Efficiency vs. Creativity
As I sat in a recent board meeting, and we talked in circles about subjects we have already talked in circles about, I saw impatience and heard frustration. I even heard some bellyaching. Have you been there?
I have noticed over the course of my experience in committees and even staff meetings that sometimes you have to pound your head against a wall several times before you get somewhere. At the same time, our world and business culture drives us toward efficiency and speed—many measure the speed of the meeting these days, not the quality. In our association, our members are all business owners and managers, and they are used to delegating work in meetings, and less used to consensus building and constant evaluation of any given topic. I am here to say that some of the best ideas I’ve ever heard of for our association came when we deviated from the agenda--please don’t pelt me with rotten tomatoes.
Let me give another example. I recently started a task force concerning a topic that is pretty controversial in our industry. I hand-picked 8-10 individuals for the task force, and set the first meeting.
About half of the folks made it to that first call, and we had a meandering, big picture discussion. I then assigned some work and set the next meeting 1 month later. At that meeting, the other half of the folks showed up, but none from the first bunch! We had basically the same conversation, but came out of it with completely different ideas and action items.
Both groups were creative, and the repetition was pretty inefficient. However, the combined ideas are more powerful than either alone. I’d love to claim that this was all by design, but honestly they are a bunch of hard headed folks and I couldn’t get them to stay on track.
My questions to you are:
- What are some tips and tools to manage the balance between efficiency and creativity or efficiency and thoroughness?
- What are some tips for group dynamics without reading a book on it?
- How do we prepare for meetings and help engage and foster creative discussion, while avoiding repetition or off-topic discussion?
Please, don’t just answer having an agenda or applying good meeting management skills ... we all have those or we wouldn’t be here. I mean new, creative ideas that I know people are using out there.
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Comments
Creativity is messy and often inefficient. You can't schedule a conference call for 4 p.m. with the expectation that a great innovation will emerge from it. A better approach is to let individuals incubate and ideate on their own with all their ideas submitted by a deadline. Then aggregate those and use them for a nominal voting process in advance of a call and/or discuss them on the call.
That being said, for your specific situation, here are a few thoughts:
1. Do the participants in these conversations see this the same way you do? If so, the door is open for you to lead them in identifying ways to make these discussions more productive and efficient. If they don't see it, then that probably is part of the reason why you're having these very challenges ... they don't have a sense of what a good process would look like and how they would act in/contribute to it.
2. If you're with a group that you think will go off-topic a lot or you have a very full agenda with limited time, whoever is facilitating needs to get the group's permission at the start to be a more assertive facilitator. Couple that with a timed agenda and frequent use of the question "Is this something that we need to be discussing/deciding today?" often will help.
3. Agenda detours often produce good stuff as you aptly note. I think the key is controlling that detour a bit as the facilitator, saying something like: "We seem to be getting off-topic a bit, but I sense some good energy in the group around the ideas that are emerging. How about we pursue this for XXX minutes and then steer back to our original agenda?"
Posted by: Jeffrey Cufaude | September 24, 2009 11:17 AM