The meeting science is an emerging scientific discipline dedicated to the study, analysis, and optimization of professional meetings. Its primary goal is to enhance the effectiveness, productivity, and satisfaction of participants by applying scientific methods and principles.
Meetings have always been a central element of management, and interest in their optimization developed in the early 21st century with an increasing number of meetings in professional environments. This interest grew significantly after the global COVID-19 crisis, [1] [2] which led many organizations to adopt hybrid work modes. Previously, various economic sectors had initiated efforts to define and formalize meeting practices.
The universality of the principles and practices of meeting science facilitates its adoption beyond the corporate world. It is integrated into diverse organizations, including local governments, military, associations, and foundations.
Simultaneously, a related field called facilitation emerged. Unlike meeting science, which aims to make operators autonomous in applying best practices, facilitation involves methodological experts who intervene in a targeted manner during events to improve efficiency.
Inspired by Toyota's practices in Japan, lean management introduced the principle of short-interval meetings (AIC) to manage operations, often associated with visual management [3] .
With the publication of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, these approaches spread through the implementation of frameworks like Scrum, which includes specific meetings such as sprint planning and retrospectives, and the daily stand-up [4] .
Sociocracy and Holacracy are governance models introduced in the 1970s and early 2000s, respectively, focused on putting people at the center of performance. They define precise meeting modalities. Sociocracy is based on four principles: decision-making by consent, organization in circles, double-linking between circles, and election without candidates. Holacracy proposes governance meetings and tactical meetings. [5]
In the United States, meeting science emerged in the 2000s. Steven Rogelberg and Joseph Allen are pioneers, laying the foundations of this scientific discipline. Their academic work is summarized in The Cambridge handbook of meeting science [6] , which explores various meeting aspects, including the meeting recovery syndrome, a concept that explores to the conditions individuals experience post-meeting. [7]
Many American authors have published works on meeting science. Rogelberg's The surprising science of meetings offers insights into agenda setting, participant engagement, and decision processes [8] . Joseph Allen, a student of Rogelberg, continues research at the University of Utah on entitativity, a concept developed by Donald T. Campbell in the 1960s. Allen has also written about remote meetings in the context of hybrid work [9] . Patrick Lencioni, in Death by meeting (2004), proposes a simple committee model for executive teams, describing necessary rituals [10] . Elise Keith, in Where the action is, presents a periodic table of meetings with 16 different formats [11] . Paul Axtell, in Meetings matter (2015), provides a humanistic perspective on meetings [12] .
The Harvard Business Review is also a resource on meeting science, featuring articles by experts such as Roger Schwartz on effective agenda writing, [13] Eunice Eun on reducing unnecessary meetings, [14] Steven Rogelberg on improving meetings, [15] Sabina Nawaz on creating norms for executive teams, [16] and Paul Axtell on questions to improve meetings. [17]
McKinsey has published articles offering insights on meeting organization [18] and efficiency. [19]
In the United Kingdom, Alan Palmer published Talk Lean in 2014, describing an approach developed in France in the 1990s by Philippe de Lapoyade and Alain Garnier, called Discipline Interactifs. This approach emphasizes precisely formulating the goal of an exchange, whether it is a managerial act, a sales interview, or a meeting [20] . Helen Chapman, in The meeting book (2016), presents concepts and illustrations contributing to meeting success [21] .
In France, Alain Cardon proposed an original approach called delegated processes in the late 1990s to improve recurring meeting practices, particularly for executive committees and hierarchical teams. In 2001, Michel Guillou coined the term réuniologie as "the art of organizing effective meetings." [22]
In 2017, the École Internationale de Réuniologie, International School of Meeting Science in English, was founded [23] and registered the trademark réuniologie with the National Institute of Industrial Property [24] in France. The school assists organizations in improving their meeting practices and combating meeting-itis. [25] Louis Vareille, the founder, defined the meeting-itis and proposed solutions in his book Meeting-itis, make it stop!. [26] [27]
Meeting-itis is a corporate condition whose main symptom is the disordered and compulsive organization of meetings. This condition, which can be severe, causes corporate loss of productivity and individual disengagement. Its etiology (the study of the overall causes of an illness) shows that the primary cause of this pathogen is a systemic failure by an organization to clarify or respect the responsibility and autonomy of its members – it’s about a lack of empowerment. In serious cases, Meeting-itis causes individuals to lose confidence in their ability to make any decision.
— Louis Vareille, Meetingitis? Make It stop!: Meeting science’s 10 magic questions and 3 secrets [28]
In his work, Louis Vareille develops concepts related to meeting science from various authors:
Other French authors have also contributed to the discipline. Romain David and Didier Noyé, in Réinventez vos réunions, provide a synthetic and operational vision of the levers to activate for meeting efficiency [29] . Sacha Lopez, David Lemesle, and Marc Bourguignon offer practical perspectives in their Guide de survie aux réunions, drawing on their expertise in facilitation [30] .
The meeting science explores various aspects of meetings: [6] [7] [8] [10] [11] [12] [14] [17] [18]
Meeting science uses various methodologies to improve practices:
Meeting science also integrates techniques to ensure participant engagement in remote and hybrid meetings, utilizing digital tools for meeting design, facilitation, and evaluation. Since 2023, artificial intelligence offers new features for meetings, including agenda design, translation, transcription, and summary writing [33] .
Meeting science can be applied to various contexts [34] [35] , including:
Consensus decision-making or consensus process is a group decision-making process in which participants develop and decide on proposals with the goal of achieving broad acceptance, defined by its terms as form of consensus. The focus on establishing agreement of at least the majority or the supermajority and avoiding unproductive opinion differentiates consensus from unanimity, which requires all participants to support a decision. Consensus decision-making in a democracy is consensus democracy.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental organization, think tank, and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer Klaus Schwab.
A meeting is when two or more people come together to discuss one or more topics, often in a formal or business setting, but meetings also occur in a variety of other environments. Meetings can be used as form of group decision-making.
Facilitation in business, organizational development (OD) and consensus decision-making refers to the process of designing and running a meeting according to a previously agreed set of requirements.
McKinsey & Company is an American multinational strategy and management consulting firm that offers professional services to corporations, governments, and other organizations. Founded in 1926 by James O. McKinsey, McKinsey is the oldest and largest of the "MBB" management consultancies (MBB). The firm mainly focuses on the finances and operations of their clients.
The World Trade Organization's Ministerial Conference of 1996 was held in Singapore on December 9 - December 13, 1996. The inaugural meeting for the organisation since its formation. The event was hosted by the government of Singapore at the Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre in Suntec City.
Sociocracy is a theory of governance that seeks to create psychologically safe environments and productive organizations. It draws on the use of consent, rather than majority voting, in discussion and decision-making by people who have a shared goal or work process.
Open space technology (OST) is a method for organizing and running a meeting or multi-day conference where participants are invited to focus on a specific, important task or purpose. The agenda and schedule of presentations are partly or mostly unknown until people begin arriving. The scheduling of speakers, topics, and locations is created by people attending once they arrive. A debriefing document is created at the end of each OST meeting, summarizing what worked and what did not. Harrison Owen created the method in the early 1980s as an alternative to pre-planned conferences, where conference organizers predetermined speakers and time was often scheduled months in advance. OST instead relies on decisions made by participants once they are physically present at the live event venue. OST was among the top ten organizational development tools cited between 2004 and 2013.
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid hierarchical aspects of a conventional conference, such as sponsored presentations and top-down organization.
A facilitator is a person who helps a group of people to work together better, understand their common objectives, and plan how to achieve these objectives, during meetings or discussions. In doing so, the facilitator remains "neutral", meaning they do not take a particular position in the discussion. Some facilitator tools will try to assist the group in achieving a consensus on any disagreements that preexist or emerge in the meeting so that it has a solid basis for future action.
A business fable is a motivational fable, parable or other fictional story that shares a lesson or lessons that are intended to be applied in the business world with the aim to improve leadership skills, personal skills, or the organizational culture. Business fables are intended to show readers how different leadership, project management, and other tools can be used in real life situations. The genre saw a peak in the early 2000s.
Patrick Lencioni is an American author of books on business management, particularly in relation to team management. He is best known as the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a popular business fable that explores work team dynamics and offers solutions to help teams perform better. In addition to Five Dysfunctions of a Team, he has written eleven other business books. He has also applied his management techniques to families in The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a business book by consultant and speaker Patrick Lencioni first published in 2002. It describes many pitfalls that teams face as they seek to "grow together". This book explores the fundamental causes of organizational politics and team failure. Like most of Lencioni's books, the bulk of it is written as a business fable.
Diana Farrell is a banker and political advisor who served until 2021 as the founding President and Chief Executive Officer of the JPMorgan Chase Institute, a think tank. Previously, Ms. Farrell was the Global Head of the McKinsey Center for Government (MCG), providing research, proprietary data, and other tools to support government leaders focused on improving performance. In addition, she was a leader of McKinsey’s global Public Sector Practice, and a member of their Partner Review Committee.
Digital transformation (DT) is the process of adoption and implementation of digital technology by an organization in order to create new or modify existing products, services and operations by the means of translating business processes into a digital format.
The World Resources Forum (WRF) is a non-profit organisation for sharing knowledge about the economic, political, social and environmental implications of global resource use. WRF promotes resource productivity among researchers, policymakers, business, NGOs and the public. In addition to organizing international and regional conferences, the WRF Secretariat coordinates multistakeholder dialogue projects, amongst others the Sustainable Recycling Initiative (SRI) as well as the H2020 projects Towards a World Forum on Raw Materials (FORAM), and CEWASTE. The WRF contributes to other EC-projects and projects with the German development organisation GiZ, UNEP and UNIDO.
Holacracy is a method of decentralized management and organizational governance, which claims to distribute authority and decision-making through a holarchy of self-organizing teams rather than being vested in a management hierarchy. Holacracy has been adopted by for-profit and non-profit organizations in several countries. This can be seen as a greater movement within organisational design to cope with increasing complex social environments, that promises a greater degree of transparency, effectiveness and agility.
Richard Post Rumelt is an American emeritus professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Anderson School of Management. He joined the school in 1976 from Harvard Business School.
Steven G. Rogelberg is Chancellor's Professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a professor of Organizational Science, Management, and Psychology and the founding Director of Organizational Science at UNC, Charlotte. He has over 100 publications addressing issues such as team effectiveness, leadership, engagement, health and employee well-being, meetings at work, and organizational research methods. He is editor of the Journal of Business and Psychology. Dr. Rogelberg has received over $2,500,000 of external grant funding including from the National Science Foundation.
Return on Time Invested (ROTI) is a metric employed to assess the productivity and efficiency of time spent on a specific activity, project, or product. The concept is similar to return on investment (ROI), but instead of financial capital, ROTI measures the qualitative and quantitative outcomes derived from the time invested. The metric is relevant in contexts where time is a significant resource, including product management, personal productivity, business process optimization, and education or training evaluation.
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