Why it's so hard to change meeting culture

Meeting patterns have worn a DEEP groove into our corporate psyche.

If you’ve tried to improve your meeting culture and not managed to make a big dent, I'm not surprised.

Or perhaps things got better for a while and then went back to how they were before.

Here are 6 reasons people find them so hard to change.

1. It’s hard to find the time to do anything new in meetings when you’re already maxed out in so many meetings.
2. Changing something in a meeting is taking a risk in public. Privately changing your morning routine is hard enough.
3. You have to get other people to do something different too. It's a mini-change process in its own right. And is it just me, or is this harder when it’s your own team who know you well?
4. There aren’t really many examples of what great looks like to model improvements on. But a lot of examples of mediocrity to keep deepening that groove.
5. No one owns meeting culture. It’s not on a budget line item or in anyone’s job description.
6. Meetings are a systems problem. You need to figure out how to influence the system - not just impose some isolated interventions that take a lot of corporate willpower.

My answer? Run safe experiments.

👉  They probe what might work better with little effort

👉  They are less personally risky than making big public changes

👉  You don't have to own meeting culture or have a budget

👉  You can get people involved in what experiment to try next