Out-Standing Meetings

I was talking with a chap about the benefit of quickening meetings by having all participants stand-up during them. He revealed that when he’d worked at Cisco, many such forums were done this way.

We swapped other examples. Ones I blogged about over eight years ago, in fact.

Apparently research abounds that short meetings this way are better than then traditional sit-downs. One recent WSJ article examines this further.

Interesting too in the light of official UK government health advice this month that all office workers should stand for at least two hours a day.

I’ve seen many a trendy post-dotcom firm promote their stand-up meeting credentials to telly cameras. I wonder if they know that such protocols have been around for centuries. The UK’s own privy council meetings for instance. Its medieval seatless stipulation still stands. Specifically to mainly speed them up, perhaps also to encourage higher calibre decision-making.

I particularly like this approach when it comes to status updates.

Apparently from the Agile software development trend, imagine a sales meeting that, standing up, has this as an agenda:

…daily stand-up meetings where participants are supposed to quickly update their peers with three things:

What they have done since yesterday’s meeting;

what they are doing today; and

any obstacles that stand in the way of getting work done.