Todd Wilkens advocates banning crackberries from all meetings. I agree with Todd that people distracted by emails and phone calls aren't focused and become impediments to an effective meeting. But, in my experience, too many organizations have terribly ineffective meetings. If your organization's meetings are terrible, will a ban on crackberries make them effective?

You have heard of the fog of war. But have you heard of a BOGSAT -- Big Official Group Sitting Around Talking? It's a disease that infects organizations.

Let me share with you a story about a BOGSAT intervention.

I'm a big fan of Sam Kaner's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, ISBN 0-86571-347-2. I highly recommend it to anyone who leads meetings.

In my post on Decide as a Team, I wrote about using a method called Roman Evaluation to reach a decision. Kaner talks about a more formal concept he calls Gradient of Agreement in his book.

I am less enthusiastic about the Gradient of Agreement today than when I was first introduced to it.

Why? 

Teams will take action on high-energy decisions. Action is less certain with low-energy decisions.

How do you detect a low-energy decision? What do you do about it?

How can you quickly measure the Return on Time Invested (ROTI) by the participants of a meeting? 

All work requires energy. Middle-managers who divert all energy to new actions fall into a common trap: They fail to reenergize existing actions, which may kill the success of new actions.

Middle management success depends on fueling both new and existing actions. How can appreciative feedback help you discover existing, effective actions and preserve them?

Stand up meetings are popular in software development organizations now.

What makes a stand-up meeting more effective than a traditional meeting to socialize status information?

I argued in my first post about stand-up meetings that the "right" participants were the key to the success of a meeting rather than whether the participants were standing up or sitting down. Despite my dislike for the stand-up component, I did mention in my first post that there are components of a "stand-up meeting" that I do like.

What components do I like? Why do I like them? How can we innovate?

I argued in my first article about stand-up meetings that the right participants were the key to a successful meeting rather than whether the participants were standing up or sitting down. Despite my dislike for forcing people to stand up, I mentioned in that article my positive regard for other elements of the standard stand-up meeting.

Twenty percent of the participants arrive late to the weekly meeting you lead.

What do I recommend you do?