YANSS 164 – Why science says meetings are inevitable and essential but their awfulness is neither

You probably hate meetings — most people do — and much of their awfulness feels inevitable which makes meetings seem unnecessary, but in this episode psychologist and organizational scientist Steven Rogelberg says that neither of these conclusions are true.

Meetings are only bad if we make them bad, and since they are crucial to the cohesion of any institution, he wrote a book called The Surprising Science of Meetings about how to use his research and the research of others to improve the meetings that must take place within any organization.

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We often think of science as lab coats and petri dishes, telescopes and test tubes, but scientists study every aspect of the natural world. When you learn that there are scientists who study meetings, those times that we get together in board rooms or over video chat or on conference calls or even just between coffees, it reminds you that everything we do is part of the natural world. The interaction of atoms and molecules and phsycical forces that scale up to things like power point presentations and weekly department head check-ins and so on.

Links and Sources

Download – iTunes – Stitcher – RSS – Patreon – Soundcloud

Steven Rogelberg’s Website

Steven Rogelberg on Twitter