Let’s go around the room. — Each person will speak in turn.
I’d love to hear from folks who haven’t weighed in yet. — The quiet people should speak now.
What am I missing? — Tell me what I have not thought of. Juniors are invited too.
Feel free to chime in. — Anyone may add a comment at any time.
You’ve been quiet. — A friendly invitation to speak, and a sign that the silence was noticed.
In a December 2023 podcast interview with Lex Fridman, Jeff Bezos gave a rule for meetings: “If you’re the most senior person in the room, go last.” He explained: “If I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high-judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, ‘Well, if Jeff thinks that, maybe I’m not right.'”
Lauren Sánchez said that she used to speak first in her own meetings. Bezos told her: “No, no, no. You’re the boss. You talk last.”
Robert’s Rules of Order limits how often one person may speak. The 1915 edition says: “No member shall speak more than twice during the same day to the same question (only once on an appeal), nor longer than ten minutes at one time, without leave of the assembly.”
It also gives priority to those who have not spoken: “No member can speak a second time to a question as long as any member desires to speak who has not spoken to the question.” The current edition keeps both rules.
In 2010 researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College published a study of 699 people working in small groups in the journal Science. They found a “general collective intelligence factor” that explained how well a group did across many tasks. It was linked to “the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.”
The lead author, Anita Williams Woolley, said that “in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.”
Barack Obama described how he ran meetings as president. “I’d call on folks in the back row, including the most junior staffer,” he wrote in an essay published on December 9, 2020.
In 2018 he told a conference audience in Las Vegas about meetings in the Situation Room. In the outer ring of the room sat “a whole bunch of people, often younger but not always.” “Those are the people who are actually doing the work.” He said: “I’d point to someone in the back and say, you, what do you think? And they’d be shocked that I called on them.”
Let’s be mindful of time. — We have a fixed amount of time, so please keep it short.
In the interest of time… — Because time is limited, I will skip this or shorten it.
We’re at time. — The scheduled end has arrived, and the meeting should end now.
I know we’re over, but… — An apology from someone who keeps talking after the end time.
Long story short… — I will skip the details and give the point.
Top of the hour. — The full hour, when most meetings start. Bottom of the hour is the half hour.
Scrum is a framework for teamwork, first used for software, created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland. Its rulebook, the Scrum Guide, gives every meeting a fixed maximum length, called a timebox. “The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team.”
For a one-month work cycle, the planning meeting is limited to eight hours, the review to four and the retrospective to three.
On November 19, 1863, the orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg. Abraham Lincoln spoke after him for about two minutes.
The next day Everett wrote to Lincoln: “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
On October 22, 1924, about two dozen men “met in the basement of the Santa Ana YMCA” in California to hear Ralph C. Smedley explain a new kind of club. It became Toastmasters International.
Toastmasters meetings have a Timer. For a standard speech, a green signal is shown at five minutes, yellow at six and red at seven. The club magazine tells members: “As the timer, you play a fundamental role in keeping club meetings and members’ speeches on track.”
In March 2021, Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab had 14 people wear EEG caps during video meetings. On one day they had four half-hour meetings back to back. On another day, the same four meetings were separated by 10-minute breaks, which the participants spent meditating.
Without breaks, brain activity linked to stress built up over the two hours. With breaks, it stayed steady. Microsoft published the results on April 20, 2021: “The antidote to meeting fatigue is simple: taking short breaks.”