The Role of Meetings

In the span of one day this week I heard an interview on Marketplace Money and read an article in the New York Times critiquing a wholesale return to the physical office and, in particular, the concept of the In-Person Meeting.

Meetings are interesting beasts. They absolutely have roles. The roles are simply different than they were.

The best project manager I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, Seth Roy, demonstrated the right way to run a meeting while we were working on the Steve Jobs Theater. Most meetings–the regular, non-emergency, weekly sort–were extraordinarily brief and pleasant for such a complex, high-pressure project. They were scripted affairs, more to record consensus than to deliberate. Everyone knew their part of the script because Seth vigorously ‘did the rounds’ leading up to the meeting; talking, emailing, coordinating, facilitating, and doing whatever he needed to do so that action items moved forward, surprises were nipped in the bud, and by the time we all sat together the state of play was invariably pretty damn impressive.

In an unexpected way, I see a similar dynamic in my interactions with clients now. Back in the day, a client meeting was the dramatic reveal, when progress was shown, explained, and opened for critique. The intent was to put the project’s best foot forward in a forum in which I could emphasize the proposal’s logic and counter any misinterpretation.  Recently, I haven’t taken this route. I’ve preferred to send a draft earlier, explain it in text and diagram, and let clients digest it first on their own. As we’ve grown more comfortable with the immediacy of digital communication, our design process has become more conversational and our level of trust has heightened. If design proposals do coincide with a scheduled client meeting, our default understanding is that the client will postpone decision-making until at least the next day. This works especially well for couples, so that they can discuss it on their own terms and then return to me as a unified front.