Would you have Satan or King Lear chair your meetings? What literature can teach us about decision-making
e used to make things. Now we have meetings. On any given weekday some 50m meetings are held in American workplaces alone. The average executive now spends 23 hours in them each week, a figure that has more than doubled since the 1960s. The number of meetings proliferated in the 1980s as Western economies moved away from manufacturing towards “knowledge” industries that seemed to require a lot of talking.
In detailing the twists and turns of this conference, and subsequent ones held by the Greeks, Trojans and gods of Mount Olympus, Homer nails meeting behaviour with a precision that management gurus today can only dream of. Where Homer blazes a trail, other literary greats follow: the Western canon is ripe with unharvested wisdom on how to make meetings more productive. Time to put yourself on mute, turn off your camera and get reading.
Few works of literature dramatise this problem better than “King Lear”. Like “The Iliad”, the play opens with a meeting, as Lear discusses how to manage his succession. As with many managers, he has already predetermined the course of action: he plans to divvy up his kingdom between his three daughters. His only decision is how large a share to give each child, a judgment he will make depending on their answer to the question, who “doth love us most”.
Nowadays, leaders are better at pretending to listen to their subordinates. But fear of displeasing the boss still shapes most meetings. During the Cuban missile crisis, John F. Kennedy was so concerned that his national-security staff would rather say the right thing in front of him than work out the best strategy that he left the room for many discussions.
The inability to manage discussion also results in a two-tier system. As Ralph observes, “practised debaters – Jack, Maurice, Piggy – would use their whole art to twist the meeting.” This leads to less adept speakers becoming marginalised. As Jack puts it: “It’s time some people knew they’ve got to keep quiet and leave deciding things to the rest of us.”
In Hell, the diabolical assembly chose to precipitate the fall of Man – which turns out to be the option Satan was most in favour of all along. Some scholars have suggested that Satan manipulated the vote. But perhaps they don’t want to acknowledge that, in getting people to vote for his preferred outcome, Satan was simply really good at meetings.
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