InformationWeek

Secret CIO: No Decision Before Its Time

Resolving problems is only one purpose of meetings. Another, equally important, is establishing territory.

By Herbert W. Lovelace
Issue column appeared: Nov. 25, 1996

In my last column, I said that sitting in meetings made me realize that you can determine how long a meeting will last by counting the number of people in the meeting. In fact, there is a mathematical relationship: The duration of a meeting is directly proportional to the square of the number of attendees.

The formula is T=kP2 , where T equals t ime, P equals the number of people in the meeting, and k is a constant that depends on the culture of the company.

Using the First Law of Meetings, one finds that a meeting with six people in a room takes nine times as long as a meeting between two people. In other words, if two people will take 10 minutes to discuss a certain topic, six people will take 1-1/2 hours.

While the First Law of Meetings seems to hold, it really hasn't explained to me all of the dynamics I see in meetings. So, to do something while I waste my life away in meetings, I've gone further.

My big breakthrough came when I was invited to a gathering where Sid Gornish, our CFO, and Stephanie Stone, our VP of Human Resources, met with their assembled underlings to do battle over payroll feeds to our company's general ledger system. The issue had something to do with who was responsible for putting in the right department codes; for once, IS was a bystander, willing and able to help the victor.

Stephanie and Sid are both fearsome characters, easy to anger and slow to forgive. They have, however, worked together closely in the past and obviously do not wish to do irreparable harm to each other. Hence, their approach was one of much turf protection, but a minimum of snarling. Both wanted to get their own way, but did not wish to be overly abrupt or dogmatic, a stance that created much out-of-character behavior for both of them.

As I watched them parry, with appropriate comments offered up by their minions, the Second Law of Meetings became clear: All important decision-making occurs no later than two-thirds into the meeting. The formula is D 2/3T , where D is the decision point and T is the length of the meeting.

It comes as no surprise, and is probably intuitively obvious, that normally the first third of a meeting is reserved for posturing and establishing the premise that each participant fully supports the position of his or her boss.

Lower-level attendees strive desperately to show how smart they are, while the older, more senior, participants use the time to gauge the lay of the land. I think future research in this area will show that no one hears anything that is uttered in the first third of a meeting, because each person is deciding what to say and figuring out what it is the boss really wants to hear. In other words, nothing of any real substance takes place.

What does seem significant is that the final third of the meeting is always anticlimactic. Regardless of the hour, and regardless of the time that the meeting has taken up to that point, it will go on for at least an additional 50% of the time already expended.

So while it was somewhat amusing to watch Sid and Stephanie make nice to each other in the name of political harmony, scientific principle dictates that having formulated this law, I try to verify it. It seems to work. Let me know how closely your company fits the mold.

In my next InformationWeek column I'll go over the Final Law of Meetings, which c overs the relationship of the length of a meeting to the importance of the subject being discussed.

Herbert W. Lovelace is CIO at a multibillion-dollar international company. He can be contacted by E-mail at secret@cmp.com. He'll provide real answers (with whimsical comments) to your questions on his Web page

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