Pointless meetings? There’s no such thing – the peacock explains why

IT’S A good rule of thumb that you can learn more by looking at what people do than listening to what they say. Everyone in the corporate world, for example, likes to talk about how much they hate meetings.

But for something they profess to despise, they seem to have an awful lot of them. By contrast, I mildly dislike kale, and I eat precisely no kale.

So why the endless meetings if no one likes them?

Ultimately, there are four main types: meetings which are designed to inform people of something, meetings which aim to get people’s opinion, meetings where a decision needs to be made, and meetings where the main purpose is to be able to say afterwards that you had a meeting.

It’s the last type – “pointless meetings” – that everyone hates. But there are very few things in nature that are truly pointless, even if they seem so at first glance.

Take the peacock’s tail: heavy, unwieldy, and useless. It’s pretty, but then peacocks are already pretty.

But according to the evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi, it is the peacock’s tail’s very uselessness that makes it valuable.

To the peahen looking for a potential mate, it says, quite clearly: “I am such a splendid genetic and physical specimen that I can afford to drag this around and still have energy to spare. You should probably mate with me.”

Other animals do similar things. Deer are famous for “pronking” – pointlessly jumping up and down, using up quite a lot of energy.

But again, this is anything but useless. It is a way of signalling to potential predators: “I have physical energy to spare. You could try to chase me, but frankly you’re better off going for an easier target. You don’t, after all, want to waste all that energy. You might not even catch me. And then where would you be?”

Zahavi called this approach “costly signalling”.

Costly signalling happens in business all the time. It’s one of the underlying purposes of advertising.

In 2017, Coca-Cola spent $4bn on adverts – despite the fact that there can’t be many people on the planet who don’t know what Coke is, and those that don’t probably have other priorities, like basic survival.

Coca-Cola isn’t trying to tell you that it makes a sweet carbonated drink that is thirst-quenching and goes well with bourbon – you already know that. It is telling you a lot of other things, like “we are still going to be in business next year” and “we probably won’t poison you because we’re invested quite heavily in business continuity”.

“Pointless” meetings are one of the most under-recognised manifestations of this phenomenon. A bit of number crunching tells you what they may actually be saying.

The average remuneration for a FTSE100 chief executive is £5.7m. An 2016 EY report found that the average pay of directors in those companies was around £2m.

With 2,080 working hours in a year, that comes to around £2k an hour for a chief executive and just under £1k for a director.

So a “pointless” meeting with the boss and four directors is worth about the same as a second-hand mid-range family car. Hold one just every other month, and that’s equivalent to hiring a member of staff.

If a company announced that they had hired a dedicated member of staff for a special project or initiative, no one would query for a moment how seriously they took it.

But holding six meetings about that project a year is actually saying the same thing. The meeting isn’t pointless at all – it is signalling “we care about this”.

Of course, this is absolutely no guarantee that anything further will come out of it. But sometimes, maybe that’s the point.