In this webinar segment, the presenter argues that increasing the number of meetings is not the solution to organizational challenges. Using a personal anecdote about her children playing a make‑believe “Meetings” game, she illustrates how meetings can become boring, decision‑heavy, and devoid of real action. She contends that many contemporary meetings suffer from a lack of excitement, progress, and tangible outcomes. The speaker proposes shifting the focus of meetings toward the future, placing future‑oriented questions on the agenda, and developing the skill of unpacking the real underlying question—a core competency in futures thinking and futurist practice. The segment ends with a call to stop adding more meetings and instead re‑design existing ones to be future‑focused and action‑oriented.
Chapters
So then the next question I want to know if we can agree on is that we should have more meetings. Should we have more meetings? In the chat box, I'm having disagreements here. When, when my children were little, they heard their dad and I talk quite often about the meetings we were having, and they came to us one day and said they wanted to play a new game called Meetings, because Mom and Dad had them, so they must be exciting and interesting. So we got the little green plastic table out and the little plastic chairs, and we sat around, and we each had paper and a pen. And I explained we needed an agenda so that we could agree what we were going to talk about in the meeting. So we put on what's for supper, what are we doing next weekend, why we should keep our bedrooms clean. And around about this point, little Hannah is looking at her big sister trying to work out, you know, Is this the way the game was supposed to go? Because it's not feeling really good. And Jocelyn goes, is this all a meeting is? Just talking about things and stuff? That's boring. So she turns to her sister and says, come, let's go and play. And the meeting was adjourned. And I remember that, that particular conversation so well, but also her kind of complete disillusionment about this magical meeting that will solve everything, that will be exciting. And I think that is the problem. with so many of our meetings today. They're full of decisions and warning and conversations and debate, but no real action, no real progress, and nothing exciting, nothing that moves us. So we want to put the future on the agenda and experience something different. So no, we certainly don't need any more meetings. I hope we can all agree with those. Now, if we don't, if we don't need those, then what is it we're here for? What is it we're looking at in terms of the future? And now we need to try and unpack what is the real question? What is it that we are really after? And getting to the heart of the real question is one of the most important skills that you can develop as you develop your own futures thinking, as you begin to think like a futurist.
