Meetings, Interruptions, and Power

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Frank, a 20-year-old straight white/Asian male programmer who has grown up watching toxic masculinity videos on YouTube, and about the challenge of getting him to care about ethics, equity, and social responsibility rather than dismissing it all as “woke”. The plan I sketched there was to smuggle the big ideas into an undergrad software engineering course in which students build something in teams. Here’s a brief (and probably misguided) sketch of what the first lecture in a such a course might be:

1. Teams need to plan and coordinate, which means they need meetings. Most people dislike meetings, but that’s because they’ve never been in one that was run well. Following a few simple rules can make yours shorter and more effective.

2. The first step for any meeting is to write an agenda with timing estimates. Doing this gives everyone fair warning of what’s going to be discussed and enables sensible prioritization: always discuss the most important things first, even if they’re longer, so that they aren’t shortchanged.

3. Have someone take notes during the meeting so that (a) people who weren’t able to attend can find out what was agreed, (b) people who were there can agree on what was decided, (c) you have something to use as a starting point for the next meeting’s agenda, and (d) you have something to check when you have to report progress. Put the minutes somewhere searchable (e.g., in a Git repo or a shared Google doc), not in a chat or person-to-person email.

4. Always choose a moderator for the meeting to make sure that everyone gets a fair chance to speak and to keep the meeting on time. If someone wants to speak, they signal the moderator (e.g., raise a hand either physically or virtually); nobody speaks until they are called on by the moderator, who allows them one point at a time.

5. The moderator’s other (equally important) responsibilities are to squash interruptions and rambling.

6. If someone persists in interrupting, draw a grid with every person’s name on a row and on a column and keep a tally of who interrupts whom. You will invariably find that (a) the same person (or people) are doing the interrupting and (b) they’re interrupting the same people. Research shows that most people interrupt “down”, i.e., they only interrupt people they perceive as having lower social status. Keeping track helps interrupters realize what they’re doing so that they can correct their behavior.

7. People’s perceptions of relative social status also affect who winds up doing what. Programming is a higher-status job than testing, which is a higher-status job than recording the minutes of meetings, so (for example) male students often snag the former and leave the latter for their female peers. This happens so often that anthropologists coined the term women’s work to describe it.

8. The irony is that there is little correlation between novices’ perception of their ability and their actual ability. The Dunning-Kruger Effect isn’t actually a thing [insert note here about bad statistics] but research shows that high-status individuals consistently overestimate their abilities and their standing in class.

9. During the meeting, individuals report progress, plans, and problems, and the team as a whole comes away with context, priorities, and responsibilities. [Include examples of status reports and a typical weekly to-do list.]

10. Who decides what when there are disagreements? As Jo Freeman pointed out in “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, every group has a power structure; the only question is whether it is explicit and accountable or implicit and unaccountable. Martha’s Rules works well for small groups that mostly agree with each other. [Insert anecdote here about a company that didn’t publish its org chart internally “to prevent siloing”. The actual effect was to keep power in the hands of well-connected people.]

11. Exercise:

    1. Read NOAA Guide to Dealing with Disruptive Behaviors.
    2. Which one do you think best describes you?
    3. Which one do your teammates think best describes you?
    4. What action are you going to take in your next meeting to correct for this?

So, will this work? That question needs to be answered on three levels:

1. Will students learn how to run meetings well? Based on past experience (I’ve given a talk like the one above several times), I think the answer is, “Some of them, and it won’t make anything worse.”

2. Will they find the content about power in social groups jarring or offputting? I expect the answer will be “yes” the first couple of times the lesson is delivered, but that those rough edges can be smoothed out with practice.

3. Will students like Frank actually change their behavior as a result of this lesson? This question is the one that really matters; I think the only way to find out is to write the other 23 lessons needed to make a teachable set and then to try them out. If you know of prior work along these lines that could serve as a guide (or that could steer me away from landmines that nobody needs to step on again), I’d be grateful for pointers.