You Have to Start Meeting Like This!

Michael Begeman is a leading authority on one of the business world's most universal rituals: the meeting. An anthropologist and computer scientist by training, he serves as manager of the 3M Meeting Network, a loose-knit collection of meeting experts that's been assembled by 3M, the innovation-obsessed manufacturing giant headquartered in Minneapolis.

But Begeman, 41, is much more than a meeting planner and facilitator. He spent four years as a member of the technical staff at Intel. He spent six years as a research manager at MCC, a high-tech research consortium based in Austin, Texas. He has run his own consulting firm. In short, he knows as much about how business works as he does about how meetings work.

So what's the most effective meeting that Begeman has seen lately? He says that it didn't take place in a high-rise office building or at a cutting-edge chip factory. In fact, it took place in a tepee -- in a scene from Dances with Wolves (1990), the Oscar-winning film featuring Kevin Costner. The scene takes place after a group of Native Americans discover Costner not far from their camp. Between 20 and 30 members of the tribe gather around for a meeting. There's one big question on their agenda: What should they do with this mysterious white man -- kill him to send a message to others who might follow, or leave him alone to signal their willingness to reason with such newcomers?

What follows, claims Begeman, is a clinic in good meeting behavior. "People actually listen to one another," he marvels. "There are some genuine disagreements, but everyone recognizes merit in everyone else's position and tries to incorporate it into his thinking. The chief spends most of his time listening. When the time comes to make a decision, he says something like 'It's hard to know what to do. We should talk about this some more. That's all I have to say.' And the meeting ends! He is honest enough to admit that he's not ready to make a decision."

How does Begeman compare that powwow with what takes place inside most conference rooms today? "Do you want to know the truth?" he asks. "Here's my mental image of what happens at most business meetings: You could take the people out and replace them with radios blaring at each other, and you would not have changed very much. That's what most meetings are like. People wait for the person who's speaking to take a breath, so they can jump into the empty space and talk. The quality of communication in most meetings is roughly comparable to the quality of the arguments that you used to have with your 10-year-old brother."

Begeman's mission is to change all that. The monthly email newsletter published by the 3M Meeting Network goes out to thousands of subscribers. The group's Web site offers a collection of useful tools and techniques, of valuable hardware and software. "There is a 'science' of meetings that's available to people now," he says. "We have the knowledge we need to make meetings better. But most people haven't learned it or don't bother to use it. And then they wonder why their meetings just stumble along."

In an interview with Fast Company, Begeman offers a short course on how to make your meetings work.

Meetings Are Work -- And Great Meetings Take Lots of Work

Great meetings don't just happen -- they're designed. Producing a great meeting is a lot like producing a great product. You don't just build it. You think about it, plan it, and design it: What people and processes do you need to make it successful? But first you have to create agreement among people that meetings are work -- they are not an empty ritual to be suffered through before getting "back to the office." Meetings are events in which real work takes place.

That's a big mind flip. All primates -- monkeys, apes, humans -- are social creatures. When you're out in the wild, studying nonhuman primates, one of the things you appreciate is just how social they are. They hang out together, they play together, they groom each other. You very rarely see solitary behavior. But if you walk into a typical company, what you see are rows and rows of cubicles. We've taken these wonderfully social creatures -- human primates -- and we've isolated them. And then we've asked them to be productive in that environment.

Now, as more and more of what people do takes place in teams, meetings become the setting in which most of the really important work gets done. I see this everyday in my own work and life. I do almost all of my work with a team of people -- some from inside 3M, some from outside the company. If I spend most of the day sitting in my office, instead of interacting with people, a warning bell goes off in my head: I'm not getting my job done.

So many people complain to me, "I wish I didn't spend so much time in meetings." To which I say, "Resistance is futile!" The simple fact is, some of our peak experiences as people take place in work groups. Most people have attended at least a few meetings in which there's been a real breakthrough: People are facing a problem, banging heads, not making very much headway -- and then a kind of magic overtakes them. A wind comes along, it blows away the clouds, and you can just feel the energy in the room. It's possible to have more experiences like that -- if you design your meetings with the same care that you use to design your products.