Meetings, Gatherings or… “Fodderings”?  

In this repetitive and defeated rant I look in despair at the “meetings” and “argue” that we need another word to distinguish incidences of people gathering/being gathered in one place from actual meetings where people meet. 

Being in the same room is not “meeting.”  It’s a gathering in of people. It’s the creation of the potential for meeting. And this potential is ignored, shunned, destroyed and it becomes a foddering. There. Found the word. I derive it from “ego-fodder”, a 2011 coinage to describe the people at any [meeting/gathering/whatever] that has not been designed for maximum participation.

And I weep at the fact that “we” never seem to learn.

Sometimes, because I am (in)famous for the quantity and vehemence of my opinions (as distinct from quality) I am asked what I thought. I used to be guileless, and/or glad to hear the sound of my own voice. Now? Now I just usually just mumble some bullshit and try to change the subject. Because, well, you can get someone – momentarily at least – to see that the event they have just hosted (that they feel proud of, or at least get defensive about when you point out that it could have been done better) as actually far from perfect.  You can probably  get them to concede that tweak x or tweak y – or even fundamental rethink z – would have probably made it more enjoyable for almost everyone.  You can, in some cases, even get them to want to do it better.

But getting an individual to want to do it better is not the victory. Because between cup and the mouth many a slip etc.  Tweaks get watered down to homeopathic levels, fundamental rethinks go unthought.  

Because people are busy, people are scared, people stick to what they know: it has more or less “worked” in the past (1). Because if you try to innovate other people in your group will push back, call you a hippy whatever (2)

And so we bleat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the farce.

“We” could design our events – be they hustings, public meetings, academic workshops, whatever – so they were meetings, not fodderings.

Specifically, we could design them so people who attended had a chance both to catch up with old friends/acquaintances but ALSO, if they chose, to meet new people, and build some weak ties.

We could design them so that after the Big Beasts had said their say (and there are always BB – sometimes they’re the “point” of the gathering after all) there is a chance for people to swap notes and get help/input into honing questions etc. That would actually improve the quality of the discussion(s) for everyone.

We could design meetings so they actually had a structured period IN THAT SPACE, BEFORE THE END, for people to chat, mingle, begin to make weak ties.  FOR GAIA’S SAKE, not everyone has the time, energy, money, desire to go to the pub. FFS.

We could keep the speakers to time and topic using simple (and even crowd-sourced) techniques.

“We” could do all this and more, so much more.

We won’t. We will persist with formats that meet the (perceived) needs of organisers and Big Beasts.  Because it’s easy. Because innovation in social norms just doesn’t really happen – not at the fundamentals, not at the speed that is/was required.

 We will continue to fail at scale, to meet the unacknowledged ego-needs of a few people.

It reminds me of what Robert Sapolsky just said in a podcast with that war criminal Alastair Campbell and austerity-fan Rory Stewart, about baboon society being really good (ish) IF YOU ARE AT THE TOP and don’t mind fighting to stay there, but quite sucky and stressful for everyone else.

I think I am done with any “meeting” that is likely to be a foddering (i.e. all of them), unless there are serious anthropology points to be had. And free high-quality alcohol in cirrhosis quantities, obvs.

See also 

Cher, Incentive Structures. And our inevitable doom.

Ego fodder, why it is awful, what is to be done.

Footnotes

(1) The signals sent by all those people who come to one or two meetings and then don’t come back? Those signals are not even seen, or, in the rare event they are, are discounted as entirely inevitable, rather than as contingent, as a number you might push down from 95% to 85%.  We don’t think in shades, but in binaries.  Uggh.

(2) Any number of reasons. Their fear of change. Their dislike of you. Their jealousy about someone else having the courage/ability to innovate. Their anger at the implicit rebuke in you saying “we need to do it differently from how we (YOU!!) have been doing it.” Their fear of losing status, having to learn new tricks. Etc. Any of those, plus others, in combination.  And because there are so many possible reasons for this resistance to innovation, and because these reasons exist in combinations and flux, they are not really amenable to “rational” challenge. The ideal speech community does not exist and we are fools for thinking so.  Want change? You need a Leviathan, I’m afraid; somebody with the power to act who doesn’t give a damn.  And when they go, as they inevitably do, normal dis-service will resume.