I’m preparing creative briefs, artwork that will be presented, and the structure for meeting notes that are due after each meeting.

I go to more meeting than you do, guaranteed.

Illustration by Andrew Joyner

I’m often astounded, but not principally shocked, at what a terrible job meetings do at their stated objective. What’s the problem? After all, these are important gatherings, run by equally important professionals that work diligently to satisfy the typical attendee.

And that, of course, is the drawback.

Facts don’t alter people’s behavior.

Emotion alters people’s behavior.

Storytelling and irrational impulses are what alter behavior. Seldom do facts or bullet points achieve this objective.

If all we require were facts, then books alone would be adequate.

I mean, when the Surgeon General announced that smoking was fatal, how many smokers rushed to quit their death sticks? That was 1964 when Luther L. Terry, M.D., Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, released the first report of the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health and stated results based on more than 7,000 articles relating to smoking. They didn’t even ban cigarette ads on television until 1970!

Human are illogical. Change agents (maybe that’s you, maybe not) can battle that and fixate about the need to present more and more facts, or we can embrace irrational behavior and make change happen.

Meetings are designed to get your average staff to change their behavior. By “average”, I mean typical—the masses, the center of the bellcurve. That’s a practical goal, isn’t it? By classification, most people (in any given populace) are in the middle of that bell curve. Change them and you’re on the yellow brick road.

The bellcurve—if this group would absorb, take action and move forward to make things happen with just a memo, you wouldn’t need to have a meeting. But we end up blocking afternoons for average meetings to sit in average conference rooms (or average conference call lines) to hear average speakers (no, the Media Guy isn’t included in the average speaker category) doing presentations filled with average bullet points. And it’s all beyond criticism.

But it just doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work when you’re presenting at the finals of an RFP (request for proposal) either. Your facts and your service and your rates can be the finest in town, but that doesn’t mean the order is yours…

…and it breaks down at your annual review…

…and it even occurs in a one-on-one with the highway patrol or a cashier or a bartender.

People are irrational and they typically make choices that have zero to do with facts. And, yet we waste most of our time refining our facts and have very little concerned with the rest.

Close your eyes and think deeply. I bet the most influential learning moments you’ve ever had didn’t take place in a gloomy meeting room.

Meeting organizers (and more important, their staff) spend virtually all of their time and money doing one of two things: 1. Nourishing the center of the bell curve, and, 2) Evading failure.

That’s why the standard meeting is, well, standard.

That’s why the refreshments (if you’re lucky enough to get them) and the setting and the venue and the location and the chairs and the layout and the agenda are… standard.

If you want to run a meeting (a brainstorming meeting, a board meeting, a zoning commission meeting) that is destined to perform as well as your past meetings, then the best thing to do is to run it the way you’ve always been running it, right?

So, here’s the challenge: figure out how to do the different [Read: THINK DIFFERENT ala Apple].
Figure out how to change the interactions that people have with one another.

-Figure out how to change what they talk about in the elevator, or at lunch.

The post Think Different appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.