Meetings Should Be More Interesting Than Movies

• Several times in the book, Lencioni compares meetings to television shows and movies.
• "What if I told you that meetings are inherently more interesting, more entertaining than movies?...Think about it this way. Movies and meetings are often approximately two hours in length, give or take twenty minutes or so...But a movie is a passive activity. You can't interrupt one of the actors with advice about what to do. And yet a meeting is completely interactive. Not only can you, but you're expected to provide input...And a movie is not relevant to our lives...But theoretically, meetings are completely relevant. The decisions that are made at the end of a meeting have a direct impact on how we spend our time and energy after we leave the room...So I would say that an interactive, relevant activity—a meeting—would be far more compelling than a passive, irrelevant one—a movie."
• One of the reasons why movies are interesting is that they're all based around conflict, and we need more conflict in meetings. Productive conflict is useful and pushes the conversation forward. 

Mine for Conflict

• "Meetings are boring because they lack drama. Or conflict. This is a shame because most meetings have plenty of potential for drama, which is essential for keeping human beings engaged. Unfortunately, rather than mining for that golden conflict, most leaders of meetings seem to be focused on avoiding tension and ending their meetings on time...To make meetings less boring, leaders must look for legitimate reasons to provoke and uncover relevant, constructive ideological conflict."
• "Everyone, but especially you, as the leader of the group, needs to be looking for places where people have different opinions but aren't necessarily putting them out there. And when you see that, you need to force them to communicate what they're thinking until they've said all there is to be said. You need to be constantly mining for buried conflict."
• "The truth is, the only thing more painful than confronting an uncomfortable topic is pretending it doesn't exist."
• "[C]onsensus is usually not achievable. The likelihood of six intelligent people coming to a sincere and complete agreement on a complex and important topic is very low."
• "Regardless of what position people originally took, once the decision is made, everyone supports it. That's why it is critical that no one hold anything back during the discussion."

Use Different Types of Meetings for Different Things

• "Too many organizations have only one kind of regular meetings, often called a staff meeting. Either once a week or twice a month, people get together for two or three hours of randomly focused discussion about everything from strategy to tactics, from administrivia to culture. Because there is no clarity around what topics are appropriate, there is no clear context for the various discussions that take place. In the end, little is decided because the participants have a hard time figuring out whether they're supposed to be debating, voting, brainstorming, weighing in, or just listening."
• "The single biggest structural problem facing leaders of meetings is the tendency to throw every type of issue that needs to be discussed into the same meeting, like a bad stew with too many random ingredients."
• "To make our meetings more effective, we need to have multiple types of meetings, and clearly distinguish between the various purposes, formats, and timing of those meetings."
• Lencioni proposes that every organization should consider implementing four different types of meetings, explained in the graphic below: