what’s the purpose of calling (council/committee/team) meetings? decision making is one primary reason.
why decision making only during meetings? cos these decisions often need discussions to make meaning of best course of actions.
why does “meeting” exist? cos pple who need to make decisions are busy with many other things in life, and meetings “guaranteed” and forced pple to set aside time, locked tgt in a space to discuss.
in the pre-internet age, this is absolutely essential. in the post-COVID19 age, workplace are already relying on WhatsApp and other messaging/meeting tools to discuss things and make decisions instead of only at “meetings”.
some held strongly to the idea of “decisions already made at meeting” = cannot be changed. why?
in the pre-internet era, there’s no way to conduct discussions without pple meeting (again).
in the post-COVID19 era, with group messaging apps such as WhatsApp, are discussions to enable meaning-making not possible?
but no, the counter argument is cos meetings are recorded and noted (cf. minuted) and are “official”. in the internet era, digital records can be served as evidence in courts, are “meetings” necessarily more serious business than courtrooms?
but again, no, cos face-to-face interactions lead to deeper discussions!? well, more dynamic perhaps; deeper, is questionable. cos meetings are time-limited and one hardly has time to draw additional references/resources to bring discussions deeper beyond that space and time defined.
a meeting is a gathering of humans, and thus human behaviours and psychology come into play. there’s always pple who are more passive and some who are more vocal at meetings. and gathering in a group hearing the more vocals can easily end up in group-think. why? it’s easier to agree than disagree, that’s the ‘lazy’ nature of brains, not to mention if one has some other things (family/workplace/whatever) on her/his mind. and no prize for guessing what’s the outcomes/decisions made in such “meetings”?
formal meetings are still needed. cos the society expects it, and there are decisions that would warrant deeper deliberations face-to-face dynamically. but the argument that decisions made at meetings are cast in stone and cannot be changed warrants a rethink as discussions are now enabled by technologies and “recorded”. especially for decisions made when the more knowledgeable others are absent and the rest are discussing “in the blind” if not less knowledeable.
if ideas can be improved and decisions can be improved outside “meetings”, why do some pple dearly hold on to meetings (and the decisions made at meetings) conceptualised by last century definition? well, mindset, beliefs, and values are the most difficult to shift (not impossible), not any amount of SkillsFuture credits would make it easier. something all too familiar to educators and researchers in the field of educational psychology and learning sciences (:
