After 25 years of attending meetings within the technology space, myself and Matthew Steiner came up with this, which appears to accurately represent almost every meeting I ever attend. If you don’t go through these stages, you’re doing it wrong.
1 – Getting the conference tech working – Projector, audio, Webex, zoom – this can often take up 20-30 minutes. Some of these challenges are nearly as difficult as completing a challenge in Crystal Maze – yet you never get a crystal when successful 😦
2 – Discussion on how many collaboration tools we use and how we found out about the meeting. At this point we are probably still rounding up attendees. To get hold of Keith, we’ll try SMS, Slack, WhatsApp, Trello, email, phone, Zoom, SkyPe etc – which inevitably leads to this discussion. We will finally agree Skype is the worst and we all miss IRC (aka Slack)
3 – This leads to a discussion on how things were marvellous in the past. Then there will be a chat about old technologies – floppy disks, luggable ‘laptops’, my first mobile phone, DOS, and there will always be someone (me) who remembers punch cards. Usually you can start the meeting around this point…
4 – Once we get going, it is likely we will have to ‘Take things ‘offline’ or ‘Put in the Parking Lot’ – this is simply code for ‘this is boring me even if it’s important to you’
5 – Mid-meeting, some of the dial in technology will fail, leading to time filling by sharing interesting video’s we found on YouTube/Facebook/Twitter (usually cats, but sometimes videos or blogs about tech meetings)
6 – Finally we bring meeting to a close, discuss follow-up meeting location. This inevitably leads to discussion on how rubbish the expense/travel policy/system is in the respective companies we work for.
7 – Now that we have overrun, we next engage in a staring competition with the people outside the meeting room, wanting to come in. This turns into a giant game of chicken. Finally, turn off tech in room, and reset to stage 1 for next meeting