How to Have the Best Bad Meetings

Unlike most meetings, mine actually involve people talking to each other

Matt Schellhas
7 min readFeb 23, 2022
Penguins having a Meeting. Brian McMahon/Unsplash

People keep complimenting me on my meetings, and I don’t like it. It’s not even just my meetings! I get compliments for meetings that people on my team run. “Wow, people actually get stuff done in your meetings.” “I love that people don’t interrupt me.” “That could have been a really hard discussion, but for your team it went really smoothly.”

I appreciate the compliments, but Past Matt is horrified that “runs good meetings” is what I’ve done with my career. The pleasantly ironic side of this story is that the compliments only come from people who have attended my team’s meetings. The people who’ve never been to them think that they are bad and that I might be insane. “That will never work…” is usually uttered when I’m describing my meeting process.

Their reactions are understandable. After all, I go against many of their cherished best practices:

  • No agenda.
  • No meeting minutes.
  • No action items.
  • No virtual post-it notes or anonymous voting, or other gamification.
  • No open door policy.

I described this to a group of coworkers once and had someone derisively describe it:

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