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I had a very interesting conversation with Joe Wheaton about the California beaver summit idea.
He has done so many virtual trainings with so many people all over the world for so long that he is uniquely qualified to give advice. So I was grateful for his thoughts. One of the things I said about the NM conference was that the organizers told me it had been a year in the planning. I was a little worried about their timeline and whether we could pull everything together so quickly to make the conference happen in spring.
That’s when Dr. Wheaton said the most shocking, and comforting thing that filled me with relief.
He basically said that “planning meetings” never get things done anyway. Imagine that! People who are driven and committed get things done. And you don’t need many of them to make something like this happen. Planning meetings actually are far more likely to slow and undo things.
For a long time afterwards my mind was completely blown.
You see I’ve organized the two events I’ve been involved with for years are the John Muir birthday Earth Day and the beaver festival. Now Earth day is a huge event that requires huge resources and meets for four months every week to organize. Their event had the entire national park service to set up and coordinate and hundreds of ranger man power on the actual day. My job was always the stage planning and arranging musicians which required contacting musicians, lining up a schedule and getting them organized. More than once I’d make a plan and some other member would change it or add a children’s performance or treasure hunt to the schedule throwing everything into chaos until I sorted it out again.
This was planned completely opposite to the beaver festival. Which takes a mountain of work and that I mostly do alone calling, cajoling, strong-arming and emailing people into collaboration. I have learned to have one ‘planning meeting’ in where I let the team say what they want to change or contribute and I endeavor to make that happen, but mostly it happens alone. In my head. On my computer. On my phone. On my spread sheet. By the time the actual day rolls around I am usually relieved because it is no longer my job. It’s everyone’s job.
When I compare the festival to earth day planning I would always feel so guilty. Like I had been doing it wrong. And because I always assume I’m doing it wrong I would feel like I didn’t collaborate enough, or was too stubborn and not flexible enough. Like it was a failing on my part to not understand that a committee of vaguely committed participants repeating the same things over and over again and throwing wheel wrenches into schedules was the way it was SUPPOSED to go.
Joe said no.
He said big planning meetings can actually make things worse. It was good to get their input and make them feel heard and then just DO it. Smart people don’t want to give up an hour of their week for four months just to make something happen. A few committed individuals was the key. And even though he never said this, I heard “THANK GOD! You’ve been doing this right!”
So that means maybe the California beaver summit can happen as planned! And maybe I can stop feeling guilty for doing the festival wrong. And maybe Stanford just did a study that said that meetings actually never make things happen anyway. At least that’s what I heard on Wait Wait don’t tell me.
Now this is what we need to be worried about.
