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Team Rocket’s identification of the problem is painfully vague. Preventing “things” from getting “out of hand” is going to mean different things to different team members. Which things? What is the threshold for “out of hand?”

In the hope of making a group of people more collaborative, people throw meetings at problems without sufficiently examining the problem itself. A regular meeting is an expensive way to solve a vague problem (see Figure 1.1), because meetings cost as much as everyone’s combined paycheck for the allotted time. If the goal is to get people talking, there are much cheaper tools than meetings. Instant messaging tools such as Slack,² Hipchat,³ and even good old-fashioned email allow groups of people to communicate a tremendous amount of information asynchronously, making it “knowledge on demand.” Tools like these can reduce unnecessary face time used for communication if they are applied with a clear purpose. Here’s an example of what I mean by “clear purpose”:

“We use (chat platform/channel) to discuss daily tasks and request assistance. Post your awesome cat pictures or recipes somewhere else.”

FIGURE 1.1 Meetings can be pretty costly when we are unprepared, because it’s everyone’s paycheck.

If you still need a meeting, the problem needs to be defined. When the problem feels under (or even un-) defined, identify and agree on the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Then diagnose the problem. Can anyone in your group be specific about what a check-in meeting is intended to accomplish? If they can, that’s a good start.

Job performance indicators for Team Rocket’s standing meeting could include an increase in efficiency by reducing the number of steps in a process, a list of ways in which the designs can be “ahead of the curve,” or the amount of new ideas produced around current problems reported by people receiving food delivery. Each of these goals is measurable, establishing a baseline against which the meeting can be examined.

Working from a primary problem, you can identify secondary problems, such as identifying and routinizing successful processes, or confronting individual fears about what could go wrong if Team Rocket weren’t doing its job well. Focusing on what could go wrong also has the potential to repair a negative project culture by providing a transparent forum for building camaraderie and trust.

A meeting is a synchronous approach to communication. It takes full advantage of the ways in which human beings communicate via speech, intentional and unintentional body language, and manipulation of physical space, such as creating a diagram together. A meeting affords tremendous capabilities for communication, but not all problems require this much communication to address. Once you have an agreement about the intended outcome, you’ve take the first step toward designing better meetings. The next step is running some experiments.