I was thinking on this one, and on the question of Why Meet? recently, and it occurred to me that what we have heard thrown around as a joke may be the most important unifying definition we have for meetings.
Specifically, when you ask a practitioner what a meeting is, they’ll say “Whatever my client says it is.” I swear I heard someone say the same thing about their research - when looking at meetings, they look at whatever their subjects happen to call meetings.
This makes the defining characteristic of a meeting this: it is declared as such.
Which raises all kinds of cool questions!
- Why do we feel the need to call something a “meeting” as opposed to a party or a get together or a conversation or something else?
- What does the declaration of meeting create in the group? I’ve already put out the idea of obligation, and perhaps this civilizing force concept is part of that?
- When your boss says he wants to drop by for a little chat, and you tell your friends you have to go because you have a meeting, what’s going on there?
• Wilbert’s question: what does the nature and frequency of declared meetings mean about a group or a culture?
@dgibson1 - I think this is why I don’t feel that a side conversation within a meeting counts as a separate meeting. A separate conversation, yes, but not a meeting. Certainly from a facilitator’s perspective, that’s either a break-out (planned) or a dysfunction (unplanned) within a meeting (the declared event).