The week before classes start is a busy one for professors. There are syllabi to write, course websites to update, lessons to plan, and last-minute advisees to direct. But, last week, when I needed to be doing those things, it felt nearly impossible to get anything done at all.
I spent most of my working hours last week in meetings. The few days before students return to campus are always meeting-packed. All-campus meeting, all-faculty meeting, department/school faculty meeting and multiple optional meeting opportunities for training and professional development.
And just prior to starting these on-campus meetings, I attended the annual meetings of the American Economics Association in Atlanta. This is the largest economics conference in the country and consists of three days of non-stop meetings for research presentations and panel discussions.
I am exhausted of meetings. And, according to an article published in the Harvard Business Review last summer, I am not alone. In fact, even in the meeting-packed week before classes start, my job is a relatively meeting-light job according to the report.
The article cites research finding that CEOs work an average of 62.5 hours per week and spend over 60 percent of that time in face-to-face meetings.
It would be easy to take the rest of this space to write about how much productivity is lost while we sit in meetings. Indeed, a complementary study described in the Harvard Business Review a year earlier showed 71 percent of senior managers think meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and most say meetings keep them from doing their own work.
But, I have been in some really good meetings in the last week and a half, and I want to spend the next couple hundred words focusing on what is good about meetings.
There is not a lot that economists agree on, but almost all economists agree that long-term growth of an economy depends on technological advancement, which always starts with a good idea.
Research shows that good ideas are made even better when a diverse group of individuals collaborate. And, in a business world overrun with emails and instant messages, America’s top businesspeople still recognize the value of face-to-face meetings to encourage collaboration.
In his YouTube video “Where Good Ideas Come From,” author Steven Johnson says, “Good ideas normally come from the collision between smaller hunches, so that they form something bigger than themselves.”
One of my favorite examples of such a collision — or, more accurately, a series of collisions — is in the case of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amons Tversky. The very first meeting between the two, who were reportedly polar opposites in personality, was at a seminar in which Tversky presented his work on how people learn. Kahneman challenged Tversky’s experimental design, and the two began meeting to discuss Tversky’s work and Kahneman’s objections. The two continued meeting and sharing hunches, and the result was a Nobel prize winning body of work establishing the field of behavioral economics.
This is what meetings are good for. When done right, face-to-face meetings provide spaces where hunches can collide to become good ideas.
Reg Murphy Center