See if you recognize this pattern:
- A recurring meeting starts out as a useful regular collaboration space. The team already has open access to its communications and artifacts, no secrets here!
- Members invite others who might find it useful or have something to contribute. Sometimes people invite themselves — it’s open after all.
- Invited or not, more people turn up, because that’s the way to be sure they’ll get information they might need or be present if the team needs something they have.
- Then, as the meeting size increases, the tone changes. People aren’t sure why other people are there, and they clam up. The spaces become more of a performance platform and less a place for messy working.
- People outside the team participate, but often lack full context. Their act of participating puts a burden on the team to respond to input.
- Now the meeting needs a pre-meeting and usually contains sanitized content. The work has shifted elsewhere, and the quality of information it contains has decreased.
A space that once promoted trust now diminishes it, but you can see the benign intent. As the original team, why wouldn’t you want to tap into expertise from across the organization? And as someone outside the team, in the absence of well-packaged information, why wouldn’t you turn up and get news you might need?