A literature lover’s guide to office politics
We used to make things. Now we have meetings. On any given weekday some 50m meetings are held in American workplaces alone. The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s. The number of meetings proliferated in the 1980s as Western economies moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries that seemed to require a lot of talking. And while covid-19 may have shut down the office (at least temporarily), it magnified the importance of meetings, which now take place on our laptops. During the pandemic we’ve spent more time in them than we ever did in person.
Despite their centrality to modern life, few of us have a good word to say about meetings. Surveys suggest we consider at least half the ones we attend to be ineffective – the same bores drone on, the people with something useful to say don’t speak and nothing of importance gets decided. In many office cultures, a meeting is a byword for a tedious, time-wasting exercise.
Frustration with meetings has fuelled a mini-industry in management books – “How to Hold Successful Meetings”, “Meeting Design” and “Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable” – dedicated to solving what one author labels “the most painful problem in business”.
Yet perhaps the sharpest analysis lies elsewhere. Though office meetings are a relatively recent phenomenon, people have been gathering to discuss decisions since Adam and Eve huddled over the forbidden fruit, and successive generations of poets and writers have chronicled the dynamics in their work.
“The Iliad”, Western literature’s foundational text, kicks off with a meeting. The Greeks are nine years into the siege of Troy, a plague has ravaged their ranks and they gather to ponder the flagging campaign (good teamwork is conspicuously absent: Achilles, the Greek’s foremost warrior, comes close to killing the commander, King Agamemnon).
In detailing the twists and turns of this conference, and subsequent ones held by the Greeks, Trojans and gods of Mount Olympus, Homer nails meeting behaviour with a precision that management gurus today can only dream of. Where Homer blazes a trail, other literary greats follow: the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive. Time to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera and get reading.
The Iliad: Listen to your foot soldiers
Though “The Iliad” is ostensibly a book about bloody battles and an interminable siege, much of the action turns on arguments between key individuals. A little way into the epic, the assembled Greeks are once again holding a discussion on what to do about their stalemate (in fact Agamemnon has already resolved to have another crack at the walls of Troy). A commoner, Thersites, speaks up to make the case for cutting their losses: their ships are rotting, they already have plenty of loot and Agamemnon has already proved to be a poor leader. Isn’t it time to head home?
Odysseus, a high-ranking commander, orders Thersites to check his “glib tongue” and then beats him up for “playing the fool” and daring to “argue with princes”; the crowd delights at Thersites’s humiliation.
By inviting us to watch a reasonable argument dismissed with violence, Homer makes clear that the Greeks did not believe in a frank exchange of views. The meeting was a large one, but common folk were there to legitimise decisions already taken by their superiors. Such assemblies were clearly as frustratingly common in Homer’s time as they are in ours.
Encouraging junior staff to voice their opinions is one of the biggest difficulties modern managers face. Many, like Homer’s warlords, shut them down – truly open meetings are a nightmare to run. But getting the view from the floor isn’t just good for employees’ morale; it’s a way to gather useful information and different opinions. Any organisation that shuts down its Thersites is losing valuable insights. The Greeks took Troy in the end, but Thersites was right about the state of their navy: Odysseus, famously, got shipwrecked on the way home.
King Lear: Majesty often stoops to folly
Bosses typically get to be bosses because they are confident in their own judgment and willing to assert themselves. That often means they become furious when they’re challenged – which makes it hard to step back and hold an open discussion.
Few works of literature dramatise this problem better than “King Lear”. Like “The Iliad”, the play opens with a meeting, as Lear discusses how to manage his succession. As with many managers, he has already predetermined the course of action: he plans to divvy up his kingdom between his three daughters. His only decision is how large a share to give each child, a judgment he will make depending on their answer to the question, who “doth love us most”. The real purpose of the meeting, it becomes clear, is for the old king to be lavished with “opulent” praise.
His two older children strive to outdo each other with performative sycophancy (no other joy, apparently, is as great as their love for their father). But Cordelia, his youngest – and the only one who genuinely loves her father, as the play goes on to demonstrate – refuses to flatter him (“I cannot heave my heart into my mouth”). Rather than hear her out, Lear flies into a rage, strips her of her portion and disowns her.
The snap decision testifies to Lear’s poor management skills. What comes next is even more of a no-no. Kent, the king’s most loyal aide, steps in to ask his master to reconsider his punishment of Cordelia. Lear silences him, warning, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” Kent insists on speaking his mind, saying he is duty bound to be “unmannerly when Lear is mad”. The king sends him into exile.
The figure of the overbearing leader who pays the price for his failure to countenance “the moody frontier of a servant brow” recurs throughout Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. In “Henry IV, Part I”, the rebel Hotspur is so unwilling to listen to counsel that his ally Northumberland blasts him for “tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own!” In “Richard III” the king turns on Buckingham, his partner in crime, the moment that he expresses faint doubts about Richard’s schemes. Similarly, bosses who expect their underlings merely to back up their views – and leave them too frightened to contradict them – often make bad decisions.
Nowadays, leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates. But fear of displeasing the boss still shapes most meetings. During the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy was so concerned that his national-security staff would rather say the right thing in front of him than work out the best strategy that he left the room for many discussions.
Today’s chief executives tend to follow King Lear, not Kennedy. According to one study, the person running a meeting generally speaks for between a third and two-thirds of the time allotted to the session. As the authors of this survey noted: “Even in egalitarian Denmark, we very rarely observed meeting participants challenge their leaders’ right to speak as much as they please.” King Lear created a “stage of fools”. Try not to do the same.
Lord of the Flies: Meetings beget meetings, not results
Anyone who thinks keeping a group discussion on track is easy would do well to study “Lord of the Flies”. William Golding’s novel follows a bunch of schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a plane crash. Meetings become central to their attempt to structure their mini-society, and they adopt a rule that anyone can speak if they’re holding the group’s conch shell (a prefiguration of Zoom’s yellow halo).
They clearly believe that more voices would improve the group’s decisions. It is a great, democratic experiment. But it fails.
Ralph, the boys’ putative leader, finds it impossible to translate talk into action, and laments the frequency of meetings at which nothing is achieved. “Everybody enjoys speaking and being together. We decide things. But they don’t get done.” His words will resonate with many modern managers.
The inability to manage discussion also results in a two-tier system. As Ralph observes, “practised debaters – Jack, Maurice, Piggy – would use their whole art to twist the meeting.” This leads to less adept speakers becoming marginalised. As Jack puts it: “It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”
We have all experienced the situation whereby a few individuals dominate – and people who talk first and frequently in meetings tend to have an inordinate impact on the flow of discussion. Individuals who love the sound of their own voice are not necessarily well liked by others in the group, but we generally listen to them: people tend to think of them as influential by default. And talkativeness feeds on itself. Studies show that the more someone contributes in a meeting, the more they are likely to be asked questions. We seem to assume that people speak because they have something useful to say. So it was with Golding’s tribe on the island.
The problem with letting meetings run wild isn’t just that quieter (and less white and less male) voices are marginalised. Counterintuitively, you’re not as likely to learn anything new. Garold Stasser, a social psychologist, has shown that when there are no rules to meetings, conversations tend to be a rehash of what everyone already knows. Meetings without order don’t achieve anything except the entrenchment of powerful personalities, as Piggy learned the hard way. You can’t save a civilisation – or bring light to the darkness of man’s heart – with a conch shell alone.
Paradise Lost: Satan is a hell of a chairman
At the start of “Paradise Lost” Satan and his army of fallen angels convene, much like Homer’s Greeks, in order to work out how to turn their fortunes around. Satan has just led the infernal rabble in a spectacularly botched rebellion in Heaven and now they’re literally stuck in Hell.
Unlike Agamemnon, Satan seems genuinely keen to come up with a strategy that everyone supports (not for nothing was John Milton an advocate of the parliamentarians in England’s civil war).
When Satan opens the floor to debate, four arch-demons make their case. Moloch advocates “open Warr”. Belial, whom Milton describes as an artful and cynical speaker, suggests that they do nothing and hope God sees fit to forgive them. Mammon argues for abandoning any idea of returning to Heaven and instead building an empire in Hell. And Beelzebub counsels sending a demon to Earth to seduce or destroy this “new Race call’d Man”. The issue is put to a vote.
This emphasis on collective decision making characterised many literary meetings after Homer. Influenced by the ideals of Athenian democracy, playwrights such as Aesychlus and Euripides depicted meetings in which the outcome was decided by the mood in the room, not the most senior person there. The result wasn’t always the right one, but the procedure was represented as admirable.
In Hell, the diabolical assembly chose to precipitate the fall of Man – which turns out to be the option Satan was most in favour of all along. Some scholars have suggested that Satan manipulated the vote. But perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge that, in getting people to vote for his preferred outcome, Satan was simply really good at meetings.
Management by plebiscite is not, of course, a viable option for most companies. But Satan knew what he was doing. It’s a good idea to ask everyone in the room to register their opinion at the end of the session, even if you don’t have a yes-no question – you can ask people how likely they think an outcome is, or to rank the various options presented. As well as giving people a sense that their voice matters, consulting a wider group gives leaders access to a collective judgment that – as a large body of literature on the wisdom of crowds shows – is likely to be a good one.
The Talmud: Honour thy disagreements
Deep in the laws and commentaries of the Talmud, there is an unusual provision about capital punishment: if all 71 judges in a capital case agree that the death penalty should be imposed, then it is automatically taken off the table.
This seems counterintuitive, given that courts today often insist on unanimity to convict someone of murder. But the Talmudic principle embodies an important insight about the perils of consensus: if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may well have missed something important.
When you look back at famously bad decisions made by small groups – the launch of the Challenger space shuttle, Enron’s board of directors signing off on risky accounting practices – it’s striking how sure participants were that they were right, and how little disagreement was voiced.
Arthur Schlesinger, an adviser to Kennedy, noted that in the discussions that led up to the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961, meetings “took place in a curious atmosphere of assumed consensus”. Information that might have disrupted that accord was excluded or rationalised away. The longer people talked to each other, the dumber they became. Meetings didn’t open minds, it closed them.
You sometimes need an active strategy to avoid groupthink, which arises from a toxic but beguiling combination of conformism and positive reinforcement. When the judges of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish court in Temple times, passed their verdicts, they would speak in reverse order of seniority, so that less experienced judges wouldn’t tailor their opinions to fit those of senior ones.
More recent management experts like Kathleen Eisenhardt and Jay Bourgeois actively encourage a “good fight” in meetings. Arguments can be a sign that participants fundamentally trust each other and are working towards the same goal – that’s what allows them to express substantive differences of opinion.
It takes a rare leader to see discord as a boon, however. Alfred Sloan, the legendary boss of General Motors from the 1920s to the 1950s, was one such maverick. “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here,” he said at the end of one board meeting. “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting, to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain understanding of what the decision is all about.” Agamemnon would probably have had him thrashed. ■
James Surowiecki is the author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”
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