Re: Anonymity in meetings LO2577

Bruce_Viney@europe.notes.pw.com
Fri, 25 Aug 95 09:05:48 GMT

Replying to LO2475 --

A quick 'whoami' and then some comments on annonymity in meetings:

I am responsible for the use of GroupSystems within our firm. My (more
recent) background is one of a hard and soft skills trainer.

Anonymity
---------------

I am coming to this discussion somewhat late so please bear with me if I
reiterate what has already been said.

Allowing meeting participants to remain anonymous is, I think, the most
important step in the evolution of business meetings and the effect they
can have on change and productivity since someone came up with the idea of
using an agenda.

Anonymity has two major benefits:

1. It allows participants to say what they really believe, free from the
constraints of internal politics, job security, promotion worries or bully
boys. This is critical in enabling meetings to become genuine forums for
discussion and therefore catalysts for productive change.

2. Each idea that is put forward in a meeting is judged on its own merits
and not by who said it. How often have you been at a meeting where an
idea has been ignored because it was mentioned by the most junior person
present? And yet if they are worthy of being at the meeting, their ideas
are worthy of being given due attention.

Despite the usefulness of anonymity it is rarely needed throughout a
meeting. More usually, anonymity is used in the early stages of a
meeting, during idea generation, organisation and evaluation, and then
only up to a point. Open discussion is often effective interspersed
between anonymous participation both to keep the meeting alive and to
allow a free run of verbal input. Once the meeting moves beyond idea
evaluation anonymity can conversely get in the way. You usually know it
is time to remove anonymity when participants start to own up to
submitting ideas. Interestingly, this will often happen even though they
needed the protection of anonymity to submit the idea in the first place.

--
Bruce
Bruce_Viney@europe.notes.pw.com