[heyalexhsu]

Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating. If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused and there's always the next time that can be used to clarify. Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be listening.

[AdieuToLogic]

> Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating.

This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild.

> Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the minimum viable time to communicate.

Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

> Then everyone will be listening.

Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced. Neither meetings nor their duration are contributory to this skill.

[anilakar]

You can spend too much time communicating and not communicate enough at the same time. Effectiveness is the key here.

[watwut]

> This is a phenomena I have yet to experience in the wild.

I have totally seen infinite meetings where nothing is achieved, nothing is really said, but someone socially isolate just talks and talks and talks because it is his only chance to interact.

[AdieuToLogic]

> I have totally seen infinite meetings where nothing is achieved, nothing is really said, but someone socially isolate just talks and talks and talks because it is his only chance to interact.

Is that communicating though?

Or are those meetings examples of people occupying the same space while audibly moving air with their lungs in order to feel better about themselves?

[6P58r3MXJSLi]

> Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced

communicating is also a skill

learning to communicate effectively can be perfected too

[colechristensen]

You've missed the point and agreed with the GP.

Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening.

(i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)

[c0balt]

Maybe this is just my interpretation but OP effectively argued "too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction".

The commenter above argued that the problem was slightly different, it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication. A meeting in itself does not create communication (of information and exchange of opinions etc.) and the commenter wanted to increase the number of meaningful meetings instead of/in addition to just cutting down meetings by numbers. The criticism of not enough time spent on communication is in the same vein, both agree on the issue of "too many unnecessary meetings".

[colechristensen]

Y'all are saying the same thing over and over with slightly different words proposing that the different way of saying it has a meaningful impact on the message. It doesn't.

>"too many ineffective meetings, we should have less unnecessary meetings and a clearer, independent direction".

>it's not too many meetings for communication but too many that are not achieving effective communication

^^ there's no meaningful distinction between those two, discussions that devolve into such things suck all potential value out of a thread.

[thaumasiotes]

The distinction is explicit in the statements you quoted. One is advocating for lessening the number of meetings. One is saying that won't help, and instead advocating for increasing the quality of meetings.

[cassianoleal]

Actually, it isn't.

The first is:

* Acknowledging that too many meetings are ineffective

* Suggesting reducing the number of inneffective meetings

* Saying there needs to be clearer, independent direction

The second is:

* Stating that there are not too many meetings in general (the first says nothing about this)

* Acknowledging that too many meetings are ineffective (same as bullet 1 of the first sentence)

* Not suggesting how to address either problem

I agree with GP. There is no meaningful distinction between the 2, but the first suggests 2 ways to solve the problem of ineffective meetings whereas the second simply acknowledges the existing of problems.

[AdieuToLogic]

> Too much time is spent attempting to communicate and as such, communication isn't actually happening.

This is where I think we have a different definition of communication.

> (i.e. we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where nothing happens and few people are any more informed than they were before)

Hence my clarification of:

  Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually 
  prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

For example, if a project kick-off meeting consists of the highest ranking managers talking and everyone else having no contribution, listen to what they are saying; their "vision" is all that matters.

Another example is when product and/or engineer managers use "stand-ups" to ask each engineer the status of their deliverables. Listen to what they are saying; we micromanage and do not trust the team.

  Listening is a skill, one which is can be perfected if practiced.

[fragmede]

That's certainly one way of looking at daily stand-up. The other way is that humans aren't perfectly spherical communicators so sometimes daily stand-up really does manage to bring up blockers for the manager to actually resolve.

[AdieuToLogic]

>> Another example is when product and/or engineer managers use "stand-ups" to ask each engineer the status of their deliverables. Listen to what they are saying; we micromanage and do not trust the team.

> That's certainly one way of looking at daily stand-up. The other way is that humans aren't perfectly spherical communicators so sometimes daily stand-up really does manage to bring up blockers for the manager to actually resolve.

Good point.

I should have made the example more germane by saying "(always|only) using stand-ups for status updates." My apologies for the ambiguous exemplar.

EDIT:

Speaking of daily stand-ups...

IMHO, there are only two questions which need be asked of each team member in a stand-up:

  1 - Is there anything you need from anyone in
      order to be successful *today*?

  2 - Is there anything you want to share with
      the rest of the team?

Any other questions/concerns need to be addressed separately.

[colechristensen]

Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message.

Step back and think if a dispute over the usage of the word is necessary or helpful in this context.

Amusingly this is where a lot of communication goes to die, loss of the big picture and discussion of how to use particular words.

Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insisting on using different language to express the same idea.

[AdieuToLogic]

> Standard philosophical problem, you're disagreeing about the definition of a word instead of the content of the message.

Perhaps I should have said we have a different understanding or expectation of communication, instead of "definition." For this confusion I introduced, I apologize.

> Clearly you agree with OP about how time is wasted but you're insisting on using different language to express the same idea.

I do not.

Again, as I previously self-quoted:

  Most meetings are not about communication. They are usually 
  prescriptive in form and dictatorial in nature.

OP postulated:

  Or maybe we're spending too much time on communicating.

To which I disagreed. OP then opined:

  If too much time is allocated then its hard to stay focused 
  and there's always the next time that can be used to 
  clarify.

Which is an indirect reference to meetings, not communication.

Finally, OP concluded with:

  Cut all the unnecessary meetings and only allocate the 
  minimum viable time to communicate. Then everyone will be 
  listening.

Which erroneously correlates meetings with listening. Your original response included:

  ... we all spend way too much time in useless meetings where 
  nothing happens ...

Thus reinforcing said erroneous correlation. I blame myself for insufficiently expressing my thoughts on the difference between listening, which is implicit in communication and the topic of the article, and meetings, which are an assembly of people requiring only physical presence.

[colechristensen]

You're still doing it. Now with "definition" vs. "a different understanding or expectation of"

You are not understanding, perhaps willfully, what people are writing and muddying the waters by trying to make unimportant distinctions about words instead of engaging with the meaning as intended by the author.

Every one of your clarifications has just been a pedantic restatement of what someone else clearly meant using different words trying to make a distinction which is not at all necessary to make.

[majormajor]

I don't think "attempting to communicate" - or especially not "attempting to LISTEN" as in the title here - would be the stated reason for many meetings. "Pitching people on your shit" or "making sure shit gets done the way management wants it to" is much more accurate for most corporate dev and B2B/B2C sales/product meetings.

For the typical "agile" process for software:

- standup: this fits, attempting to communicate status and request help with blockers

- backlog grooming: attempting to figure out what to do with artifacts of generally-async communication (tickets from a backlog, either created by you in the past or by others). attempting to fit them into the process best. Communication is often seen as a necessary evil, and this process often goes faster with fewer people. if people bring up questions, there may be some attempts to communicate in explanations.

- sprint planning: work assignment and time management/estimations. similar to above, questions could spark attempts to communicate, but it's not the primary purpose.

- sprint retro: improve the team dynamics and the flow of the process. communication is usually assumed here, but in practice it's "people saying things, they get written down, then the next sprint happens same as the last." there often isn't effective communication to the people who could change things

I think if the goal of meetings was more specifically "we are going to communicate until our mental pictures are exactly the same" you'd end up with faster/better actual work from everyone on the team.

But in big orgs that's usually not even what's wanted. If the plan sucks, but it's a VP's pet project, it's not good for various whole teams in that org to all effectively communicate with each other to realize it sucks but not have the political skills or pull to change the VP's mind...

[twelfthnight]

I’ve been in so many meetings where the outcome is to plan another meeting, and include even more folks. Whichever team brings the most folks steers the decision in their favor, and thus manages hire more unnecessary employees for political will (which then increases the need for even more meetings).

The way out is creating a singular vision (eg leadership) and assigning teams goals they can work independently on towards that vision. It is to remove dependences between teams (and thus the need for them to communicate as much), not to increase communication or Jira tickets or Gantt charts or RACI matrices.

[atomicnumber3]

Critical issue is that it expects leaders to actually lead. Common yet fatal flaw in many plans.

[mixermachine]

In my experience in software architecture, drawing a diagram often saves you >60 minutes of discussion and potentially multiple meetings. This works even with a badly drawn but truthful one.

Use an Ai agent + Mermaid.js for a quick scribble if you are in a remote meeting. Use white boards or pen + paper in a local meeting.

Diagrams are so much clearer then words, especially if the concept or logic in question is not trivial.

[mechsy]

Yes, it helps to keep the bigger picture (pun intended) in focus and something tangible to criticise. Same for design docs. Otherwise, the conversation‘s spotlight just keeps moving around and might even follow whatever thread one of the more prolific speakers just came up with, which carries the danger of derailing the whole thing and adjourning without a decision.

[UK-Al05]

I have feedback in the past that people don't like diagrams upfront, because it presents a finished solution.

[chaboud]

I think this is, more often, that we are spending too much time pretending to communicate. Far too often I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have a quorum, but people try to have the meeting anyway. Even more often than that, I've found myself in a meeting that doesn't have the sufficient pre-requisites to be useful. It will just be some AI slop document dropped in front of folks, with little to no regard for coherent thought or responsibility. It's 30 minutes of gaslighting the readers, trying to make them feel stupid for "not getting it", followed by 10 minutes of "this meeting was a waste of time" course-correction (we read our docs in the beginning of meetings).

And the problem is that the communication (or alignment) is the thing that the meeting is supposed to be about, sharing well-considered thoughts and cohesive direction, soliciting meaningful feedback against clearly-articulated assertions. Instead, we're all-to-often addressing someone's attempt to turn their job into a group project, the stone soup of the modern business world. You can lay this bare by asking "what is the aim of this meeting?" early on, to level-set that the meeting owner isn't just setting up a study group.

Birds-eye-view-only managers only see work get done in meetings, so they assume that the meeting is where the work gets done. They don't understand all of the work that went into what came before the meeting to make it a successful one. If you rush the "communication" before you've found the clarity of thought, your meeting is just noise.

There's a simple but powerful response to this sort of persistent malaise, one that strikes fear in the hearts of the secretly inept: "I don't know, but let's figure it out right now."

When it's time to slow down and walk through the problem, I hold folks to an ordering of dependency: Why, What, How, Who, When... If you don't know all of the things before (e.g., Why, What, How - if you're trying to figure out Who), you cannot proceed. I don't care if you're an intern or a VP. No short-cuts to bullshit hand-wavy answers.

Decompose the problem, do the thinking, reason through it right there, and, if the team doesn't change its behavior, find another team. In the right environment, some folks are willing and able to step up to the plate and act like grown-ups working together to craft something better. Sadly, quite a few can't (or won't) answer the call to be responsible adults.

So they call another agenda-less meeting.

[bawolff]

Spending time "on" communicating is not the same thing as communicating.