The Meeting

All over the civilised World, business meetings can either be useful, efficient and interesting or they can be the most tedious and stressful affairs imaginable. The distinction can be as simple as the relevance and/or importance of the subject matter (and how that subject matter is approached) or, perhaps, the difference might lie in the characters (or lack thereof) of the individuals involved in the meeting. No country has a monopoly on boring, monotonous farts and, of course, there are always going to be the snipers and vipers to look out for – some people take great pleasure in the opportunity to belittle or undermine a colleague in front of a captive audience. It could just be the sheer volume and duration of meetings which make the difference between feeling that one’s time has been well-spent or wasted.

Assuming those variables to be common to all countries, then there are the cultural and linguistic specifics to consider.

A meeting in the UK might consist of, say, 8 people around the table, one of whom rises to his feet to point at arrows and graphs being projected onto the wall. He drones on for as long as it takes and the other 7 listen and scribble (or tap out text messages on a mobile phone hidden just below the edge of the table). This process is punctuated from time to time by a point or question raised by one of the other 7 people. Whilst their point is being made, it is temporarily they who “own” the meeting and that ownership is duly handed back to the presenter for his explanation or just to watch him sweat and stammer as he realises (along with everyone else) that there’s something fundamentally flawed in his notions. Traditionally, a 10 o’clock meeting in the UK begins at, well, 10 o’clock and, just as traditionally, one’s sense of humour is supposed to be left in a special rack outside the door on entry and picked up again afterwards, if one still has the will to live and to laugh by that stage.

Traditionally, a 10 o’clock meeting in France begins at some point thereafter. By about 10:20, most of the players will have arrived and two of them are wiring up the projector. At some stage in the ensuing day or so, the remaining participants arrive. Suddenly, invisibly and inaudibly, a starting pistol is apparently fired and all 8 people begin talking. Some are talking in pairs and others are talking to everyone. In the UK, a conversation is very much like table tennis. The “ball” (the topic of conversation) is only ever on one side of the table at any given time and it gets batted back and forth. The same conversation in France would be better compared with American Football. There’s still only the one ball but it can be chucked, kicked or carried in any direction and there are heaps of players involved, some in piles of 4 or 5, some running around individually and some grappling in pairs. I’ve witnessed many occasions when, for uninterrupted periods of several minutes, literally 5 people are in a conversation where each of the 5 is talking to the other 4 simultaneously and, amazingly, each seems to be listening to what the other 4 are saying whilst making their own contribution to the debate.

I’ve long-since abandoned any effort to try to keep up with what’s going on in these free-for-all exchanges. Clearly, the fact that the mêlée is conducted in French presents problems to me but it’s far more the case that the tight-arsed Brit in me just rejects this approach to debate. My instinct is to try to single out the voice of the person I deem most likely to be making the most sense but, at my level of French, the mixture of noise of the other 4 voices, each of which is competing to be “the one most heard”, makes it practically impossible to stay focused on the target voice.

As ever, I recognise that I’m a guest in this country. I arrive in the meeting with inevitable cultural baggage and it’s my approach to debate which is the alien one and theirs which is the norm. I just have to do my best to occupy my mind with something interesting during the scrimmages and hope that I have a clear view of the ball at the end of the fourth quarter! Touchdown!