Theory of meetings

I want to present a theory (well, a hypothesis or idea) of why organizations like to hold in-person meetings.

I worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals in the early 00’s and there were so many meetings, with so many people doing so little at them, that I started to wonder why meetings were considered to be so important. A two hour meeting of a department of 70 people could easily cost the company $30,000 just in salary and overhead. Most meetings were not interactive; the information transmitted could just as easily have gone via email. So somebody considered an in-person meeting $30,000 more valuable than an equivalent email. Millennium even had company-wide meetings of 2000 people that seemed to serve very little purpose other than presenting some new company philosophy that management wanted everyone to rally behind but had little effect on what most workers did.

Admittedly those large meetings were rare and most meetings were of smaller groups. But ten professionals getting together weekly for an hour – that starts adding up, especially when multiplied by the number of such groups within the company.

If A and B are talking in person and A says something that B disagrees with, and B says nothing, then later if B says something to C that disagrees with what A said, A can interrupt and say “but wait, I assumed you agreed with me, since you didn’t correct me at the time”. A and B are competing over “control” of C, and A is justified in taking the moral high ground because B had an opportunity to object. (The disagreement could directly relate to what C is supposed to be doing, or could be more amorphous.)

That is, other things being equal, “silence = assent” in in-person professional interactions, especially if the speaker is a manager and a listener is not. (There are probably exceptions, but I think this is true in the normal case.)

This is a social property of in-person interaction resulting from the fact that the speaker knows that they have the listener’s attention. If A sends the same information in an email to B, then B has many ways to get out of explicit dissent: they were too busy to read the email, they were too busy to reply, they didn’t think a reply was expected, and so on. Even if A’s message holds theoretical weight, it loses its moral weight.

Now consider a meeting where A says something to a group of people. (I’m referring mainly to informational meetings, rather than highly interactive meetings, but the same idea applies to some extent to both.) Maybe B is in the group and disagrees with A. But nobody else is speaking up. B feels peer pressure – am I the only one who has problems with what A is saying? Am I the problem? I don’t want to be That Person who makes the meeting even longer and keeps people away from their work.

Everyone else is thinking the same thing.

So, whatever A proclaims becomes truth, because nobody has objected to it, and silence = assent.

My sense is that group video conferencing is more like email than like in-person interaction, although it depends on how closely the participants are monitored. A participant can say “oh I missed what A said, which I wouldn’t have agreed with, because I had to let the cat out / help my toddler / step out for a minute” etc. and thereby preserve their moral integrity. In any case the social contract for video is weaker than an in-person meeting.

We have other institutions that also hold in-person meetings, for basically the same reason. A wedding is the best known of these. Traditionally the entire village is supposed to turn out for a wedding. The truth of “Alice and Bob are now husband and wife”, when proclaimed in front of people who don’t dissent, is established by the proclamation. Everyone witnessed it; no one objected; it must be true. There are many similar patterns in society, such as swearing in of elected officials.

A wedding is a standard example of what’s called a speech act. My hypothesis is that in in-person meetings, what a speaker says without dissent is also a speech act, while sending email is not a speech act, and has little normative effect. People may pay attention to email because they want to, but if they don’t want to, it is not a moral lapse.

By having the floor at a meeting, the speaker wields power, for the reason given above – lack of dissent means you yield the moral high ground to the speaker. The official at a wedding has the power to create a marriage (as long as no one objects). The group leader at an informational meeting has the power to control the group (its goals, direction, policies, philosophy, priorities, etc.) by controlling all members of the group, which they do through speech acts.

We are seeing pressure now (Jan. 2023) for employees to return to ‘the office’ after working from home for two years. Workers are mostly opposed to this and cite increased productivity and no loss of quality in working from home. I wonder if the speech-act idea partly explains what is going on. Managers can exercise control through the moral coercion of this kind of speech act, if they can arrange for in-person meetings. If communication is via email or video, they feel their control slipping. If they lose control, their standing with their managers is threatened. So the meetings are very important to them.

(As with many of the things I write on this blog, this idea may not be original, but I don’t think I’ve heard it articulated before.)