Comments on: The 15 Laws of Meeting Power

By: Adam Neira

Adam Neira — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:21:14 +0000

Truth is powerful. Tactics and political machinations can only get certain people so far. All behaviour is a result of mindset and setting, so a meeting’s format, intent and design can have a significant effect on the resulting thought, feeling and action patterns. As history attests G-d makes sure that wisdom flows through the zeitgeist to the most righteous of an age. Maimonides in “Guide for the Perplexed” explains this point quite clearly. In relation to the concept of power, a great saying goes…”It doesn’t matter what you think we will all know the truth and what is correct in the end !”

Watch what happens with the world power dynamics in the coming weeks and months…

By: tones

tones — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 23:49:20 +0000

when i was a teen, i found a book on my dad’s bookshelf about the laws of power in a corporate context. i kept it and looked at it again after reading your post. the link was emotional, as with most of my memories. this emotion was disgust. i loathe these tactics and the people that use them and the cynical undertone of your implied consent will ensure i never visit your site again. (i was brought here via a link from stephen downes). the best advice given to me about handling meetings filled with types of your ilk is to take dram classes. art always wins over serious drones and telephone sanitizers. pathetic and sad.

By: Pre-Sell

Pre-Sell — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:39:21 +0000

All of the really skilled organizational politicians I know would come in as the moderator/compromise voice in public, to make sure nobody powerful loses face, and they would let the brash young things spew a bit. These people would have pre-sold anyone with power over the decision on a set of options and framing terms already, before the debate. Either that or they would have built up a history of one-on-one discussions with each powerful person where it would become understood that the real decision would be announced after the meeting, and the organizational politician would be there for that post-meeting informal discussion, helping frame the terms of the decision. They’d allow the brash ones to get fiesty at meetings in order to gain leverage over them in these offline conversations. They let you rock the boat at meetings so that when powerful people question them about how disruptive you are, they get to brad your dissent as either creative and stimulating or disruptive and divisive. They do all of this in a way that makes no enemies – because the ones I know, at any rate, really do have the best interests of the organization in mind.

So in my experience, another law of meeting power is that meetings are not where the power is. It’s the relationships around the meeting that hold the power. A lot of the meeting behaviours you describe are – I think – really targeted at the larger conversational decision-making process in which the meeting is just one small part. Stating the obvious, letting others get polarized, refereeing, careful listening (for citation *after* meetings, not during them), me-too-ing and win-win engagement – those are all part of what you descibed as coalition-building – but the coalitions as they form in the meeting can be fleeting.

So that would add another class of meeting laws – like “never surprise powerful stakeholders with anything duing a meeting – pre-sell them or at least fully apprise them of your framing of the issues beforehand in informal conversation”. To do that means building certain kinds of relationships outside of meetings. If you do some of the more assertive stuff in meetings, you kind of put yourself outside those networks.

That said, I tend to be outspoken in meetings, because I’m opinionated and it’s much more fun!

By: Venkat

Venkat — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 03:05:44 +0000

Alright, I am not quite the disruptive sociopath I come across as here, mostly I behave, and also run my own meetings in a fair way But here is my basic problem with all your suggestions from the POV of the chair person: any addition to basic (or lite) RRO that increases the robustness of the process against disruption also lowers its ability to be creative. For example, the RRO meetings I experienced typically were sloppy about a speaker’s list, and you could easily break into a back-and-forth for a bit before the chair could catch up and shut you down. I have observed much more disciplined implementations of RRO, and they are definitely less creative, valuing bureaucratic rigor of process over problem-solving and collective thinking.

For less disciplined meetings (non RRO), things are even more dynamic and capable of extraordinary creativity and chemistry as well as extreme uproar and toxicity. Buy one, the other comes free.

Your points 3 and 4, without the “flexible” caveat, scare me to death. That’s the sort of rule that is used by dictators-in-liberal-skin, like that scary woman in ‘The Beach’ (the diCaprio movie about a hippie enclave in Thailand).

Point 3 might be acceptable practice when it is a subject where there are clearly no expert. I expect in an Einsten-vs. Godel debate, it would take days of their non-stop talking before the marginal value of what they had to say on their subjects would be lower than anything I could add.

Point 4 isn’t for real meetings. It is for stage managed presidential debates!

By: Robert Rules

Robert Rules — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:34:18 +0000

What about modifications to to Robert’s Rules? You talk about the maneuvering and tatics of the participants but think of the poor devil that has to chair a meeting with sociopaths like yourself in it!

I think at least the following three rules of order are good extensions to conventional parliamentary procedure, especially in low-hierarchy situations (i.e., interdepartmental meetings where multiple peer groups collide):
1. A speaker’s list that is displayed on a flip chart or whiteboard and is followed.
2. No back-and-forth between two speakers (or maybe one back-and-forth, in the form of question-and-answer). You may think debating societies can be a good meeting strategy for obtaining an outcome, but most participants put their fingers in their ears and think happy thoughts when two lions start marking their turf.
3. In a large meeting situation (8 or more), those who haven’t spoken before get precedence on the list over those who have spoken twice. This is a sort of hybrid egalitarianism: everybody has something to contribute, but the value of your contribution declines in proportion to its frequency.
4. (I know I only said 3 rules) A recommended time-limit of 3 minutes per speaker, flexibly enforced by the chair. Reasons should be obvious.

In the adaptive fashion of ever-evolving meeting strategies, I’d be curious to hear how you thin your 15 rules hold up with these sorts of rules of order.

Overall I think your analysis is spot on and wonder if you’re at work on a self-help book!