In 2008 Eric Ries described how his startup analyzed problems. After each problem, a meeting was held, led by a designated “five whys master,” with everyone involved present. The results were emailed to the whole company and “should read like plain English.”
Ries wrote that over time teams get used to “the rhythm of five whys, and it becomes completely normal to make incremental investments.”
In October 2020 Dropbox announced that it would become a “Virtual First” company. Its guide for employees sets a rule for meetings: “We save meetings for the 3d’s (discussion, debate, and decision-making).” “Everything else we handle over chat, email, or a doc.”
The guide adds: “We care about your impact—not how many meetings you’re in.”
In 2014 Michael Mankins of the consulting firm Bain & Company described one large company where “people there spent 300,000 hours a year just supporting the weekly executive committee meeting.”
In 2014 General Motors recalled cars with a faulty ignition switch. Its engineers had first noted the problem in 2001. The Valukas report, released on June 5, 2014, described two habits inside the company. The “GM nod”: “everyone nods in agreement to a proposed plan of action but then leaves the room and does nothing.” The “GM salute”: “a crossing of the arms and pointing outward towards others, indicating responsibility belongs to someone else.”
CEO Mary Barra said: “No one raised the issues to the highest level of the company.” GM forced out 15 employees. At the time GM counted at least 13 deaths. Barra said: “We are better than this. But we own this problem.”
In Thirteen Days, his account of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Robert Kennedy wrote about the meetings of the president’s advisers: “We all spoke as equals. There was no rank, and, in fact, we did not even have a chairman.”
Sheldon Stern, historian at the John F. Kennedy Library from 1977 to 2000, later listened to the secret recordings of those meetings. He disputes Kennedy’s account. He notes, for example, that Secretary of State Dean Rusk “was one of the ExComm’s most regular attendees (19 out of 20 recorded meetings) and contributors.” Kennedy’s book says Rusk “frequently could not attend our meetings.”
Software teams that use Scrum hold a daily meeting of 15 minutes, “following the guideline of no problem solving during the daily scrum.” A problem that comes up is set aside and taken up right after the meeting ends, “a practice often referred to as the sixteenth minute.”
The person running the meeting is advised to “Suggest that those who are needed stay to discuss or resolve them.” Everyone else can leave.
On May 15, 2012, Raymond Chen of Microsoft explained the term on his blog The Old New Thing. In a brainstorming session, people “designate a corner of the whiteboard to be the place to ‘park’ those ideas for later consideration.” “From what I can gather,” he wrote, that corner became the parking lot, and later the name passed to the document that collects the parked ideas.
An internal Microsoft presentation he quotes advises: “Avoid using Microsoft jargon terms, such as parking lot and dogfood.” Chen found no older source for the term.
California’s open-meeting law for local bodies, the Brown Act, requires the agenda to be posted “at least 72 hours before a regular meeting.” With few exceptions, it limits the meeting to that agenda: “No action or discussion shall be undertaken on any item not appearing on the posted agenda.”
When a new matter comes up, a member or the board may act “to direct staff to place a matter of business on a future agenda.”
Rule 611(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence says: “Cross-examination should not go beyond the subject matter of the direct examination and matters affecting the witness’s credibility.” The objection “beyond the scope” is familiar from courtroom dramas.
The new subject is not ruled out. “The court may allow inquiry into additional matters as if on direct examination.” The committee that drafted the rule called the question “essentially one of the order of presentation.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote a manual of parliamentary practice while he was vice president. He received his first printed copy on February 27, 1801. It says: “No one is to speak impertinently or beside the question, superfluous, or tediously.”
The House of Representatives later adopted the manual as a partial guide to its own proceedings. Its own rules provide “that remarks must be confined to the question under debate.”