Businesses do meetings.  They do lots of meetings!  There is nothing more uninspiring than going into a meeting knowing from the outset that little progress is likely to be made in getting past a business obstacle.  Hours can go by and the sum total achievement might be an in-depth knowledge of the constituent minerals of a bottle of Evian. 

A date for the next meeting is placed in diaries with the hope that things will be different then.  Everyone knows though that they won’t.  The problem will not magically disappear, and the entrenched positions of the different interests at the table will not have changed either.  What can be done to avoid rigor mortis setting in?

You could try jumping onto the board table and with great enthusiasm and fanfare encourage colleagues by announcing; “let’s do some blue sky thinking… think outside the box”.  In truth, the only box people are thinking about will be what is on the telly tonight!

As an alternative approach, you may wish to adopt the method used by a certain management consultancy when attempting to engage a room full of accountants.  (To give you an idea of the type of clientele we are dealing with here, the accountants were asked to dress down for the workshop - of the 12 present, only one made any sort of attempt at complying and did so by loosening his tie and wearing a jumper.)

“Right guys, I want everyone to get real friendly!  Please leave your seat and see if you can all get on these six paper tiles I have placed in the middle of the floor.  Good!  Now I shall remove two of those tiles and see if you can now fit on four”, said Steve “power handshake” Consultant hopefully.

The silent agony of removing 12 bookkeepers from their calculators screamed volumes “What does this teach us…?” questioned Steve - it teaches us Steve that you must know your audience and to never mess with the ‘men in grey’ - they were not impressed.

If the above two examples don’t grab you (please do not try them at home without the supervision of an adult), perhaps the following case may offer a glimmer of hope.

I was recently called into a meeting where for the past nine months my client had failed to make progress with its foreign, and much larger supplier, in terms of strengthening data integration.  Meetings had been held to try and identify “where things have been going wrong”, and by extension, who was to blame.  As the case in most corporate environments, the pace of change was proving excruciatingly slow.  The suppliers were also not in the mood to be told that problems with data integrity resided primarily with them.

For this meeting, rather than work out where things were going wrong and point the finger of blame, we merely asked the suppliers for a report where we could identify at a given date the figures they understood to be correct.  Armed with this knowledge my client could take remedial action to ensure a smooth supply chain.  The suppliers were happy with this proposal as the information was easily available and could be provided at little cost. It also circumvented an analysis of their business processes.

What this demonstrated for me was that in certain cases the problem is not so much in the issue itself, but in the way that it is phrased, and the framework in which it is placed.  If it is possible to rephrase the question, or place the issue within a slightly different context, entrenched positions may not necessarily remain so. Think outside of the box ‘yes’, but you don’t need to jump into and out of it with your feet tied together to prove the point.