Meetings have a rhythm. Get the right people in a room, a goal, and some pressure, and you can achieve some pretty wicked progress in a short amount of time. When a couple of my friends used to come over on Sundays to talk about game concepts, and work on fleshing ’em out, we’d make incredible progress in a relatively short amount of time, simply because we had the right chemistry – the right “pop” that would be able to mix casual, friendly conversation with incredibly interesting and thought-provoking ideas.

We’d play off each other’s ideas, and the banter had a natural back-and-forth that just … flowed. It was effortless, by and large.

The group of people I tend to meet with now completely lacks that “pop” – and it’s problematic, when you’re on a schedule, and you’ve got meetings all day, and they all drag like you’re mired in quicksand. Last week, just before leaving for break, we had a quick meeting about one particular aspect of the game that was missing some of the usual attendants – that meeting was hands down the best one I’ve been in so far on this project. People contributed, the banter boiled the good ideas to the top, and the end result, I believe, was so far, the most interesting concept we’ve had so far, as a group. (Yes, it was a meeting I organized, but I bear only some responsibility for not *driving* the meeting.)

The problem, here, is that we have a couple *very* forceful personalities on our team – and they tend to be the most experienced voices. The problem is that they don’t understand the concept of a meeting having a rhythm – the only thing that seems to matter moment-to-moment is getting their thoughts across. Yes, you need to convey your thoughts, but you also have to understand the ebb and flow, and read the personalities in the room, to know when linger, and when to move on. We have, for instance, one extremely experienced person on the team who I respect a great deal, but is hung up on a concept everyone else has bought in to. The *problem* isn’t that they don’t buy into it, but rather, that they bring *no* new means to *approach* their problem with it. It’s the same questions, over and over. And slowly, to boot – every time they talk, the meeting screeches to a complete stop, simply until they get their sentence out.

The problem, of course, is that a good meeting is like a rolling stone – it has momentum. It takes time to get it rolling, and if you actively stop it, it’s difficult to get it rolling again. You can nudge it in a different direction, or you can get it rolling slightly faster or slower, and pull everyone else along with you without breaking up the momentum. But stop the thing, and everyone falls off. We have two people who are regular attendees who stop the rock every time they talk, because they can’t understand the momentum that’s been built. The project’s EP, who’s also functionally the design lead, blows the rock to bits every time he’s in a meeting. It’s disaster, and it wastes everyone’s time.

Moreover, though, it robs us of the productive, crazy idea farm that a good get together can be. I *love* working in good meetings, when we’re all on fire. But the design meetings right now … they’re like being hit in the head with a hammer.