# Unnatural Nature of Meetings and Managers By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2024-03-27 I'm convinced of two things regarding managers and meetings. First, meetings have become a place where managers believe their role is to put on a show to justify their existence. As most managers are not entertainers, attending these meetings is like going to middle school play. Sure, there is a story, but it is often bland and akin to listening to a robot read the screenplay. The most significant difference is that one cares very little about the manager versus the children in the middle school play. But this only heightens the absurdity of the manager's poor performance at every meeting. Of course, the performance aspect of the meeting is entirely unnecessary, especially if it is not at least entertaining. The performance only highlights the manager's anxiety created by the organization, which often has very few clear expectations and objectives. So, without clarity, managers spontaneously start to tap dance while spinning 20 plates on poles. The second thing I'm convinced about regarding managers and meetings is they are largely unnecessary in nearly every way. Complex systems always self-organize without a designated manager and meeting to discuss performance metrics. This does not mean that the system has no innate objectives or that the individuals within the system do not communicate. The system often has objectives, and individuals frequently communicate. A flock of birds wants to survive, and the individual birds constantly send and receive messages about their position. Within human organizations, the innate goal is often survival via generating more income than expenses, and people coordinate all the time regarding their tasks and issues via emails, phone calls, text messages, etc. Some may say that the 'alpha' of the wolf pack represents the manager, but one confuses leadership with management. Leaders occupy emergent positions within complex systems to serve a particular function at a specific time that we humans identify as leadership, but the system hardly sees it this way. Outside of this place and time, the leader in these systems is just another individual. Managers are a human organizational construct intended to control how individuals operate from a place of assigned authority. There is no leading or emergence. It's just a position of power devoid of meaning. Thus, one could easily argue that meetings and managers are not natural and are likely highly inefficient on the grand scale of universal existence. It's all just performances of what we think organizing and efficiency look like. Natural systems believe otherwise. #### Related Items [[Management]] [[Performance]] [[Meetings]] [[Emergence]] [[Complex Systems]] [[Systems Thinking]] [[Organization]]