Symptoms and impact

Every now and again someone in your team comes down with a nasty case of verbal diarrhoea.  The symptoms are quite debilitating:

• Incoherent ramblings about irrelevant stuff
• Excessive repetition of stuff discussed in the last 5 meetings
• Use of flowery language… no actual substance
• Speaking over everyone else and dominating the meeting

This often has serious side effects:

• Productive people start dodging your progress meetings
• Meetings take 5 times as long as they should
• The important issues are not discussed
• Too much time is spent discussing the past, and too little spent looking forward at the challenges and pitfalls around the corner

Medicine

It’s all about the agenda and a harsh but fair chair.

Agenda:

• What have we accomplished since we last met? (1 minute max per person)
• What new risks and issues (problems) have emerged?
• Our mantra is “we’re not here (in this meeting) to solve problems, we’re here to decide who will own the problem, take it away and sort it.”
• What are we going to accomplish next week?
• Who aren’t we communicating with that we should be?

Maximum of 5 people in the meeting if possible.  Meeting should last no more than 30 mins.