Classification Essay Example (With Breakdown)

Office workers complain about meetings constantly, and most of the complaining is accurate, but the complaints are imprecise: they lump together kinds of meetings that have almost nothing in common. "Too many meetings" is not really a complaint about quantity. It is a complaint about the wrong kinds of meetings happening instead of the right ones. A more useful classification of meetings — one that would survive contact with actual workplaces — sorts them by what the meeting is supposed to produce. The first legitimate kind of meeting is the decision meeting. A decision meeting exists to produce a decision that cannot be made asynchronously because the tradeoffs need to be weighed by multiple people in real time and the nuance would be lost in writing. Decision meetings should have no more than six people, should include at least one person who disagrees with the default answer, and should end with a documented decision and owner. A decision meeting that does not produce a decision is a failed meeting and should be rescheduled with a sharper scope. The second legitimate kind is the alignment meeting. An alignment meeting is the one where people with related work agree on what each of them is going to do so the work does not conflict or duplicate. Alignment meetings should be short — fifteen to twenty minutes — and should end with each participant being able to name what the others are doing that might affect their own work. The classic mistake is letting alignment meetings become status updates, at which point they are neither alignment nor status, just a weekly tax. The third legitimate kind is the creative meeting. A creative meeting exists to generate options that no individual would have generated alone. These are the meetings where disagreement is the feature, not the bug, and where the goal is to end with a list of possibilities rather than with a decision. Creative meetings should be explicitly framed as such, so that participants know their job is to push back rather than to agree. A meeting labeled as a brainstorm that secretly expects consensus is a creative meeting that has been misclassified as a decision meeting, and it will produce both bad decisions and unhappy participants. The illegitimate kind of meeting — the one that most office complaints are really about — is the recurring status meeting. A recurring status meeting exists to give people a chance to tell each other what they are working on. Almost every such meeting should be a written update instead. The argument for holding them is that the ambient exposure to everyone else's work produces serendipitous collaboration, and I have been in workplaces where this was true. But the argument fails in practice because the status format rewards people who are good at describing work rather than people who are good at doing work, and over time the meeting selects for talkers over doers. The solution is not to run the meeting better. It is to replace it with a written update that respects everyone's calendar. The classification matters because the solution to "we have too many meetings" depends on which kind is actually in surplus. A workplace with too many status meetings should kill them. A workplace with too few decision meetings is suffering from slow decision-making in writing, and the answer is to schedule more meetings, not fewer. Without the classification, the generic complaint about meetings produces generic solutions that either destroy the meetings worth keeping or preserve the ones that should die.