According to a study published in Live Science, it appears that they do. And if Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed, human decisions often depend more on what we think within the first two seconds of a situation than they do on any sort of group process. Meetings are fun to hate. So, if most people hate them and if meetings make us stupider, why are we doing them? To form a meaningful opinion on the study in Live Science, we’d really need to read the original study and critique the methodology. Herein lies a piece of really valuable advice: don’t take statements at face value just because they start with “research says”. It’s not that they lie, it’s just that most media outlets publish summaries of studies and in the most basic of terms. There simply isn’t room or sufficient interest to publish all the delimitations of the study. In truth, “studies” usually yield results that are very specific to the conditions that were present in the study itself. So, no, meetings DON’T make us stupider. What this report is really saying is that a group of research subjects, functioning under a certain set of conditions, produced fewer items on a brainstorm list than they each did as individuals. So what about our own infamous, oft-villified meetings? My simple answer is: never go cold into any meeting. Ever. Plan it. Think about the purpose. Think about what activities will achieve the purpose. Think about who the right participants would be. Here are a few things we do around here to convene meetings that expand intelligence rather than shrink it.

1. Never have a meeting for the sake of having a meeting. Think about the goal. Is the task(s) at hand the sort of thing best handled by an individual or by a group?
2. Spend time designing the meeting’s structure and don’t ask your participants to sit and listen to reports anymore than is absolutely necessary. Unless your goal is to put them into a trance. If you have a lot of reporting you want to do, see if you can make it interactive or intersperse your reports with other activities.
3. Be clear and explicit about your decision rule: who is making the decision and how. Then stick to it like it was religion.
4. Honor your timeframes. Start and end on time.
5. Set a realistic agenda and plan it in advance.
6. Call us for training and/or consultation on collaborative management and meeting design/facilitation.

I’m not really kidding about that sixth item. We teach this stuff and we do a lot of design and meeting facilitation around here and sometimes it helps to get help. I suspect that, as with everything else, nothing is a panacea. Some things work some times, other things work at other times. Some situations lend themselves to group decision making. Others to individual — and even split-second — action. The trouble isn’t with “meetings”, though — it’s with the really lame habit of convening meetings mindlessly.