We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. That's especially true for things with large "multipliers". An unscripted meeting might take one hour for the person calling it, but eat 10 hours of other people's time (plus interrupt them). Adding an hour of prep and summary for the caller lowers that ratio a bit so everyone has a more similar view of the meeting.
That's rarely grounds to make things harder with no benefit, but meeting prep has very solid benefits. Even in terms of time wasted, a clear agenda keeps meetings from dragging on, and routing minutes/summary after the fact avoids repeating discussions or inviting people who only need to listen.
Sometimes friction creates abrasion and waste. Sometimes it creates the traction necessary to actually move forward without sliding all over the place like a hot mess.
I'm working on some of our internal screens at work and part of this is me really trying to get things right and easy for everyone. However, yeah, there _are_ things that should be hard to impossible to do because they shouldn't be doing them and we've entered the realm of needing to coordinate with people and raise flags that something errored along the way.
At first people thought of it in terms of the needless waist friction that had become so prevelant, but soon came to realize that it was a good friction telling them they were off the beaten path, allowing them to hand stuff over to their managers and get problems taken care of before causing problems for customers, wasting customer services time as well as causing us to expend more resources to correct the mistake.
Like you said, friction in just the right places allows good things to happen.
Callers tend to have higher salary, but usually way less than the people count multiplier.
(There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.)
Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing.
So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.
A lot of people do. They just don’t reach you (vs internet distribution).
As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that.
Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.
For actually tracking Meeting Points, one option might be to make them a project metric? As in: "We predict our project will consume 21 Meeting Points, if we go over 25 that's a failure to be analyzed afterwards like overruning schedule or budget, if we're under 15 we're probably budgeting wrong".
I'm not saying the market/cost approach is necessarily the best or appropriate. But it's an interesting thought experiment to work through it.
Sometimes imposing arbitrary requirements (e.g., "have an agenda") is a cheaper way of effecting the same ends. Though Goodhart's Law is another pitfall.
NB: "vipers"?
Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.
"No agenda, no attend-ah."
We groaned every time we used it. I've used it ever since.
The one I heard was "If we don't know what the meeting is for, how will we know what we're getting out of it if we attend?"
They did a company wide training on effective meetings.
Set agendas, notes, and etc were all part of their training. It was great.
I never saw a single person do those things... not the VPs, not the CEO, nobody. I did it for my meetings as a sort of invisible act of defiance, but nobody ever read them before the meeting and most didn't know meeting invites came with anything other than the time, date, location info :(
I (dev) and my team certainly do.
To that end, I've started putting a standard caveat at the end of all my team meeting reminders on chat: Everyone is optional, but everyone who goes must have read the agenda and linked pre-reading.
First couple of times I did that, some people self-called-out as not having read the notes (after asking questions specifically addressed in the notes). After that it's been mostly good. People have thanked me for my efficient meetings, but all I did was to make people read the agenda :)
"Therapy" meetings certainly have their place, and I've personally grown a lot as a person in those. We have one (retro) every two weeks. But if most meetings in your organization are better thought of as therapy meetings... well, it's no surprise people don't do concrete things any more.
This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is having too many pointless meetings, they need to be effective, short and have agendas... and usually you can count in hours the time before the one of the exact same senior managers has sent a 2 hour, 20-person invite titled "project catch up" with a blank body.
(You can probably generalise this to many company initiatives, not just the ones about meeting habits.)
It mostly doesn't work.
Three places I worked had tidy kitchens. None of them had these labels, but more importantly: in all three of them management would fix it if others didn't. I guess most people only see their bosses boss tidy up a couple of times before they realize everyone is supposed to do that.
People seem really busy and tell me they are too busy to plan their meeting or prepare for mine. It’s a viscous cycle.
As soon as there's more than one point on te agenda, the meeting is going to be a drag for half the participants.
(Of course that single purpose often still requires prep from the organiser and/or other participants.)
You can tell a lot about a person's professionalism by looking at their meeting invites.
I avtively refuse meetings without an agenda and a why this meeting is important. And I put a Joy in applying this on a management level too.
Don't fuck with people's time, it's the only thing we can't get back.
My agendas look like this:
(1) Two word emotional check in [Lead:Jd][budget: 5 minutes, actual: ]
(2) How did sprint one go? [Lead:Mark][budget: 7 minutes, actual: ]
(3) Should we have pizza or chinese food for lunch? [Lead:Francis][budget: 3 minutes, actual: ]
I send out the agendas in advance for anyone to PM me to add something.
Then I use a stop timer to track how many minutes were used per agenda and send it along with the minute meetings and action items post-meetings. Action items are almost always tracked some sort of issue tracker but I use different ones for different projects.
More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.
Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes:
> The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity
https://www.scrumguides.org/docs/scrumguide/v2017/2017-Scrum...
The meeting chair (senior engineer) goes around the room and we all have the same list of items to report on each day. It helps avoid duplication of effort and also increases coordination in pursuit of objectives.
* "Effective Meeting Skills" by Marion Haynes is a short workbook from 1988. It looks dated, but the material is still relevant and a quick read. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0931961335/
* "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" by Steven Rogelberg. This 2019 book is great and includes useful findings from real studies of meetings. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218/
This podcast interview with the author is a good introduction: https://www.gayleallen.net/cm-127-steven-rogelberg-on-making...