Redesigning the Meeting Process

There is an article over at ACM Interactions magazine that suggests that design should be applied to work interactions and that discussions, meetings, and relationships should be designed in the same way that we design other processes, products, and experiences. The aim of the article is actually less about designing dialogues in the sense that I think about it, for example, taking an existing dialogical situation and aiming to improve the way that the dialogue progresses to meet tangible goals, and is more akin to reconciling the different traditional approaches taken by designers on the one hand and business innovators on the other. Designers, nowadays, typically take an ethnographically based and user-centered approach to developing a solution. Businesses on the other hand often still utilse a document-centric approach, revolving around spreadsheets, charts, and powerpoint slides. The article suggests that design innovation will often not survive the business process and that it is the design of the meeting at which the designers and business folk meet which causes much of the problem. Rather than meeting with the aim of taking forward the most promising innovative solution, what is more likely to occur is that the design will fall prey to business decisions that have already, to some degree, been made. A fait accompli that leads to limited options:

“Reject it outright, accept it but do something to mitigate the damage, and accept it publicly but work privately to keep it from ever seeing the light of day-all tried-and-true processes for dealing with folks who want your sign-off but not your collaboration.”

The suggested alternative is to adopt an approach used by Procter & Gamble. At least two weeks before the yearly  strategy-review meeting proposals have to be submitted to the CEO who would prepare questions about the proposals, The presidents responsible for each proposal were then limited to three pieces of paper that they could take to the review meeting as a basis for the defense of their proposal. This process meant that rather than sitting through presentations defending the proposals, and inch-by-inch, getting buy-in from various other presidents until a safe proposal could be agreed, the proposals had to be discussed and the presidents had to engage in a dialogue about the future strategy. Until this point:

“Rather than engaging in dialogue, executives had devoted their time to bulletproofing arguments, then advocating and defending them. Dialogue was different, foreign, and unnerving. Only after two or three cycles did the presidents come to see how invigorating it was to engage in dialogue about what could be rather than what is.”

By redesigning the meeting process it is suggested that there can be a profoundly positive effect upon both the participants and the organisation as a result of applying design thinking.