December Lunchtime Talk with John Curran

1. “All we do is have
meetings”:
What meetings tell us about group
dynamics and workplace culture
@drjcurran
Dr John Curran
Organisational Anthropologist & Associates
Consultant, Tavistock Institute of Human
Relations

2. Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies
and almost always get worse over time. Please get
(out) of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they
are providing value to the whole audience, in which
case keep them very short

3. Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it
is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to
leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste
their time

6. Meeting Purpose
(a) Information sharing,
(b) coordination of efforts,
(c) internal conflict resolution,
(d) negotiating status,
(e) exchanging goods and mates, and
(f) strengthening group cohesion.

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Meetings as
Ritual

8. “promote bonding among meeting attendees,
allowing some time for socializing either at the
beginning of a meeting or just before a meeting
can be helpful. Previous research shows that
conversations such as small talk in the pre-
meeting phase can enhance the meeting
experience and overall meeting effectiveness,
particularly for attendees who are introverted”.
Lehmann-Willenbrock

9. ““The taboo topics may be those with the greatest
potential for conflict OR those topics with the
greatest potential for change and productivity
improvements”
Lehmann-Willenbrock

10. The things that everyone knows but are not
supposed to talk about”
Graeber

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Defining the Role of
Meetings

12. Official meaning refers to a clear purpose and/or
goal that serves the aims of the organisation or
company. This can be either based on sharing of
knowledge and information, planning, scoping,
actioning.

13. “In fight/flight the group behaves as if its purpose is
to identify an external enemy or threat, which is has
either to attack or to flee from. In dependency the
group behaves as if it expects to be fed and
nurtured by an omniscient leader. In pairing, the
third basic assumption, the emotional state of the
group is one of expectancy and hope. Typically all
attention is focused on two members of the
group…their pairing will produce the future leader,
the messiah who will provide salvation.”(Miller,In
Sher and Lawlor).

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Case Study 1
Official Meaning: Fear

15. By unofficial I refer to the social interactions that
are not focused on work or the primary task. They
sit outside this, yet the meeting space provides a
group space the unofficial performances to take
place. They can come in the form of chit chat or
comments about clothing that someone is
wearing in the team.

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Case Study 2
Unofficial Meaning:
Water bottle

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19. Impression management is a conscious or
unconscious process in which people attempt to
influence how other people see them in a certain
way.

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Categories of
Meetings

21. Categories of Meetings
Functional – work gets done
Collaborative
Formalised
Informal
Controlling
Toxic
Defensive
Performative
Fearful
Conflictual

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Culture Empathy
Map

23. The Culture Empathy Map is used in three ways.
1) By the consultant
2) Team coaching
3) For leadership development

24. Routines &
rituals
Organisational
structures
Control
systems
Symbols
Stories
Power
paradigm
Johnson and Scholes

25. Mapping has been a source of theoretical
discovery...Putting words down on paper makes
them external and visible in a way that helps
negotiate with the thoughts and feelings they
represent
Steve Potter

26. Doing ethnography enables us to examine how
social order is produced as people go about their
everyday interactions. Multiple sources of
naturally-occurring data are used to understand
how communities, organisations and institutions
work, informally as well as formally.
London School of Economics

27. From anthropology we take the idea of the use of
self as instrument, the central role of observation
in our work, the notion of the ‘field’ and the need
for immersion in the field…The idea of
understanding from multiple perspectives and
multiple positions, the importance of narrative and
story and hearing the stories of those
experiencing the issues being explored and the
concept of liminality Anne Benson

28. Culture is not scripted or shared as a manifesto
but learnt over time by interacting in different
fields. It becomes an embodied state of thinking
and doing that frames a sense of rationality and
values. What is normal is contained in symbolic,
metaphorical and ritualised codes that are acted
out in largely unconscious everyday
performances”
Curran

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Mapping Culture
In a meeting

30. Step One:
One a piece of paper write down the purpose of the
meeting
Step Two:
Who is attending the meeting? (one team or different
departments – seniority) who has not showed up?
Step Three:
Meeting logistics – start time, role of the agenda (was it
sent out before hand), who is facilitating the meeting?
Physical location of meeting, set up of room
Step Four:
Describe how people are present in the meeting – levels of
engagement, who sits where, what are people doing at the
start of the meeting?

31. Step 5
What are the cultural ‘tool kits’ being used and performed?
Is there a single tool kit or multiple ones at play.
Is the result stability or friction in the meeting?
The concept of cultural ‘tool kit’ was developed by the
sociologist Ann Swidler who defines this as
“symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views, which people
may use in varying configurations to solve different kinds of
problems”

32. The sentient system is made up of the social,
human processes, symbols, meanings unconscious
group forces, emotionally significant events and
experiences. Members of the sentient system have
attributes and beliefs based on their needs and
fantasies and the patterns of identification that
individuals have built up over time in relation to the
role they hold in the organisation”
(Sher, Lawlor, Brissett)

33. Step 6
Identify what type of ritualized behaviour are being used to
meet the primary task of the meeting, disrupt the group
from meeting the task, or defend ones of individual or
groups identify from others.
Understanding rituals and symbolic meaning are important
part of the anthropologist’s interpretative thinking when
making sense of any group or culture.

34. 1/ Rituals of power and authority
The ways in which official hierarchy is maintained
How policies and official practices are performed
Acts and performances to preserve unofficial structures of
power
Usually formalized and repeated at the same time.
Offers little room for resistance

35. 2/ Rituals of Change
The ways in which we move from one state to a new one
(liminality)
A new role
Meeting a project deadline
working productively
Takes place on both micro and macro levels
A meeting or workshop
Part of larger OD work

36. 3/ Rituals of Preservation
Preserving an individual or team’s sense of identity
A threat of change
Feeling power is being imposed
Lack of collaboration
Can take place in formal or informal spaces/fields.
Either subtle or highly theatrical

37. towards avoiding work on the primary task with the
wish to evade reality when it is painful or causes
psychological conflict within or between group
members
(Tavistock Institute of Human Relations)

38. Systems psychodynamics consultancy and
organisational work transpose the individual model
of development to institutions and group processes.
Therefore, splitting associated with the paranoid-
schizoid phase can occur between groups within
institutions”
(Sher and Lawlor)

39. Step 7
The final process is reflection and using self as data. This
requires that the consultant or, if working in pairs, co-
consultant reflect on their observations and initial
hypothesis and then map their own emotional responses to
being present within the meeting. This can also happen in
supervision.
Reflection works as a form of challenge; the ability to
understand one’s own feelings towards a group and to
expose one’s own unpleasant feelings and thoughts.

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Case Study 3
Fight/Flight Strategy

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Some Take Aways
1) Meetings are ritualised spaces that contain individuals and groups ideally to
focus on the primary task
2) However, with this meta ritual are ritual performances that are used to
either meet the goals of the meeting or disrupt the goals in order to
preserve an individuals or subgroups identity against change or power and
authority.
3) Everything that happens in a meeting is deemed ‘rational’…which means
there is lots of irrationality.
4) Theories and methods from anthropology, sociologically and systems
psychodynamics provides a rich tool kit to decode the complex
performances that exist in meetings.
5) The Culture Empathy Map provides a tool for consultants, coaches and
teams to understand the culture and psychodynamics of meetings from a
holistic point of view.

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Break Out Session
What stood out for you in the talk?
What emotions do you experience when you think of meetings?
How do rituals differ, if at all, when comparing face-to-face to
online meetings?