Broadly speaking, a meritocracy is a group of people selected to hold power based on their skills and abilities. ![[Idea Meritocracy#^ideameritocracydefinition]] In order for an [[Idea Meritocracy]] to take place at higher orders of business, they also need to take place at lower orders. A great place to start implementing meritocratic patterns is in meetings because it can result in immediate improvement of both the quality of outcomes and happiness of participants. There are two key components to this pattern, preparation and consideration. #### Preparation 1. The leader of a meeting asks that everyone prepares for the meeting by answering, in writing, a question or questions 2. Depending on the context of the meeting, the leader may ask that everyone send in their answers privately. In this case they should prepare for the meeting by reviewing each answer. A happy consequence of this activity is the cancellation of some meetings. 3. Attendees of the meeting should be informed that they are not allowed to participate in the consideration step of the meeting unless they're properly prepared. #### Consideration 1. If the leader of the meeting asked for everyone to send in their answers beforehand, they introduce the information they have chosen for consideration and proceed with the meeting. Otherwise, each *prepared* participant reads their answers to the group for further consideration. ### Problems The majority of the speaking time in any particular meeting is taken up by the same minority of individuals across meetings. Usually [[Type A Personalities]]. Opinions or thoughts expressed by team members in a meeting are [[Anchoring|anchored]] to those of the previous speakers or consistently in agreement. [[Meeting Productivity]] is lacking, either - Meetings scheduled in advance of a few days with 3 or more participants appear to be conducted in an "off-the-cuff" manner. - Participants of planned meetings appear to be thinking about the topic at hand for the first time during the meeting. ### Antipatterns [[Anchoring]] is the primary underlying pattern that hinders meritocratic meeting outcomes. [[Pre-Meetings]] can explicitly undermine this pattern. ### Claims It is extremely difficult to achieve this pattern without being explicit in the choices you make about how to organize and lead meetings. A modern business that isn't investing in its collective cognitive abilities and [[Emotional Intelligence]] is disadvantaging itself. ### Tools Email - probably the simplest way to achieve this pattern, using blind copy to email all participants in advance of a meeting so they can't accidentally reply all and reveal their answers. Email is also trending towards being one of the more formal communication mediums for teams, and is already commonplace for top-down communication. ### Avoid Don't use group communication channels to submit answers for consideration, as they are too easy to read in passing and cause [[Anchoring]]. ### Related Patterns [[Retrospectives]] can benefit greatly from this pattern. ### Further Reading - [Principles: Life and Work](https://amzn.to/3uXjXev) - [The Power of an Idea Meritocracy](https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/the-power-of-an-idea-meritocracy) - [How to Run a Meeting](https://hbr.org/1976/03/how-to-run-a-meeting) - [A Way to Detect Bias](http://www.paulgraham.com/bias.html) ### Categories #meetings #conference-calls #communication #email #books #collaboration #decision-making #opinions #thoughts #ideas #meritocracy #bias ![[✉️ Subscribe For Updates#^subscribe]]