# Finding What Works in Meetings By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2023-02-10 Professionals attend meetings. Often many meetings within the course of a career. If one attends three meetings a day, three days a week, in twenty years one will have attended approximately 9,000 meetings. When one lives this, it just seems that one has a meeting to attend, or that work is challenging to execute given the interruptions of meetings. However, if one takes a step back and assesses the magnitude of the situation, one can come to appreciate that with that many meetings one could potentially find out what is generally effective in meetings. In short, one could either conduct an operational study or an experiment. If one views the meetings with a scientific bent, one could enhance one’s organizational effectiveness. Again, most people do not seem to do this. Instead, their focus is on the uniqueness of a given meeting (e.g., the agenda, the people, etc.). These elements define, at least rhetorically, why the meeting is being held, but it doesn’t exhaust all that could be experienced or learned. Understanding how people, in general, act during a meeting is useful. Observing how people respond to different types of statements and behaviors is useful. And, with nearly 10,000 opportunities, one can execute these different types of actions and behaviors and see what tends to work. It is one thing to read a management book about how to conduct effective meetings. It is another thing to experience the spectrum of meeting types and outcomes. Over the course of a career, one will literally see it all. Finding what works in a meeting requires attention to those things occurring outside the agenda. When it comes to understanding meetings, context matters as much as content. #### Related Items [[Meetings]] [[Attention]] [[Learning]] [[Science]] [[Business]]