Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I guess I complain about meetings a lot.

This morning, NPR’s Yuki Noguchi ran a piece on the overuse and misuse of meetings in Corporate America, and several of my friends immediately forwarded the link to me.

Yeah. I complain about meetings. A lot.

But then, I have a lot of meetings about which to complain.

Ever since my company adopted the Agile methodology for our IT projects, the number of meetings has doubled. Not only that, but the number of pertinent meetings on my schedule has actually decreased.

Before, my meeting-load had two types of meetings in it: those that related directly to a specific project and to my work on it as a software developer, and team meetings with management. Now, I have a plethora of meetings where the whole team gets together to do everything as a group. This now includes:

• Scrums (daily stand-up/status meetings)
• Grooming sessions (where we flesh out and refine requests for future work)
• Sprint planning sessions (all-day meetings to organize the work for our 3-week “sprint”)
• Quarterly planning sessions (all-day meetings to sketch out the work for upcoming quarters)
• Demo meetings (where the QA/UAT members prove the changes for the product owners)
• Retrospectives (where we do a post-mortem on the 3-week sprint just completed)

And these are in addition to any meetings that are directly related to specific work I’m supposed to do. Oh, and we still have meetings with management, to learn of the latest layoff or reduction in benefits.

On reading the NPR article, my immediate reaction was, “Duh.” My second reaction was that this is a result of Corporate America’s redefinition of “team.”

In the last decade or so, the concept of a “team” has changed dramatically. We used to think of teams as a group of folks with disparate yet complimentary skills. Think of a football team, where different members have different skill sets, sometimes quite specialized. You need someone who’s good at kicking and punting, and someone who’s good at passing. You need speedy receivers as well as beefy defenders. You would not try to field a team of all linebackers or all quarterbacks.

And yet, that’s where we are heading in IT shops today. The concept of “team” no longer relies on specialized skills and different areas of expertise. Nope. Now we want everyone to be able to do everything. Anyone in the team should be able to run a meeting, balance resource workloads, analyze defects, devise solutions, program batch/online/front-end/back-end components, test fixes, validate deployments, and do anything. While this sort of jack-of-all-trades approach to resource management can work in theory, it ignores the fact that these different activities often require different aptitudes. Someone who’s good at high-level coordination work may not be well-suited to nose-in-the-dirt detailed analysis.

But even if you could assign any resource to any particular task, it falls apart with the meetings where the new “team” mentality is taken to its ridiculous end-point, where we are all equal voices with equal say, and we all have to agree on Item 1 before we can move on to Item 2.

In Noguchi’s piece, this sentiment is boiled down to its essence by Al Pittampalli, an author and an expert on “meeting culture.”

“One of the biggest problems in organizations is that the meeting is a tool that is used to diffuse responsibility.” — Al Pittampalli

Corporate America in general, and Agile methodology in particular, devolve an unprecedented level of management responsibility down upon the workers, wrap that responsibility up in buzzwords like “empowerment” and “self-actualization,” and then close the deal by imposing a faux-democratic feel to the proceedings. It’s all an illusion.

Responsibility is pushed downward. Authority (and its rewards) are retained above.

It’s a shell game, and we’re the gulls.

k