Don't make bad meetings worse

I've learned in a couple of decades of attending meetings of all kinds that sometimes you have to restrain yourself from speaking. If, that is, you want the meeting to end.

Meetings involving engineers can be aggravating: engineers tend to be less well socialized, less adept at reading and responding to subtle behavioral cues, than normal people. Yet I will choose a meeting of a hundred poorly socialized engineers over one with a dozen community activists any day. The engineers, by training and temperament, are inclined to get to the damned point. They also recognize facts when they see them, and respond to rational arguments.

Community activists, on the other hand, are often people with more zeal than talent. (If they could get paid for their zealousness, they'd be getting paid instead of being community activists.) The fact that they get excited by something the rest of the community does not, means that the activists are a little odd. Sometimes, they're more than a little odd: they're flat-out nuts.

You'd think that the lofty goal toward which they're donating their time would keep them unified. You'd be wrong. The contention usually comes down to incompatible visions of how to achieve the goal. In more troubled cases, "the" goal is sheerest illusion: two or more factions are pursuing different ends without realizing it.

But even if they can reach consensus on a goal, they can't stop being odd, or nuts. And that's what kills meetings.

It only takes one person with a bone he can't stop picking to bring an otherwise rational discussion to a halt. The fussiness or crankiness or belligerence or outright malice he brings to the table infects everyone else, and before you know it, a verbal brawl has broken out. Even if the brawl is avoided, the discussion still simmers along but gets nowhere.

A strong leader can keep a meeting from rat-holing. However, a strong leader is anathema to a meeting of community activists. (Given the angular personalities involved, perhaps it's instinctive wisdom for the group to deny such power to any one member.) The most that can be tolerated is a moderator to preserve what Wodehouse called "the decencies of debate." I think it would be better for a verbal brawl to break out, because at least such a shouting match might tire the participants enough to give up the battle in a reasonable amount of time. Preserving the decencies of debate just allows the debate to go on, and on, and on, and on.

Perhaps the worst problem afflicting these people is a profound inability to analyze their own behavior. They rail at the group's dysfunction, but have not the slightest idea that they're major contributors to it. It's not unexpected -- if they knew how odd or nutty they were, they wouldn't be odd or nutty -- but it is unfortunate.

If you found yourself in such a gathering, your first impulse would be to fix it. You'd want to make people see how fruitless their rat-holing was. You'd want to explain just why the "debate" is pointless.

And you'd make things worse. You'd be throwing oil on a fire.

The only way to deal with these people is to let them have their say, then move on as quickly as possible. Don't make things worse by trying to argue with them. Just stay quiet, and keep reminding yourself that you're foregoing the pleasure of telling them how foolish (or selfish, or otherwise deficient) they are for the arguably greater pleasure of getting the damned meeting over sooner.