The Data That Turned Meetings Into a Science
Close to a billion meetings take place each day around the world, and CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays inside them. Ars Technica reports that the study of those hours is no longer a tiny niche: “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists, and it is accelerating because archived virtual meetings supply vast swaths of data.
The mechanism is the part worth noticing. The field’s growth tracks a change in the medium — meetings that happen on video arrive with a record attached, and a record is what makes a billion daily gatherings countable. A meeting that can be replayed is a meeting that can be studied, and the window into human behavior now on offer is a byproduct of the video call.
Which is a reminder that the tools reshaping work also reshape what can be known about it. The meeting was always a social instrument. It took a camera to turn it into a dataset.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Once something becomes measurable, it tends to be managed for the measurement — expect meetings to get optimized against whatever the archives can see.
There’s a counterweight worth keeping: people meet to connect, communicate and cooperate, not only to produce decisions. A metric that misses that will miss the point.
Fair — though the awkward part is that connecting is harder to count than deciding, which is a decent argument for keeping some of it off the record.