Overcoming the Cult of Action

If you read this on your way home from work, chances are that you  have just concluded several hours of meetings – formal and informal,  internal and external, small one-to-one chats and large group sessions,  consensual and controversial ones. There is abundant literature on how  to get the most out of meetings, and plenty of good advice that does not  need repeating. However, there is a little blind spot, a missed  opportunity, in much of what has been written. 

Conventional wisdom says that a meeting is a good meeting if it ends with a clearly defined set of actions.  It is an even better meeting if those actions are documented and have  owners assigned to them. “Meeting Nirvana” is when those actions are  indeed put into practice.  It seems that, as in the handling of economic and political crises,  action trumps everything else. But on occasions this leaves an uneasy  feeling – sometimes it just seems contrived to squeeze the obvious  progress made in a meeting into a set of actions. 

This is not because of laziness, or an aversion to commit, or a reluctance to push colleagues to deliver results. A  meeting can be incredibly valuable and yet end without a single action –  when its fruits are not actions but understanding and insight. 

Let me give you an example: A software development team meets to  work out the design for, say, an accounting package. Ideas and arguments  fly around, the whiteboard is repeatedly filled with diagrams, and,  slowly, a rough structure is emerging. While there may well be follow-up  actions such as prototyping certain aspects of the system, adjusting  the project plan, or clarifying requirements with the customer, equally  valuable results may be insights such as -  

• “The problem is structurally similar to the Health Care Record system developed last year.” 
• “Processing of accounting entries will be heavy, hence it is worth writing code with performance in mind.” 
• “Requirements can be expressed as three fundamental types of transactions. Using this language simplifies the design.” 
• “The CTO lacks certain specialist knowledge to fully appreciate some of the constraints.” 
• “It does not make sense to be inspired by competing products  since their product history ties them to legacy platforms and accounting  practices.” 

Let's be explict about why these insights are valuable: They cannot be followed up, measured, assigned, tracked – but  if they are internalised and understood by everyone in the meeting they  give something much more useful: a background and context for future  actions and decisions, including those that could not be anticipated at  the time of the meeting.  

• The user interface designer will go away from the meeting and  consider what can be reused from that earlier health care project. He  and the rest of the team will remember the dead ends and pitfalls and  transfer the lessons learnt from them.
• When it comes to preparing the first progress update for the  board, the project manager remembers insight items 3 and 4 to create a  presentation that is appropriate for a non-technical audience but still  true to the architecture of the system.
• The consulting accountant on the project will stop pestering  the software engineers with tales of how things are done in Sage and  instead force herself to consider from scratch what makes a good  accounting package.

Insights empower people to take day-to-day decisions on their own  while remaining aligned with their team. Insights form a solid  foundation for a broad range of actions – in particular those that could not be anticipated or planned at the time of the meeting.  While the conventional list of actions after a meeting leads to clearly  defined progress, a list of insights has a less direct but much more  far-reaching impact. 

Best practice for meeting actions is fairly uncontroversial – they  need to be well-defined, have a single owner who commits to them  (ideally in the meeting), they need to be tracked, etc. What is the equivalent best practice for meeting insights?  It is clearly not enough if the chairperson walks away from a meeting  thinking “yeah, we have probably all learnt something in the past two  hours”. Making the most out of meeting insights starts in the meeting  itself. Towards the end of the meeting, it is sensible to -  

• Pull together the main insights and jot them down on the whiteboard.
  Ask “what have we learnt”, not just “what are we going to do”. 
• Find out whether there is consensus on the insight items.
  This  is an important step and roughly equivalent to getting a person's  commitment to a meeting action. How controversy is handled depends on  the situation but it is rarely a good idea to gloss over it – it will  come back and bite. At the very least, the insight item can be rephrased  as “There is disagreement over ... ”. 

When sending round the meeting summary afterwards (you do this,  don't you?) the insights are included alongside any action items and  decisions. For larger projects, collating insights from multiple  meetings on some internal workspace (company wiki) is a nice way of concisely documenting the collective knowledge that has been created. 

This all sounds quite pedestrian – but the “Cult Of Action” around meetings is so pervasive in many organisations that it can appear somewhat revolutionary.  Yes, you can indeed have a perfectly productive meeting without a  single action nor decision at the end. After all, if a meeting leads to  people working more smoothly and efficiently for a long time afterwards –  how could it be regarded as a waste of time? Empowering people in this way may even reduce the need for future  planning and progress meetings, and it stops teams from going round in  circles in their collective thinking. 

Break the habit, renounce the “Cult Of Action”! Meeting actions do  have their place but blinkered exclusivity wastes your and your team's  potential. What is your experience? Do you agree?