Engineering Life-On Meetings

I was spurred by a question asked by a friend. True to my nature, I went on a journey of digression (a diatribe) about meetings.

Why do we still have mandatory in-person meetings in the age of zoom and various other video chat services?

This message appeared on a friend’s timeline, sharing her frustrations with mandatory in person meetings. This message prompted the opening of a pandora’s box of emotions, full of strong opinions, hidden trauma, and simmering resentment towards the idea of mandatory work meetings, regardless of whether the meetings are live and in person or virtually through technology.

As with most topics, I tend to digress, go off on tangents, chase stray thoughts down rabbit holes, and sometimes not come back to the original topic until much later. The digression is almost always interesting, but the results of the journey may not always be satisfactory.

This strand that started out with a single statement has now evolved into a conglomeration of disparate ideas and opinions regarding those ideas. I draw upon my own experiences in my roles in life, both in academia and corporate America, observations of those experiences, and the knowledge I had garnered. It is a hodgepodge of salient memories from the deep recesses of my long-term memory, connected and analogized into a hopefully cogent essay. It is, as Joan Didion would say, me figuring out what I think by writing about it. Not much of the ideas are new, although the connecting and analogizing might be. Thanks for reading about my thinking, I am sorry about the mess. Be forewarned, it will get snarky.

The business meeting, as we know it today, has prompted recent stories from news outlets. This is one from CBS Sunday Mornings, about the amount of time considered wasted by the average worker. The COO of Shopify had gone to extreme measures to break out of the meeting cycle. (https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/A5F_ivAj6vFXEyyefVE6aqT_rKp4k8dp/)

Some questions that I wanted to address is:

·       What are the purposes of meetings?

o   Are there different kinds of meetings?

·       What makes a perfect meeting?

o   What differentiates my perfect meeting from all the other kinds of meeting that I have experienced?

·       How does the perfect meeting get corrupted?

Meetings are as varied as people. I know that people in both academia and industry schedule meetings at the slightest provocation. Some of the motivation comes from a need for democratization: we need to get consensus from all the constituents. Some of the motivation comes from the conveners’ need to cover their asses (CYA), this is accomplished by including as many people into a blame game meeting as possible, thereby placing any potential guilt on the invited crowd if a scapegoat is needed.

There are also those meetings that are convened to feed the egos of the conveners because they suffer from impostor syndrome and need the occasional meeting to strut in front of their direct reports as if they knew everything there is to know and to assert their potency and authority as the person in charge. It is much cheaper to just get them a prescription for an ED medicine, but I digress.

There are project meetings that are convened to track the progress of specific projects. These meetings are usually formatted to put the Key Performance Indexes (KPIs) as the focus. I don’t have issues with these meetings, as the economic viability of the company depends on tracking these indicators, although most project managers do not understand Goodhart’s Law, one of my new favorite intuition pumps, as I will relate later.

There are feel good, Kumbaya singing meetings; they are sometimes called all-hands meetings, or communication meetings. They are convened to either soften the hard blows from bad news on the business end: layoffs, closings, bad performances, tanking stock prices etc.; or as a way for management to pretend to communicate with the plebes about the goings on behind the closed corporate doors, while the only information dispensed are what they want to dispense. The infrequent moments of transparency, such as the Q & A sessions, are made mostly opaque by design, as the questions asked and answered are pre-selected and pre-spun by the corporate legal eagles.

None of those meetings interest me. Indeed, to partially answer my friend’s questions, those are the meetings that can happen through technology. When the meeting doesn’t matter, I don’t care enough to attend live. Zoom away.

For me, meetings are specifically meant for problem solving, they are the means, both physically and psychologically, to communicate amongst like-minded problem-solvers, and allow problem-solvers to collaborate, muck around and find out, to innovate and to be creative around specific problems.  They are essential for technical discussions as words alone are never adequate.

I believe that it is always better to meet in person, to be able to speak to the facial expressions and body language of the people that you are trying to communicate with, to read and dissect their obvious and hidden thoughts, to ask follow-up questions for clarification, to communicate. Communication is a dialog between people who desire communication with one another. The amount of interaction amongst a group of people working together is predictive of the result of the collaboration. This is also a function of the openness and transparency of the interactions, hence the difficulties in the meetings.

Meetings have a long history, probably going back as far as the first hunter-gatherers, meeting to decide on the best strategy to bring down their next source of animal protein, although I doubt that the first meeting had all the structures and formalities that our present-day meetings had accrued through history. No one called the meeting to order, no one had a pre-written agenda, no one tried to hide behind the rocks to avoid being called upon, no one tried to hide their smart flint under the table as they played games or perused prehistoric porn hub, and no one had kept meeting minutes so that upper management can review the notes and decide on a scapegoat if the hunt failed or who to reward an Amazon gift card as a form of recognition on a successful hunt.

There are many factors which create a fertile group oriented problem-solving environment.

·       Social interaction.

·       Serendipity.

·       Problem-solvers who have broad and diverse visions of the world, and therefore the problem.

·       Problem-solvers who are imbued with curiosity and playfulness.

We have written historical accounts of exceptional institutions whose primary purpose is to solve difficult problems. These organizations have recognized the roles of social interaction, serendipity, broad and diverse vision of the world, curiosity, and playfulness in their culture and organization in their organization’s successes. Many of these institutions deliberately design these factors into their organizational and physical structures. Some have gone out of their way to create situations and circumstances to encourage environments that encompass all the factors.

Ed Regis tells stories about how the founding director Abraham Flexner of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton New Jersey sought to build an institution solely dedicated to the advancement of human knowledge in his book Who Got Einstein’s Office: Eccentricity and Genius in the Institute of Advanced Study, (Regis 1987). Flexner was convinced that he needed to create an environment and a culture which naturally drew out the curiosity of those who were he hired to work at the institution. He knew that it was critical for him, the founding director, to establish the foundational ethos upon which the institution could build upon for the future. As the environment and culture were on his mind, one of the first priorities he had, ironically, was to hire a top-level pastry chef. Why? Because he knew that most of the scientists and mathematicians he was looking to hire are from Europe, who are used to having a collegial and refined café society; having tea twice a day is a critical activity and by inference, the best pastries are a vital attraction for the world’s top scientific minds. Teatime was central to the exchange of ideas amongst these wunderkinds. A collegial and relaxed atmosphere was conducive to the exchange of ideas and future close collaboration, and the most introverted scientists could not resist the call of the finest pastries. The teatime and pastries serve as the bait for the brilliant minds in the Institute, both to recruit them and to help cultivate fruitful cross-pollination and collaboration.  It is a very indirect and subtle way of doing both.

Jon Gerstner tells the story of how Bell Labs built a bucolic campus far away from the hustle and bustle of New York City, where it was originally, in Holmdel NJ, in The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, (Gertner 2012). The builders of the “new” Bell Labs put a great deal of thought to the design of the facilities, not just in terms of the technical requirements for experimental and computation needs but also in terms of how the laboratories and offices are situated to best promote serendipitous encounters; encounters that promotes cross pollination of ideas. The accepted practice at Bell Labs was to place people from disparate specialties in random contact with others to allow natural germination of ideas. In an idea later employed by Apple,  the cafeteria and mail pickup areas where placed in a central location, giving the workers opportunities to walk to the central hub of the laboratory and subtly promoting the water cooler socializing. Steve Jobs of Apple had also liked the idea of centralized hubs and he had wanted to go further by putting all the restrooms in the central area as well, before someone talked him out of it.

In the Bell Labs building, the offices and laboratories are distributed along long corridors which radiated outward so that the workers must walk past many offices and laboratories dedicated to different projects and in completely different technical areas, in the belief that people will be curious about all the different activities that surround them, and they are bound to poke their heads in and ask about what is going on. The architecture encourages open collaboration opportunities through subtly taking advantage of the curiosity of the problem-solvers.

Bell Labs also played match makers with the workers. John Bardeen was the theoretician in the trio of engineers that invented the bipolar junction transistor (BJT); Walter Brattain was the experimentalist in the trio; the third person was William Shockley, who was their manager and a stellar physicist in his own right. Bardeen and Brattain sat in the same office and at adjoining desks. The result? All three shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention of the BJT. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

I am sure that the transistor inventors had plenty of technical meetings during their time working together, but I don’t think Bell Labs management believed that only having work-related meetings would synthesize and cement the relationship between them. Close collaboration and communication amongst the co-inventors came from matching the collaborators’ technical knowledge to complement one another and allowing them to sit across from each other. It is important to remember that in this instance, successful collaborations came from deliberate and purposeful planning and nurturing of relationships.

Note that in both instances, the emphasis was not just on getting people to converse and communicate, it was to allow them to do so naturally, at their own pace, and allowing them time and space to converse, debate, postulate, hypothesize, conduct experiments, analyze, synthesize, loop back to retry, reconfigure, and do what scientists do best: muck around and find out. Social interaction was the gateway, a good first step to deep and broad conversations which led to productive exchanges through a complex and meandering path which was unencumbered by strict requirements. Efficiency was never the main consideration. Patience is required and expected, because the process of ideas exploration and collaboration are both random and unpredictable. Those who designed the Institute of Advanced Studies and Bell Labs knew and believed in that serendipitous process.

The curiosity factor has always been assumed of those who are accomplished experts; creative people are and should be very curious. A key aspect of their curiosity involves the broad and diverse vision posited previously. They should be curious about topics that are well outside of their areas of expertise. This type of broad curiosity often overcomes any hesitancy the problem-solvers may have about their lack of expertise in another area. Indeed, this is the basis for the open-source collaboration practices that are prevailing today. Problem-solvers are curious, it doesn’t matter whether they feel like their own expertise qualifies them to investigate a problem or not. As David Epstein wrote in his book Range (Epstein 2019), sometimes, a generalist whose perspective, unclouded by pre-conceived notions and limitations, offer a fresh and welcomed perspective of problems and are able to overcome habitual prejudices, rote and habitual assumptions which sometimes plague experts who are blindered by their own expertise.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”

Plato

Even though the above quote has been commonly attributed to Plato, the attribution is probably apocryphal. Regardless, it is a telling quote that rings true in my experience. What the quote implies is that humans exercise their imagination more completely and creatively when they are indulging in play; play that are pleasurable and satisfies their curiosity. They think best when their working memory is occupied with play. People at play shed their inhibitions, reticence, and guardedness immediately. People at play are more likely to slip into the state of flow or wu-wei, a state that is rarely achievable deliberately. 

There is a process for problem solving in the technical and science-based activities which is based on the practices of scientific process.  The problem is usually systematically identified, the constraints, theoretical and practical, are laid out. The desired outcome is also identified, sometimes it is context dependent; the desired outcome  can range between stringent and open ended.

Curiosity and playfulness fuel the idea generation phase of the problem-solving process since creativity and unencumbered thinking is essential to teasing out all the possibilities. Being playful also means not creating artificial barriers by setting limits or censoring the possible solutions; being self-limiting could potentially eliminate viable solutions by prematurely eliminating potential solution space.

On a side note, one of the most condescending phrases thrown around by those who are not problem-solvers is: “we don’t want to make this a science project”. It insinuates that those who do the work are too irresponsible and theoretical because they wish to explore all the possible solutions that are available. It also is directly motivated by a disregard for the skills of those who do the work, a blind adherence to Key Performance Indexes that are, at times, arrived at artificially and under duress. It is the deadliest phrase invoked during the problem-solving process. Problem solving is by definition a science project: one needs to approach it as an open inquiry as one would a science project rather than as a recycling of the same solutions in deference to efficiency, economy, and to meet artificially imposed limits. If a problem is deemed difficult enough to warrant the time and talents of the many in a meeting, then it is a science project. Declaring that it isn’t one doesn’t make it any less of a science project. A full solution space at the beginning is necessary, casting a wide net. It is only after a solution space has been identified that the paring process begins, considering efficiency, economy, and meeting artificially imposed limits.

Problem solving is also a highly iterative process. Many iterations of conjecture, experimentation,  testing, verification, trial and error, analysis, more idea generation occurs over time. The amount of time is determined by the context and parameters dictated by the problem definition. A familiar problem with numerous precedents will probably be resolved quickly and expediently without fuss by enacting procedural solutions, a term that Epstein uses. A complex problem with a significant number of unknowns and uncertainties deserves a slower and more thought-out problem-solving process, or a conceptually driven process. A misapplication of the procedural or conceptual could be disastrous for the KPI. A complex problem with significant unknowns and uncertainties treated procedurally means that the  procedurally proposed solutions are likely to fail successively as the solution process is iterated. Conversely, treating a simple and well-known problem conceptually, which rarely happens, means expending resources and schedule, which also destroys the all-important KPI.

An important but often ignored factor is the nature of idea generation and the introspective nature of analysis and synthesis work. Problem-solvers generally cannot generate solutions in a single meeting, as there are too many activities going on within an initial meeting, their working memory is so full of distractions  that they are not fully engaged solely on the problem. Humans need time to digest and process all the pertinent details, which requires that they take the problem back to their offices, if they are afforded that luxury, or where contemplation of the scope of the problem is possible. Each problem-solver, with a jumble of information crowding their working memory, must be allowed to organize and prioritize the information, alone and without time pressure, this translates to allowing all the problem-solvers a broad swath of time and space by themselves for contemplation and rumination. The time to be alone with the problem is essential.

Most of the solutions generated during the initial idea generation phase are partial solutions and range between incomplete and ill conceived. It isn’t until the problem has been scoped out that a vision be clarified.

There is nothing better than a meeting of minds convened with the purpose of resolving challenges. The furious flow of ideas, counterarguments, and counter-counterarguments is the soul of good problem-solving meetings. The magic of a great meeting, however, rarely exists under the meeting culture within formalized meeting environments where I have had the misfortune of being a participant.  Problem solving, idea generation, and decision making are all great reasons to have meetings but just because a meeting is convened does not mean that the solutions, ideas, and good decisions will result.

Another important factor which is also usually ignored is the temperament of the problem-solvers. Many are introverts, introverts are usually quite willing to be “social” if they view the purpose to be meaningful, but they are also unwilling to add to the din of noise that is typical of most meetings involving many people. Which leads us to the phenomena of groupthink.

Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome. (GroupThink n.d.)

The introvert will subjugate their own opinions and ideas in deference to the hierarchy which gives rise to groupthink because the social pressure to be a follower in a formal meeting situation is too great for an introvert to oppose. They are bullied into keeping silent.

More insidiously, having a manager present skew the discussion to the manager’s opinions. Even with those who are not introverts will accede to the hierarchy because it is just easier to not make waves. It is a foregone conclusion that consciously or subconsciously, the group will acquiesce to the manager’s opinions without an objective assessment of the manager’s opinions.

The ideal meeting which incorporates all the factors mentioned above is illusory in most present-day formal meeting contexts because there  is a concatenation of artificial practices and misconceptions about human behavior that characterizes modern meeting practices.

First there is the hierarchy, a pecking order which is the norm in all management structures. Meetings are usually the ones who call for meetings, even though it isn’t usually the highest-ranking manager that calls the meetings, all eyes are on the highest-ranking manager in deference to  organizational chart. Some managers used to be engineers, their effectiveness in presiding over a problem-solving meeting is a function of how much of their problem-solving sense and know how had been removed during the requisite managerial frontal lobotomy when they became managers. There were many managers in my past who were still problem-solvers at heart, but the corporate hierarchy no longer incentivize them to be problem-solvers, they are incentivized to manage: box-checkers, i-dotters and t-crosser.

As managers rise through the corporate structures, their need to be in control and to be the center of attention rises exponentially. This can translate to a need to appear knowledgeable in all areas; the ever-present sword of Damocles of upper management’s perception of their competence is hanging over their heads precariously, trampling their humility and putting their hubris on steroids. Even though this pressure may not always be self-inflicted, the stresses from the presence of expectations are ever present; they have too much skin in the game.

Another prevailing misconception comes from the fact that most people do not understand what collaboration entails. Contrary to some beliefs, collaboration requires more than just putting a mishmash of people in a room, stirring them up, and then waiting for PFM (Pure Fucking Magic). This is a deeply ingrained misconception for those who have never participated in solving problems or participated in making group decisions. The process and the interactions amongst the participants of a problem-solving meeting of minds are much more complicated than PFM, but it is typical of the mindsets of those who had never done the work. I have had more than one engineering manager propose, in all seriousness, that locking all the “smart guys” into a room and wait as the problems self-resolve.

The responsible managers are also likely to propose a list of action items prior to the definition of the problem. Once this structure has been dictated to the worker bees — depending on the manager and how realistic the structure is — spontaneity, serendipity, curiosity, and playfulness are most likely driven from the process.

The solution for this kind of management interference is to keep managers out of the room. A meeting without a hierarchical pecking order is ideal, even though groupthink will inevitably converge on the opinions of the most senior or the most experienced problem-solvers, that is easier to counter than with the groupthink due to management hierarchy.

The KPI has become the main measure for any activity in a project management environment. The KPI, as defined by KPI.org is:

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the critical (key) quantifiable indicators of progress toward an intended result. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.

Managing with the use of KPIs includes setting targets (the desired level of performance) and tracking progress against those targets.(What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)? n.d.)

Note that the KPI definition states that using KPIs to measure progress does NOT actually mean using KPIs as the target. Although the ambiguity that comes from not specifically stating that KPI should not be used as targets could be construed as passive assent. Which brings me to one of my favorite recently acquired propositions: Goodhart’s Law.

Goodhart’s Law states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when we use a measure to reward performance, we provide an incentive to manipulate the measure in order to receive the reward. This can sometimes result in actions that actually reduce the effectiveness of the measured system while paradoxically improving the measurement of system performance. (Michael F. Stumborg 2022)

In most of my experience, the main KPIs involve time and cost measures: the amount of time spent to bring a project to fruition, the difference between the project time versus the customer deadline; the cost measure being the budget allotted by management for the project.

Usually, the customer deadlines are hard deadlines. Product launch deadlines and timetables are strictly set, although the customers may have worked in time margins in their deadlines for their purposes. The problem is usually with the estimated project time. Those estimates range between realistic to pure fiction, depending on whether the challenge of solving the problem requires procedural or conceptual efforts. The problem is that the estimated project time is usually set by managers. Once again, those managers who have retained their engineering mindset are usually more realistic, but any estimated project time is subject to the uncertainty associated with working in the physical world. It is impossible to predict the unpredictable. Uncertainty and randomness haunts all project timelines, it all depends on whether lady fortune smile upon the project. Hence the admonition from Goodhart’s Law.

The cost and budget related KPI also have a dependency on the simplicity or complexity of the project, with a similar amount of associated uncertainty and randomness as the project time KPI. I have worked on projects that meet or beat those KPIs and I have worked on projects that had lasted years beyond the estimated time KPI and millions beyond the cost KPI. It is much easier to work on the former than on the latter. The difference is the experience and judgement of the project manager and those who negotiated the KPIs. One particular project stands out because it involved a new concept and new technology. It was clearly more of a research project than a development project. Unbeknownst to us, our CEO had promised production level units at an accelerated schedule, the time KPI was blown to smithereens. The solution was to spend money to accelerate the R&D schedule, which never works, so the cost KPI was blown to smithereens too. Two years past the original delivery deadline, the project was declared dead.

KPIs are obviously a useful measure. It keeps the project team focused by consistently measuring the progress, giving necessary feedback, but the KPIs need to be based on reality rather than wishful thinking, they should also be constantly updated as difficulties arise, and they should not be targets.

How can the process avoid the siren song of allowing the KPIs to become targets and not violate Goodhart’s Law?

KPIs should not be decided upon until the problem-solvers have analyzed the open-ended problem and made a comprehensive assessment of the potential solutions. This approach will at least identify some of the potential bottlenecks and showstoppers and result in a more definitive problem statement. The KPIs can then be assessed within a restricted sample space.

The second part of my response to my friend’s inquiry at the beginning, after this long digression is that I will prefer not to meet face to face if the problem-solving session involves managers and the central focus of the exercise is negligently using false targets.

A simple summary is this: if the meeting is going to be a waste of time, I would rather be behind the technology, my mike muted, and my camera off so that I can do what I need to do or do what I want. If everyone involved is serious about solving problems and having some fun while doing so, I am all in on the face to face, it is not only preferred, it is necessary.

References

Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. NYC: Penguin Press, 2012.

"GroupThink." Wikipedia. n.d. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink (accessed October 15, 2023).

Michael F. Stumborg, Timothy D. Blasius, Steven J. Full, Christine A. Hughes. "GOODHART'S LAW: RECOGNIZING AND MITIGATING THE MANIPULATION OF MEASURES IN ANALYSIS." CNA.org. September 1, 2022. https://www.cna.org/reports/2022/09/goodharts-law (accessed October 15, 2023).

Regis, Ed. Who Got Einstein's Office? Eccentricity and Genius at the Institute for Advanced Study. NYC: Basic Books, 1987.

"What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?" KPI.Org. n.d. https://www.kpi.org/KPI-Basics/ (accessed October 15, 2023).