InformationWeek

The Secret CIO: The First Law Of Meetings

Long meetings may be a fact of life at large corporations. Now it can be revealed why they're often so unproductive.

By Herbert W. Lovelace
Issue column appeared: Nov. 4, 1996

I went to work Saturday while Cindy was out shopping. Or, to be more accurate, Cindy went shopping because I decided to go to work. I needed the time to go through my in-basket at the office since, once again, most of my week was spent in meetings.

My mind is rapidly turning to oatmeal because of the many long and unproductive meetings I have to attend. Not because meetings are held; I work in a large corporation and have learned to accept them. But I fume when I have to spend time doing stuff that piled up while I was bored silly in meetings.

This happens, even though as often as I can get away with it, I have become a no-show at convocations that I think will be useless. When I can't get out of attending, I do my best to leave as quickly as humanly possible.

I have even resorted to pulling my pager out of my pocket, frowning at it as if it has just signaled, and telling people that I will be back if I get this situation straightened out. Hey, it works for me.

Yesterday, I got a message that there were no pressing items to put on the agenda for our product-delivery task force, but the meeting would be held anyway to schedule the next three months' worth of meetings.

That message ranks right up there with my favorite: It was decided to eliminate the steering committee for a human resources project. Given that the venture was going OK and ther e was every reason to believe it would stay that way, this decision was a good one.

Unfortunately, the steering committee still gathers periodically to "ensure continuity" for a project for which they are no longer responsible.

My attitude may be colored by my own personality. I recognize that I have the habit of wanting to make decisions and move on; it must be my limited attention span. In any case, in order not to go totally crazy while having to endure all of these corporate conference-room experiences, I have formulated three Laws of Meetings. In this column I will share the first one with you. Your experiences may differ from mine, or to use one of the new buzzwords, these may "resonate" with you. Here goes:

The length of time of a meeting is directly proportional to the square of the number of attendees.

In other words, T=k *P squared, where T equals time, P equals the number of people in the meeting, and k is a constant that varies with the culture of the company. This First Law of Meetings is easy to use and is intuitive. But note the square factor. Since six squared is 36 and two squared is four, a meeting with six people in a room takes nine times as long as a meeting between two people. That is, a 10-minute conversation between two people takes 1-1/2 hours when there are six people in the meeting.

The implications of this seemingly innocuous law are staggering. It explains, for example, why today's federal government with 100 senators is far less able to govern effectively compared to the days when there were only 40 states and thus 80 senators. I expect further research will show this phenomena to be a crucial explanation of why small start-up companies can take leadership positions, seemingly out of nowhere, in markets being attacked simultaneously by mammoth corporations.

In my next column, I'll go over the Second Law of Meetings, which predicates how long it takes to reach a decision in a meeting.

In the meantime, check your watches and see if you can verify the accuracy of the first law.

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