May 21, 2008
The Topless Meeting
The psychedelic 60’s phrase coined by Timothy Leary, “Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out” is being replaced with Silicon Valley's new mantra “Turn Off, Tune in and Unplug.”
The latest meeting model encourages us to leave our laptops at our desks and keep our smart phones out of sight. If you can endure the initial anxiety and craving, this progressive trend in business paths the way to connecting with our coworkers, rather than what has become the ubiquitous distraction of our personal devices. Meeting productivity, focus and teamwork are the goals of disconnecting from our technology for a short time.
Todd Wilkens, who works at a San Francisco design firm Adaptive Path, waged a "personal war against CrackBerry."
His colleague, Dan Saffer, coined the term "topless" as in laptop-less. Mobile and smart phones must be stowed on a counter or in a box during meetings. "In this age of wireless Internet and mobile e-mail devices, having an effective meeting or working session is becoming more and more difficult," he wrote on his company blog in November. "Laptops, Blackberries, Sidekicks, iPhones and the like keep people from being fully present. Aside from just being rude, partial attention generally leads to partial results." LA Times Article
"It's increasingly difficult to get people's undivided attention," said Stanford University Professor Pamela Hinds, who studies the effects of technology on groups. "People would argue they are attending to the most important information without any loss of participation, but in fact they aren't fully there." The culprit: Etiquette has not kept up with technology, said Sue Fox, author of "Business Etiquette for Dummies."
Below, a pharmaceutical cure for Blackberry addiction (comedy):
Undoubtedly, meetings tend to drag when people don’t contribute or pay attention, but a common retort to “going topless” is that the distraction of personal devices is a symptom, not the disease. Meetings are a long-standing source of frustration because they are generally run badly.
John Kenneth Galbraith said of meetings, "Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything." To that end, here are some tips on assembly as you put away your toys and navigate this brave, new world.
Three Tips for a Fast and Focused Meeting:
- Write and keep an agenda.
- Everyone in the meeting drinks a bottle of water as the meeting begins.
- Conduct the meeting with everyone standing up.
People will tend to stay on topic, and when the allotted time is up (no more than an hour, unless there are scheduled breaks) everyone will be ready to use the restroom.
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