One podcast I recently subscribed to is You Are Not So Smart. Yes, the name piques curiosity.
Anyway, I haven’t prioritized actually listening to the episodes I’ve downloaded until the other day, when I finally got around to listening to an episode entitled “Meetings.” The general idea of the episode was that we almost universally hate meetings, and there are reasons that so many meetings are seen as a waste of time.
The organizational scientist who was the guest pointed out that, because of that, people also figure the problem must be meetings themselves and that they just shouldn’t exist. However, his research shows that meetings do serve a purpose… but we just are bad at doing it as effectively as we could.
So, even though pretty much all of us detest meetings, we can’t just blow them up even though that seems like the most useful option. It made me think about other times that I’ve thought that something seems like such a lost cause that trying to fix it is useless. While that may sometimes be true, perhaps it’s much more often that I’m looking at the situation from the wrong perspective or not asking the right questions on what could be improved or how.
Oh, and I also learned about “Parkinson’s Law” in this podcast episode. Even if you’re unfamiliar with the name, you’re almost certainly familiar with what it describes…