Meeting Management

What's Wrong with Meetings?

So what's wrong with meetings? A lot of it has to do with the way they're conducted—the meeting process itself. When groups of people get together to discuss things, it helps if there is a standard conduct, a method for insuring that all factions represented are heard. A standard for meetings is Robert's Rules of Order. Written by General Henry M. Robert in 1876, these rules enforce parliamentary procedure, which came from the English Parliament at that time. Henry Robert was ordered to San Francisco in 1867 as part of the Army Engineers; he found a tumultuous place where various constituents had quite different ideas about how things got done.

Using the United States House of Representatives model, he developed a ...