Methinks

I used to attend a lot of meetings at which I would find my brain in some sort of peculiar gear, not quite neutral, but without much transmission of power into action despite the incredible energy going into running other things.

One day, the boss asked, "Why do you keep falling asleep at meetings? Not enough sleep?"

I was torn between the truth and the other truth. So I gave him both barrels. "Working too hard, so my brain switches off to save energy when not engaged."

There was a curious mix of outrage and confusion on his face.

The thing is that both these things were true. I was working far too hard, with too little of consequence to show for it, doing things that resulted in other meaningless things. At the same time, my brain was terribly disengaged during meetings because every now and then, we'd be listening to the latest gossip and irrelevancies just spun off from the rumour mill.

It got so bad that I took to hooking my laptop up to the room projector so that I could refute the sort of nonsense people were spouting. Things like "Hey, the results were soooo bad that year..." or "Last year we said that..." could be refuted just by pulling up the relevant minutes of past meetings, or statistics with comparisons and graphs.

That's when I realised the second thing. You could be right, but it wouldn't save you. That's a bit like the Republican party in the United States now. Alternatively, it was a bit like what I call the Half-Assed Theory of Leadership: 'You are either right behind or left behind.'

You see the thing is that when people think up wild fantasies and crazy theories, they hate being shot down immediately after take-off. The idea of contention as a mechanism for disposing of the trash before it begins to fruit seems to be anathema to such people. It makes them feel bad, and somebody (normally the shooter) will have to pay.

Fortunately, the shooter was also the de facto minute-taker for some of these meetings. This second mechanism helped to preserve a record of true proceedings in a handful of important cases.

You see, meetings are for people to come together to do work. They should never be rambling story-telling sessions in which people essentially say, "Methinks that..." and the whole lot of 'methinks' form a body of literature for further development. It's not about opinions alone, but about informed and considered opinions, preferably with sound justifications.