Rabbit Holes

A funny thing happens in lots of work meetings: Everyone starts with shared goals and great intentions, bright-eyed and relentlessly focused, only to end up squabbling over petty details, and leaving with little to show for it. Maybe someone notes a few quasi-artificial action items, mainly to feel there was some point to the past hour, but the results of such meetings are rarely worth the time and frustration. If this never happens to you, you’re free to skip the rest of this post, and invited (not to say begged) to share your secret in the comments section.

The most common reason for lousy meetings is also the most avoidable. It’s sometimes called “falling down a rabbit hole,” because the phenomenon is so bizarre that participants feel like Alice in Wonderland. We start discussing a high-level topic, then drill down into a subtopic, then a sub-subtopic, and so on, until we reach a level of detail that’s effectively irrelevant to the original goal.

The solution is simply not to fall too far. It’s easy to forget in the heat (or boredom) of the moment that progress requires only high-level consensus, not lock-step on details. It helps to think (very abstractly) of all the subtopics you could possibly discuss, arranged as a tree in which each level is less significant than the one above it.

Recognize the conversation’s descent as it happens. Once you’ve spelunked deep enough—that is, achieved sufficient high-level agreement for meeting attendees to make independent progress after the meeting—pull up to a higher level. Move on to the next item on the agenda, or end the meeting early. Don’t debate fine-grained details until N o’clock merely because that’s what your calendar dictates.

The most amazing thing about the news is that whatever goes on in the world, it exactly fits the number of pages that they're using in the paper that day.

—Jerry Seinfeld

To make matters worse, the conversation risks divergence at each level of descent. People may shift focus to disparate subtopics without even realizing it. They are thus likely to interpret each other’s statements outside the intended context, in a frustrating exercise called “talking past each other.” The solution is to pull back and establish common ground. If you don’t need immediate consensus to move forward, don’t bother trying to find it. If you go far enough, you’ll bump into some point you disagree on, and that point will expand to waste as much of your time as you let it.

Remember your goals for the meeting. Don’t be afraid to steer the conversation to a higher level, so it doesn’t fall too far down any particular rabbit hole. When you reach a point of frustration, back up and establish common ground, to make sure you’re not talking past each other. If attendees don’t all understand the goal of the meeting in the first place… Well, that’s an issue for another post.