Meetings As Levers For Culture Change

Below is a snippet from the Prologue of my upcoming book. Every week another portion of the book will arrive in your inbox until I complete the self-publishing process.

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In professional settings, meetings tend to be held in the spaces and places where patterns of being together are modeled, reinforced, and begin to reverberate. These patterns ripple out and become embedded in the group culture. Thus, meetings can be a powerful lever for shifting how work gets done at the micro and macro levels. Meetings are where we see organizations walking their talk - animating their values through their actions. While “culture” tends to be fairly intangible, often described as “the water we are swimming in,” it is In meetings one sees an organization’s actual culture most clearly. 

Many organizations espouse values of “autonomy,” “flat/non-hierarchical,” “collaborative,” and “inclusive,” yet when observing their meetings, we see the highest paid people talking the most, staff provided little time to provide input on important matters, people looking to the managers for permission to talk, little listening and lots of monologues. While these organizations' values sound good on paper, their stakeholders quickly see how synthetic these laudable labels are, and those values they expose tend to be as stagnant as the posters they are plastered upon.

Our organizations face more complex problems than ever before, and the same thinking that got us in this mess is not the same thinking we need to clean this mess up and create anew. Creating anew requires us to work differently together, and the easiest way we can begin to practice new ways of being in iterative, connected and experimental manners are meetings. If we change the way we meet, we can change the way we work, and in doing so create the quantum changes we seek.