Designing better meetings

Making the most of the science and innovation of meetings

I’ve long been interested in how meetings are organised. Here I share

i) a very short formula for better meetings and

ii) a longer piece surveying what’s known about meeting design and how to do them better.

I continue to be surprised how few institutions - whether in academia, government or politics - have engaged with either the science or the options. But there are options they could easily adopt that many would greatly appreciate.

i) BSTC: A SIMPLE FORMULA FOR BETTER MEETINGS

To kick off here is a very simple formula for meetings which ensures that everyone is fully present, and that the meeting makes full use of their intelligence

· BRING Everyone who attends should bring something to the meeting – preparing information, ideas, options, proposals. The host of the meeting in particular should communicate in advance a clear account of what the meeting is for.

· SHARE The meeting should start by sharing these either verbally, briefings or through a written chat function (some can be shared in advance,)

· TALK The key issues should then be discussed – this is the core of the meeting, and can use some of methods described in the longer piece (allocating roles, multimedia, countering hierarchy…).

· COMMIT Everyone should then take away a task from the meeting that they commit to doing, and the last few minutes should capture all of these, which then become one of the inputs if there is a subsequent meeting.

Anyone who has nothing to share, and is not likely to make a commitment, should probably not be at the meeting. Good preparation should mean that the time is kept to the minimum necessary (and few meetings should be more than 55 minutes long and many can be much shorter). A rough formula is: 15 (share), 30 (talk), 10 (commit), leaving 5 minutes free.

ii) A LONGER OVERVIEW OF THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF BETTER MEETINGS

Many of us spend much of our time in meetings. They are the everyday expression of collective intelligence — bringing groups together to think. But often they feel like a waste of time, and fail to make the most of the knowledge and experience of the people present. Oddly, the vast majority of meetings in business, academia, and politics ignore almost everything that is known about what makes meetings work.

Strangely the world has few if any serious centres that study the science of meetings and how they could be made better. There are plenty of options and fashions — but not much evidence on what works. This has become even more apparent during a year of endless Zoom and Team calls that has generated a vast treasure trove of new data on meetings — but without institutions in place to make the most of it.

Here I look at what is known, and how that knowledge can be used. I explain why meetings haven’t disappeared, despite an explosion of technologies that might have rendered them redundant. And I suggest how meetings might be organized to make the most of the collective intelligence in the room and beyond. Specifically I suggest that anyone responsible for meetings should at least consider:

-being clear on purposes (which can range from sharing information to creativity and decision-making);

-using an explicit division of labour (including not just facilitation but also a range of other potential roles);

-care on meeting maths (the ratios of time, complexity, numbers, shared background);

-reining in the extroverts and the most powerful;

-using multiple media to make themost of different cognitive styles;

-orchestrating explicit argument (and avoiding the temptations of easy consensus); and finally,

-avoidance (cancelling meetings unless they’re really needed)

The Problem with Meetings

The formats used for meetings are old. Most organizations still depend on the board or committee, usually made up of between five and twenty people, for the most crucial decisions. This remains the supreme decision-making body in organizations as varied as Ford and the Politburo, Greenpeace and Google (with twelve sometimes treated as the ideal number). At the level of the nation, we still depend on parliaments and assemblies, usually made up of a few hundred individuals, which meet in formats often little changed over centuries. For more everyday matters, there are committees, teams, or workplace meetings. For the world’s major religions, there are the often-rigid formats of service, prayer, and song. And for the worlds of knowledge and ideas, there are conferences and seminars, with anything from a few dozen to a few thousand participants — again, formats similar to their equivalents a century or more ago.

We depend greatly on these old forms of face-to-face deliberation, and the advance of technologies for communication across space and time has done little to displace them.

But our very dependence fuels frustration. The typical meeting barely attempts to make the most of the knowledge and experience in the room. The loudest or most powerful speak the most, drowning out the weak or shy, and much that should be said isn’t.

Many have tried to develop more open, lively alternatives. There are boardrooms like the one at Procter and Gamble that is surrounded by screens, and where the entire global leadership team meets weekly (physically and virtually) to review data on sales, margins, or customer preferences. There are cabinet rooms like the one used by the Estonian government, with screens instead of paper. Some companies have gone to extremes to minimize the curse of meetings. Yahoo! sets ten or fifteen minutes as the default for meetings. Others hold meetings standing up. To counter the torrents of useless talk, some cultivate silence. Amazon requires six-page memos to be prepared before any meeting and then read in silence by each person for thirty minutes before a discussion. It also has the (rather good) KPI for board members of how many actionable ideas they’ve come up with.

Some conferences have experimented with giving participants buttons that they can press when they want the speaker to stop — a wonderfully empowering idea, but sadly far from widespread.

Another cluster of innovations has tried to reduce the need for people to congregate together physically. Telepresence meetings and Google Hangouts, online jams involving thousands, smaller webinars, and meeting tools like Slack allow teams to meet and work online.[i]

Yet another set of innovations turn meetings inside out, making the formal parts of meetings more like the informal conversations on the sidelines that are frequently so much more enjoyable and memorable. This was the prompt for “open space” methods several decades ago as well as unconferences, World Cafés, Flipped Learning Conferences, Holocracy, and other tools for democratizing larger gatherings, all designed to overturn the stiff formality of the traditional meeting so that anyone can propose topics for discussion and participants can choose what conversations to take part in. Some echo the unstructured worship and creative use of silence pioneered by the Quakers four centuries ago.

Such tools can be a refreshing alternative to the stultified, overprogrammed conference formats of keynotes and panels. But they can also be frustratingly vague, making the whole less than the sum of the parts; they can be hard work to organize, too, and aren’t well suited to sustained problem solving. An odd feature of these innovations is that they tend to crystallize quickly into a formula — and don’t then evolve in response to experience. They also worsen some of the tendencies of bad meetings, such as dominance by extroverts.

Hybrids seem to work better, like the meetings held by the Dutch social care organization Buurtzorg that combine a flat structure with fairly strict rules to ensure that decisions are taken. To adopt the ideas of culture theory, the best meeting models combine elements of hierarchy, egalitarianism, and individualism; the ones that are either too purely hierarchical or too purely egalitarian (like open space) work less well.[ii]

Why So Many Meetings?

The British Civil Service was not keen on meetings, and until recent decades many of its office buildings had no meeting rooms. It preferred minuted reports — sent from desk to desk. By contrast, a recent study found that on average, 15 percent of an organization’s collective time today is spent in meetings, with senior executives spending two days a week in meetings with three or more coworkers.

This spread can be seen as a horrible creep of unproductive time. But it’s better understood as a logical response to the growing complexity of today’s decision-making needs. When power relationships are ambiguous, problems are complex, and the environment within which decisions are being made is itself changing rapidly, we benefit from regularly coming together to realign goals, interests, and attitudes. This happens most easily through conversation, and is harder when decision makers can’t see each other’s social cues. Misunderstandings are more common over e-mail than phone and over the phone than with video messaging. There’s also strong evidence that we’re much happier interacting with others face-to-face than virtually.

Even the most banal procedural meetings help participants to gauge one another’s interests, attitudes, and relationships. That helps them negotiate more easily as well as develop a shared intelligence and culture, though it can also help a hierarchy to enforce conformism and squeeze out deviance. The same is true of activities that cut across many organizations — working in formal partnerships, alliances, supply chains, networks, and joint ventures. These too require meetings (as well as a mushrooming quantity of e-mails and conversations) to coordinate actions. Only a small proportion of issues can be handled through formal contracts. Meetings cost a lot (and there are now devices to work out exactly what that cost is).[iii] But not holding meetings can be even costlier.

There is a vast research literature analyzing precisely how meetings do or don’t work, the subtle strategies we use when talking to others, and the role played by supporting activities, such as providing agendas, documents, minutes, presentations, preparatory e-mails, and exchanges.[iv] To work well, they have to counter our tendencies. One is our desire for social harmony, which means that in teams, people tend not to share novel or discomforting information. Another is that our egos tend to become attached to ideas and proposals, and so make it harder for us to see their flaws. A third is our tendency to defer to authority. And a final, opposite one is that although we all make judgments about whose views we respect, and recognize that in any group the value of contributions will vary greatly, we often default to equality, giving equal weight to everyone — an admirable democratic tendency that unfortunately can mean that poor-quality contributions crowd out better ones.[v] All these tendencies, if unchecked, lead to worse decisions and degrade collective intelligence.

So what could make meetings better? To someone with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and in the same spirit most organizations get stuck in habits, using the same meeting formats regardless of what they’re trying to achieve. But there are usually many other options worth considering. Here I summarize some of the crucial factors that can help to make a group more like a collective intelligence, and less like a miserably boring committee or conference.

Visible Ends and Means

A first step is to ensure that the purposes, structures, and content of the meeting are well understood by all participants. Is the meeting to share information, create something new, pray, or make a decision? It will need a different shape depending on which of these is the main goal.

Agendas that are easily accessible beforehand ensure valuable time is not wasted and everyone is up to speed the minute they walk in (and agenda setting can either be done by the most senior person or in a more open way). Sharing background papers and materials encourages a common understanding of the purpose of the meeting, and many digital tools can make these visible.[vi] This doesn’t imply that all meetings should be instrumental. Some meetings should be open-ended and exploratory. The point is that this should be clear.

Active Facilitation and Orchestration

Even the most motivated groups don’t self-organize themselves well. That’s why the role of the chair or facilitator is so important for getting good results. The role doesn’t have to be filled by the most powerful person in the room; it may be better played by someone junior, given the temporary authority to ensure the meeting achieves its purposes and sticks to time.

To do their job well, they need to keep the meeting focused on its goals. Yet they can also help the group to think well by countering the risks of anchoring (the first person to speak sets the agenda and frames). They can work hard to avoid the risks of unequal contribution (with higher status counting for more than greater knowledge and experience). Other methods like leaving periods of silence for groups to reflect and digest can improve the quality of discussion. So can encouraging participants to write down their most important thoughts before the meeting, allowing the most junior person to speak first (as in the past in the US Supreme Court) or interweaving different scales of conversation (from plenary to smaller groups, down to discussions in pairs and back).

Explicit Argument

Good meetings encourage the explicit articulation and interrogation of arguments, and ideally allocate people roles to interrogate them. These roles can be formalized or left more informal. The key is to avoid skating over the uncomfortable aspects of disagreement.

Psychologists have shown that people have a strong confirmation bias. This means that when we reason, we try to find arguments that support our own idea. At an individual level, this can lead us to make bad decisions. But from a collective point of view it can be extremely effective, since it encourages people to develop the best versions of their arguments. Confirmation biases cancel each other out and then push the group to a better solution.[vii]

Giving a structure to argument then becomes an important design challenge. Parliaments do this through formal debates, and courts through the presentation of evidence and interrogation of witnesses. Some hedge funds interestingly incentivized disagreement, rewarding the people who had disagreed with trades that then turned out to succeed (and the account by Ray Dalio, founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater, is a good summary of the value of encouraging argument and criticism).[viii]

For argument to work well, meetings benefit from structured sequences — so that, for example, discussion focuses first on facts and diagnosis, before moving on to prescription and options (which tend to be more fraught as well as more bound up with interests and egos). The general point is that conscious, deliberate processes usually improve the quality of discussion.

Multiplatform and Multimedia

The best meetings use multiple tools in parallel. They combine talk and visualization, and small talk as well as plenaries involving everyone. A consistent finding of much research is that people learn and think better when supported by more than one type of communication. Information presented in different forms aids learning and understanding. A written five-page report, presentation, and selection of images combined with a verbal discussion will have differing effects, but can add up to a better understanding of the issues. This is also why simple rules can help, such as no numbers without a story, and no story without numbers, or no facts without a model, and no model without facts.

Digital tools help visualize complex ideas at meetings, making it easier to reach decisions, such as allowing ideas to be visually collated by multiple people in real time, creating linked networks of ideas collaboratively, or presenting complex data in more accessible ways.[ix] Other promising tools show the participants how ideas and arguments are evolving, and how the group mind is thinking and feeling.

Reining in the Extroverts, Opinionated, and Powerful

Social psychologists using survey and observational techniques to measure group intelligence have shown that they correlate only partly with the average and maximum intelligence of individual group members. For example, one recent psychology study found that three factors were significantly correlated with the collective intelligence of a group: the average social perceptiveness of the group members (using a test designed to measure autism that involves judging feelings from photographs of people’s eyes), relatively equal turn taking in conversation, and the percentage of women in a group (which partly reflects their greater social perceptiveness).[x]

Extroverts dominate the typical meeting. As a result, many participants may not feel comfortable contributing. Formats that make it easy for everyone to contribute, rein in the most vocal, and give people time to think before speaking are likely to work better.

Physical Environments That Heighten Attention

Meetings benefit from environmental conditions that make it easier to pay attention to the meeting itself and other participants. That includes sufficient natural light, quiet and space, and giving people chances to move around (and not staying seated for more than an hour or two in any one stretch).[xi]

Physical shape also influences the quality of meetings. For instance, square or circular meeting spaces allow everyone eye contact with everyone else and so encourage greater engagement. The classic boardroom table is a poor design from this perspective, as is the classic theater-style conference hall.

Finally, some organizations ban use of laptops or smartphones during meetings — partly to ensure full attention. US Cabinet meetings, for example, require participants to leave their phones at the door.

Deliberate Divisions of Labor

The best meetings take advantage of a division of labor with distinct roles, including facilitation, record keeping, synthesis and catalysis, court jester, and professional skeptic. They then end with explicitly distributed tasks given to participants.

For the meeting itself, methods that distribute roles among participants include Edward de Bono’s “six thinking hats,” where different-colored metaphoric hats open up different perspectives to thinking.[xii] White addresses the facts and what is known; black provides caution and critical thinking; red emphasizes feelings, including intuition and hunches; blue manages the process, ensuring it is followed by the group correctly; green promotes creativity, new ideas, and options; and yellow encourages optimism, looking for values, benefits, and advantages. The idea is that the interaction of these viewpoints leads to better outcomes, especially when participants try out different roles rather than becoming fixed in just one.

David Kantor’s “four player model” has a similar approach.[xiii] Groups are divided into four roles: movers, who initiate ideas and offer direction; followers, who complete what is said, help others clarify their thoughts, and support what is happening; opposers, who challenge what is being said and question its validity; and bystanders, who notice what is going on and provide perspective on what is happening, offering a set of actions people can take while in a conversation. In a healthy meeting, people will move between these roles.

It’s easy to imagine other variants; what’s important is to formalize differentiated roles (which many of us hear as inner voices when we’re trying to make a decision). Even better, tasks are distributed to named individuals at the end of the meeting, so that these can then be tracked. Knowing that this is going to happen makes it more likely that people will pay attention.

Meeting Mathematics

There is no perfect mathematical formula for meetings, but experience suggests something close to a law that correlates the complexity of the task, number of participants, available knowledge and experience, time, and degree of shared language or understanding. This is particularly true for meetings that aim to come to a conclusion or make a decision.

The most common reason meetings fail is that they don’t conform with meeting mathematics: there are too many people or too little time, too little relevant knowledge and experience, too sprawling a topic, or insufficient common grounding.

A simple task, with few participants, and well understood common language and references, may lead to quick results. Whereas a complex task, with many participants and not much shared frame of reference, may take infinite time to resolve, and even if the time isn’t infinite, it may feel so.[xiv]

In framing understanding of an issue or mapping out options, diversity brings great advantages, as does tapping into many minds. But translating that diversity into good decisions usually requires the added element of a common grounding or culture. So strong organizations try to bring in a diverse workforce as well as tap the brainpower of their partners and customers, and then funnel decisions through a group that also has a strong common understanding and language along with a depth of relevant knowledge. On their own, crowds aren’t wise.

Getting the mathematics of meetings right is key not just for face-to-face meetings but also for online ones. In principle, online meetings can gather in much more intelligence — knowledge, ideas, observations, and options. The most successful online collective intelligence projects tend to combine quite-precise tasks and reasonable amounts of time, and are more about gathering and assembling than judging. As a result, they don’t require so much common framing or the subtle cues needed for ongoing collaborative projects.

Good Meetings Are Visibly Cumulative

Meetings rarely happen in isolation. Some two million hours of work may go into the design of a large building or car, including many hundreds of meetings. There are complex tools to coordinate the efforts of a large work team as well as simple devices like feedback forms and regular reviews that link any meeting to previous ones on the same topic (through traditional means like minutes, or more modern ones like data dashboards and lessons learned exercises). Social media patterns can be analyzed to show how people interact after meetings, and social network analysis tools can be used to reveal underlying patterns of helpfulness in organizations and across them (for example, surveying who people rely on to get information or get things done).[xv]

Within workplaces, evidence suggests that the quality of relationships and attitudes, measured by the quality of small talk before meetings, matters more for meeting effectiveness than good procedures on their own.[xvi] Participants’ perceptions of meeting effectiveness have a “strong, direct relationship with job attitudes and wellbeing.”[xvii] If attendees of a meeting are happy going in, they will be productive throughout, and happier and more productive afterward. Modest tools can influence this.[xviii] So can simple devices like encouraging everyone to take coffee or lunch breaks at the same time.[xix]

Avoidance

Newspapers and news shows fill up their space regardless of how much news has happened. The same is often true of meetings. Organizations schedule regular cycles of committee, board, and group meetings, and then feel impelled to fill up the available time. This is one of the sources of frustration and boredom in many organizations, because it means that many meetings feel pointless. An alternative is to leave time slots in, but more frequently cancel meetings when they’re not needed, radically shorten them to align with the number and seriousness of issues needing to be addressed, and consult with participants on whether the meeting is needed, and if so, how long it should be.

Often people feel uncomfortable canceling meetings for fear that it implies that no work is being done. Similarly, people in big bureaucracies feel uncomfortable not attending meetings — for fear that they may miss out on vital decisions or not be seen as a team player. The opposite is a better approach — canceling or shortening meetings as a sign of effective day-to-day communication

What makes meetings effective mirrors what we know about collective intelligence more generally. For a meeting to be most collectively intelligent, all five of the approaches to organizing collective intelligence that I advocate in my book ‘Big Mind’ need to be in play. Autonomy: the meeting may take place within a highly structured hierarchy, but it will achieve the best results if it is allowed some autonomy — the freedom to explore and open up before options are closed down and decisions are taken. Balance: the meeting needs the right mix of types of intelligence depending on its task; it may be primarily to gather observations, create, remember (for example, synthesizing lessons learned), or judge, but will benefit from clarity on what it is trying to achieve and how. Focus: a clear goal for the meeting makes it easier to determine what contributions are relevant or not, and avoid sidetracks. Reflexiveness: taking stock of whether the meeting is on track and new categories of thinking methods are needed. Integration for action: the role of the chair or facilitator to integrate contributions, and then turn complex, flowing conversations into the beautiful simplicity of a good decision that can be acted on.[xx]

Although this is far from being a science, much is known about what makes meetings work. Yet strangely, the great majority of meetings ignore what’s known, wasting billions of hours of precious time. I’ve asked people in many organisations — from universities to parliaments, businesses to NGOs — what evidence they use to guide their design of meetings. Almost none can give any answer: they just do what they’ve always done.

Digital technologies that help us design and manage meetings may encourage more hunger to use this knowledge. For now, they offer only modest ways to enhance meetings: making them easier to organize, bringing disparate groups together, and more recently, showing how the group’s conversations are evolving.

The chat function in Zoom and Teams is already enhancing meeting dynamics in useful ways, as is the ease with which they can break into small groups.

Computer vision technologies that can judge when people are bored or angry, asleep or distracted, are bound to transform meeting dynamics, in ways that may contribute both to greater productivity and to feelings of powerlessness.

In the not too distant future, we may use computer facilitators much more to regulate time, ensure everyone has a chance to speak, suggest or manage strategies to overcome impasses, monitor emotions through scanning faces, and help avert unhealthy conflicts.[xxi] They may also be good at coaching people how to handle difficult meetings, though we may end up coming to prefer these roles to be played by inhuman machines rather than self-interested leaders.[xxii]

My hope is that before long someone will set up a serious research centre on meetings — running experiments, synthesising evidence, and designing new methods. They could do so much to make life better for hundreds of millions of people.

Chesterton famously wrote: ‘I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees’. But whoever sets up this centre might truly deserve a statue or two.

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[i] For a useful recent analysis of how groups make good decisions, see Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting beyond Group Think to Make Groups Smarter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015). This book reaffirms the finding that it’s often sensible to get groups to agree on diagnosis before moving on to prescription. Steven Rogelberg’s ‘The surprising science of meetings’ (Oxford University Press, 2019) is another very good source.

[ii] Ones that meet these criteria include Future Search, 21st Century Town Meetings, and Design Thinking. See Steven M. Ney and Marco Verweij, “Messy Institutions for Wicked Problems: How to Generate Clumsy Solutions,” accessed April 24, 2017, http://www.stevenney.org/resources/Publications/SSRNid2382191.pdf. For a summary of the principles behind Future Search by its developers, see Martin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007).

[iii] “Estimate the Cost of a Meeting with This Calculator,” Harvard Business Review, January 11, 2016, accessed April 24, 2017, https://hbr.org/2016/01/estimate-the-cost-of-a-meeting-with-this-calculator.

[iv] Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1984); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959); Michael Mankins, Chris Brahm, and Gregory Caimi, “Your Scarcest Resource,” Harvard Business Review 92, no. 5 (2014): 74–80.

[v] Ali Mahmoodi, Dan Bang, Karsten Olsen, Yuanyuan Aimee Zhao, Zhenhao Shi, Kristina Broberg, Shervin Safavi, Shihui Han, Majid Nili Ahmadabadi, Chris D. Frith, Andreas Roepstorff, Geraint Rees, and Bahador Bahrami, “Equality Bias Impairs Collective Decision-Making across Cultures,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112, no. 12 (2015): 3835–40.

[vi] There are many apps now available that support preparation and communication before meetings. Some, such as Do, include features that collaboratively build the agenda beforehand and send out automatic meeting notes. Others are specific to one challenge such as scheduling. Pick will find mutual availability between participants and then automatically book a convenient time for a meeting.

[vii] Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34, no. 2 (2011): 57–74.

[viii] Ray Dalio, Principles, accessed April 25, 2017,

https://www.principles.com/#Principles.

[ix] Parmenides Eidos is a software program that visualizes complex data in more succinct ways to aid better decision making. See “Private and Public Services,” Parmenides Eidos, accessed April 25, 2017, https://www.parmenides-foundation.org/application/parmenides-eidos/.

[x] Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone, “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 330, no. 6004 (2010): 686–88.

[xi] Desmond J. Leach, Steven G. Rogelberg, Peter B. Warr, and Jennifer L. Burnfield, “Perceived Meeting Effectiveness: The Role of Design Characteristics,” Journal of Business and Psychology 24, no. 1 (2009): 65–76.

[xii] Edward de Bono, Six Thinking Hats (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1985).

[xiii] See “The Structural Dynamics Theory,” Kantor Institute, accessed April 25, 2017, http://www.kantorinstitute.com/fullwidth.html.

[xiv] Roughly speaking, the meeting mathematics formula runs as follows: meeting quality ~ [time x common grounding x relevant knowledge and experience] / [numbers x topic breadth]./

[xv] For an instance of social network analysis applied to roles in meetings, see Nils Christian Sauer and Simone Kauffeld, “The Ties of Meeting Leaders: A Social Network Analysis,” Psychology 6, no. 4 (2015): 415–34.

[xvi] Joseph A. Allen, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Nicole Landowski, “Linking Pre-Meeting Communication to Meeting Effectiveness,” Journal of Managerial Psychology 29, no. 8 (2014): 1064–81.

[xvii] Steven G. Rogelberg, Joseph A. Allen, Linda Shanock, Cliff Scott, and Marissa Shuffler, “Employee Satisfaction with Meetings: A Contemporary Facet of Job Satisfaction,” Human Resource Management 49, no. 2 (2010): 149–72.

[xviii] Like Nesta’s “randomized coffee trial,” which encourages people to meet people they don’t know in the workplace and has now been adopted by many big employers.

[xix] In everyday operational meetings, as much as strategic and creative events, meetings provide a place for participants to demonstrate their vision and mission. Joseph A. Allen, Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Steven G. Rogelberg, The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

[xx] For one approach that emphasizes this last capacity to synthesize from complexity, see Stafford Beer, Beyond Dispute: The Invention of Team Syntegrity (Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 1994); Markus Schwaninger, “A Cybernetic Model to Enhance Organizational Intelligence,” Systems Analysis, Modeling, and Simulation 43, no. 1 (2003): 53–65.

[xxi] The work of the Affective Computing Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been promising on this, with its focus on how digital technologies can better communicate emotions, although it raises as many questions as it answers, such as when hostility is or isn’t good for meetings, or whether mutual transparency improves the quality of decisions or instead fuels conformism.

[xxii] Amy MacMillan Bankson, “Could an Artificial Intelligence-Based Coach Help Managers Master Difficult Conversations?” MIT Sloan School of Management, February 23, 2017, accessed April 26, 2017, http://mitsloan.mit.edu/newsroom/articles/could-an-ai-based-coach-help-managers-master-difficult-conversations/.