings not called by a line manager, which are also common in corporations, e.g., interdepartmental, project and team meetings, often proceed in the managerial style and are run by an appointed or tacitly agreed-upon moderator.

Managerial meetings have an authoritarian streak, not least because the manager’s authority to run the meeting in his or her desired manner is rarely questioned. Or, stated empirically, when we observe no objections to the manager conducting the meeting at his or her whim, we see a managerial meeting style in action. As such, this meeting order is rare, and we may need to go back fifty years or find a fairly paternalistic organization to see it—like a classical entrepreneur in a small or midsized company, or an early Henry Ford convening his senior managers—long before such issues as worker’s rights and the quality of employees’ work life demanded consideration.

One advantage of this meeting style is a certain efficiency; agenda items are typically processed and disposed of quickly. The arbiter of their satisfactory resolution is the manager, who only solicits the input from meeting participants that is likely to clarify his or her own thinking. The concomitant drawback of the managerial order is, of course, the disenchantment or alienation produced when meeting participants do not have a real say in the proceedings—and are, thus, less motivated to act on meeting decisions.

Few extant meetings conform to this pure type. The two next meeting orders both feature some of the inclusion and democracy absent from the managerial meeting, and they do so in different ways: formally and informally, respectively.

2. Parliamentary order

The formal democratic procedures of parliaments and other political assemblies are the origin of the parliamentary style of meeting. Robert’s Rules of Order exemplifies this meeting style, with its emphasis on speaking order, the rights of participants to be heard and formal turn taking regulated by a speakers’ list. The hallowed political rights of assembly and speech without censure are connoted by the parliamentary order. As work life in factories, corporations and government bureaucracies was humanized during the latter half of the 20th century, as exemplified by the writings of Peter Drucker, the norms and institutions of democratic assemblies percolated into meetings in the work place. Increasingly, managers would listen and delegate, and the workforce became better educated and expected to have their say. Meetings in democratic assemblies offered obvious templates to be adopted.

Many formal democratic procedures function as safeguards against abuse, especially when participants represent constituents whose concerns and grievances must be heard. The right to speak when you indicate or have waited your turn is one such rule that guarantees an oppressed minority a voice—yours—in parliament. However, when a project group has to make 20 decisions in the space of an hour, it may prove dysfunctional to insist on one’s right to speak. Meeting managers often find it difficult to resist such implicit calls for fairness in the allocation of speaking time—which largely accounts for the widespread inability of meetings to finish on time.

In like manner, moderators are often hard pressed to distinguish between meetings in which parliamentary principles are in order—such as an annual shareholders’ meeting, a general assembly in a trade union, a city council meeting, or a meeting in an association of NGO’s—and the frequent and smaller organizational meetings, where speed and efficiency are of the essence and where the fundamental human rights of any one person or group are unlikely to be quashed. A moderator infected by the formal-democratic virus sees three hands go up just before 5 PM and groans under his breath, “Oh, no, now I’ll be late for my train!”

The common assumption that a speaker, having acquired the right to speak, must not be cut short is a similar formal-democratic misconception. On one occasion, in the US General Assembly, all heads of state were allowed a 15-minute opening statement, but Colonel Gaddafi went on for 96 minutes, unchecked by whomever was asleep at the wheel (Leonard, 2009).

The obvious advantage of the parliamentary order is to introduce participants’ voice in the classical meeting. The right to be heard has been integrated into most business and organizational meetings, and many modern meetings mix the parliamentary and managerial meeting styles. However, the rigid format protecting speakers’ rights makes the style somewhat clumsy and inappropriate for often small, collegial and short meetings held in work organizations. Delegation and involvement can be effected in a more flexible and informal manner, as we shall see in the next two types of meeting order.

3. Collective-egalitarian order

The anti-establishment student protests and the counter-culture movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s introduced many alternative forms of social interaction (Roszak, 1973). In the words of one informant, deliberate and rule-bound meetings now became spontaneous gatherings where everyone sat in circles and the most charismatic speakers won the day, with no regard paid to formal positions of authority.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the relaxation of bourgeois norms implied by the youth movement slowly disseminated into the work organizations of Western societies, especially in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, where it aligned with longstanding social-democratic and egalitarian mores. In schools and universities, individual achievement was tempered by group work, collective efforts and interdisciplinary, project-based learning (de Graaf & Kolmos, 2007). This style of working proved to be well suited to modern, flexible, entrepreneurial-type private and public organizations, which embraced the expectations of new generations of “knowledge workers” to be heard and participate, at work and in meetings.

A delegating management style emerged, with low power distance and much involvement, especially in meetings, which came to seen as arenas for everyone to speak and contribute their experiences and ideas. The classical manager-as-authority receded into the background, especially in the public sector, and especially in educational institutions and human service organizations. These places of work, teeming with humanistic social reformers, saw the rise of a new form of management, “collective leadership”, as it was called, somewhat oxymoronically—before it was suppressed and supplanted by the regime of New Public Management in the 00’s.

Empirically, where meetings today are relaxed, verbose, low-structure, rich in off-topic tangents and weak in results, we may assume a considerable influence from the collective-egalitarian meeting tradition. Particularly in NGO’s, voluntary and civil-society organizations, associations and communities, conventional management is frowned upon as undemocratic, and meetings are often leaderless or led by someone uncomfortable with authority. The flow of conversation is supposed to be free, untrammeled both by the classical manager’s arbitrary exercise of authority and by the rigid procedures of parliamentary deliberation. In fact, of course, meeting discourse is often dominated by the extroverts in the room; those who speak easily, with nary a moment’s reflection before words gush out of their open mouths, whether they have anything of substance to contribute or not. The friendly (non-)moderator is powerless to prevent this, as democracy, delegation and empathy all conspire in his or her mind to let such speakers finish in their own sweet time.

The advantages of the collective-egalitarian meeting order is the open and easy-going style of management, which makes for meetings that are often friendly and good-spirited, hallmarks of neither the managerial nor the parliamentary meeting styles. A relaxed and mutually respectful atmosphere between managers and employees is obviously useful to organizational value creation, such conviviality being the culmination so far of a hundred-year long process of workplace humanization. This is hard to be unhappy about. On the other hand, value creation, that is, the efficient production of results, seems to have suffered. When contemporary meetings are long, diffuse, rambling and inefficacious, it is often due to the cultural influence of informal democracy. The boredom induced by a self-absorbed manager’s soliloquies or by the endless speaker’s list of the parliamentary meeting has given way to the dreariness of the collective-egalitarian meeting with its blabbermouths holding forth, unrestrained by the too-respectful moderator.

4. Facilitative order

A facilitative meeting order is neither common nor well-described in the literature on small and everyday organizational meetings (but see Doyle & Straus, 1976, Ch. 6; Ravn, 2014). Sometimes referred to as “group facilitation”, this approach to running a meeting is, of course, a well-known and frequently prescribed tool of process consultants (e.g., Schwarz, 2002), who use it for the rare and important meetings for which they are hired: large project kick-off meetings, team-building events, strategy workshops, employee innovation collaborations, etc.

Facilitation per se, of course, means “making easier” (lat. facio: do, make, plus the adjectival -ilis produces facilis, doable, easy to make). When applied to human and social activity, “[f]acilitation is about process—how you do something—rather than content—what you do” (Hunter et al., 1994, p. 19). Let us examine this and three other distinctions that define meeting facilitation:

a.  Content vs. process. In a meeting, the content is the agenda items, people’s knowledge and opinions, the statements made, and the decisions and understandings produced, while the process (or form or structure) is the manner in which this material is being processed. This distinction is rarely made in conventional, managerial considerations of meetings, but it allows the modern meeting facilitator to focus on the communicative processes that often lie at the core of meeting problems, such as the managerial prerogative to monopolize the conversation, the unbending parliamentary rules of order so ill-suited to supposedly agile modern meetings, and the lack of structure in collective-egalitarian meetings. While a meeting considered in its entirety has form in the sense that the agenda specifies a sequence for the items to be discussed, there is rarely any structure to the discussion of a single item. It is up to the facilitator to provide such structure and ensure progress in the meeting discourse, for example, by distinguishing between phases like (a) Hearing, when participants listen to each other without judging yet, (b) Constructing, when ideas are critiqued, sorted, synthesized and strengthened, and (c) Concluding, when the facilitator sums up and clarifies the decisions made (Ravn, 2011, pp. 64-67).

b.  Meaning and value. Organization theorists have long distinguished managers’ concern for production from their concern for people and argued that these concerns be synthesize. Drawing on the well-known work of Blake & Mouton (1962), elsewhere I have updated their two-by-two matrix of these apparent opposites so it applies to the intentions of the meeting facilitator (Ravn, 2007, 2011): A concern with producing results, or creating value, in the current jargon, for the meeting’s external stakeholders, must be combined with a concern for the participants’ desire to find meaning in meetings (an experience often sorely lacking). When a meeting facilitator is squarely focused on these twin objectives, she will find it easy to spot which is needed in a particular meeting. Meetings that seem efficient and produce decisions often suffer from deficits in employee engagement and co-ownership (the meaning dimension), and lax and friendly meetings that have room for every anecdote sometimes lead nowhere (the value dimension). The competent facilitator ensures that all meetings function in both dimensions.