> In my view, in a healthy organization, the meeting itself should be a point of collaboration. Otherwise it's a waste of time. This culture of behind-the-scenes-go-betweens also creates a lot of opportunity for opacity and malicious miscommunication (deceit).
Yes. At the same time, collaboration is limited when you need a lot of one-on-one discussions that are mostly relevant to one person.
You can have those one-on-ones as a part of a larger meeting. But is it optimal? I'd say no. During a meeting attention is limited. You can tackle one problem at the time and can't do them in parallel. If you have multiple problems to discuss where there's one stakeholder, it's a waste of time for others. A meeting that's a collection of queued one-on-ones is not efficient. An efficient meeting is one where every spoken sentence affects every participant.
Bulk of the project progress is done in the trenches, so to speak. Moving it to meetings makes them longer and more frequent. If someone waits for a meeting to drop an unexpected bomb for the whole team, it likely won't be resolved then and there. After all, others weren't aware so they didn't have time to prepare. Asking people to improvise on the spot is not a good idea. I'd argue that giving others as little time to prepare as possible is a symptom of an adversarial environment.
On the other hand, sharing things in advance gives everyone time to digest them.
Perhaps rewording the statement would work. How about "you should go into meetings only if there will be no surprises".
Yes. At the same time, collaboration is limited when you need a lot of one-on-one discussions that are mostly relevant to one person.
You can have those one-on-ones as a part of a larger meeting. But is it optimal? I'd say no. During a meeting attention is limited. You can tackle one problem at the time and can't do them in parallel. If you have multiple problems to discuss where there's one stakeholder, it's a waste of time for others. A meeting that's a collection of queued one-on-ones is not efficient. An efficient meeting is one where every spoken sentence affects every participant.
Bulk of the project progress is done in the trenches, so to speak. Moving it to meetings makes them longer and more frequent. If someone waits for a meeting to drop an unexpected bomb for the whole team, it likely won't be resolved then and there. After all, others weren't aware so they didn't have time to prepare. Asking people to improvise on the spot is not a good idea. I'd argue that giving others as little time to prepare as possible is a symptom of an adversarial environment.
On the other hand, sharing things in advance gives everyone time to digest them.
Perhaps rewording the statement would work. How about "you should go into meetings only if there will be no surprises".