What did you do in the last meeting you attended? Assuming you weren’t running it yourself, did you listen to what everyone was saying? How many times did you check your email? How many websites did you visit? What proportion of the meeting would you say was important to you personally in getting your work done? I know the answers to these questions. I don’t know the answer to this one: why do we do this to ourselves?

After securing food, shelter, clothing and sex, early humankind’s next step (or detour) on the road to civilization was probably having a meeting. The next step after that was to not pay attention when someone else was grunting about something irrelevant to the next wooly mammoth hunt. Today we can look back with pride and marvel at how far we have advanced from our primitive beginnings. Now, unlike our distant ancestors, we have agendas!

I have written before about the strange rite of the weekly meeting, whose frequency is determined by an arbitrary astronomical rhythm, and not at all by a connection to the work at hand. But if meetings are perhaps inevitable, at the very least let’s pay attention! What is rampant throughout clinical development, and probably the entire pharma enterprise, is what should be called “unattended meetings.” We should suggest to Microsoft, makers of the ubiquitous Outlook software for scheduling meetings, that they add another choice to meeting requests other than “Accept”, “Accept Tentatively” and “Decline”: “Attending But Not Listening.”

This Time, Technology is Not the Answer

One thing we know, technology has only worsened the unattended meetings phenomenon. Twenty years ago the worst thing we probably did when we weren’t paying attention was to doodle (with a pen, on a piece of paper). It is technology that enables us to supplant doodling with checking, and writing, emails; surfing the web on phone, tablet or notebook; or just doing other work. Simple telephone conferencing has created the modern marvel of enabling us to not pay attention to meetings from across the globe, in real time! Alexander Graham Bell could never have anticipated such value added.

What’s the Cause?

Why are we not attending to the meetings we attend? The list of reasons is long: certainly a lack of relevance and a surfeit of meandering discussion is the first cause. But there are worse reasons, such as attending the meeting only in order to assert authority, or defend a staffer from another department, or because your company values “consensus” at all costs, or because we are afraid of being left out. Then there’s misplaced politeness, basic mistrust, and the ultimate time-waster: if she’s going to come, you’re going to come too!

One of the key motivations for attending, yet not attending, meetings is that there may in fact be a moment in that meeting – brief but critical ­– when there will be a kernel of information that actually is relevant to your work. But what a cost to get it! And what a risk that you’ll miss it, even if you are not surfing!

The root cause of this time-wasting may be that we mistake a meeting as a medium of getting information. There can hardly be a more inefficient means of sharing, getting or requesting information. Instead, this is what today’s technology is indeed useful for. Clinical development is an arena filled with software applications generating data at our fingertips. While the software might not be good at turning that data into information, that’s what we humans can do, as long as we don’t spend our time in meetings instead.

Justifiable Risk

There are really only two good reasons to have a meeting: discovery, and decision-making. Discovery is a powerful purpose; decision-making is a necessary one. A meeting for discovery is how a staff group formally explores a research or process problem; if well run, these meetings can be exhilarating, and put other meetings to shame. Group decision-making may indeed be critical, and if so, no one should feel the need to drift to the electronic ether while the decisions hang in the balance.

Short of eliminating all of the meetings that we actually do not attend, we should be helping each other scrutinize the reasons why a meeting is being called. Is it because we don’t think about the topic until we walk into the room? Is it because the way we use our technology tools is failing to inform us? Is it because we outsourced the work but can’t trust who we outsourced to? Is it because we are afraid to act on the obvious, without using a multidisciplinary group to cover our tracks? The time we are wasting is our own. No one can afford it, and we all pay for it. Let’s have a meeting to discuss this.