It seems as though meetings can generally be categorized into one of the following types:
- Stucture-Keeping - standups, other types of recurring meetings that provide a standard time to hook in communication tasks and/or other things that need to be done on a cadence.
- Features: standard (agenda, standard attendees, typically shorter duration
- Goal: stick to the agenda, do what’s necessary and not more
- Presentational - one person or group needs to brief others about a specific thing.
- Features: visuals, one-sided, Q&A, short-to-medium duration
- Goal: “so what” communication understood by audience
- Working - a collaborating teaming session working at a particular problem or a particular artifact together.
- Features: problem-orientation, small size, longer duration
- Goal: the discrete deliverable, with inputs from all
Each type of meeting would have different best practices. A different type of agenda. Different supporting tools (eg a whiteboard).
I think “this could have been an email” syndrome occurs more often when the meeting type is unclear, the meeting tried to mix types, or the wrong approach was taken for the type.
Source
- self