Doing it in a Group

How are your meetings?  Are they productive?  Do you get the chance to voice your opinions, make suggestions, increase synergy, or do you just whittle away at some random sketch while the others argue about platitudes and the proper way to graph data? 

I only ask this because, as someone who has (relatively) recently been thrown a paradigm shift with the boss leaving, we have had to make some changes to the way we do meetings.  For the past 5 years, it's been a pretty standard format - 1/2 research presentation, 1/2 literature presentation, a little literature abstracts thrown in, and a singular focus on the person who's speaking at the time.  There are many ways to do group meeting, and this was it for us. 

With the boss leaving, we had to think about what we wanted out of group meetings, and what we felt would be the best format to get our thoughts across to other group members.  On a day-to-day basis there is a varying degree of communication between folks in the lab, depending on what projects people are working on and whether or not someone is trying to learn something new that another person in the lab has mastered (be it a technique, a computation, etc.).  This constant communication is very important, and made justifying the "one person gives a big talk" easier because one could argue that everyone was getting help on a consistent basis.  That being said, it didn't happen for everyone, so some folks who are working on their own projects (i.e. me) did not get the same level of feedback on a regular basis.

Fast forward to recently, and we've had the opportunity to try several different formats with our meetings, seeing what works and what doesn't work.  What definitely doesn't work is having everyone present, because it just takes way too long and doesn't allow for a good amount of discussion for each person (especially if some folks are taking longer than others).  Last night we followed a similar format, but had only half the people present, and it ended up being a very fruitful discussion for everyone involved, I think!  What seemed to be the most helpful was getting that more casual discussion happening with everyone in the lab, so one could get input from other lab members who aren't normally involved in the day-to-day conversation.

It's clear that there's value to this format - who doesn't like input?  At the same time, however, we appear to be moving away from the "one person does a more formal presentation" format, which may detract from opportunities to, well, present.  An interesting twist to this has been attending the group meetings from other groups, which was something we chose to do to help us stay "in the loop" and "visible" within the department.  The group that I currently attend actually does both formats - weekly group meetings in which one or two people present, as well as subgroup meetings in which folks do more of an informal presentation with discussion.  While this is similar to the way we've done it in the past, I think the benefit is that the subgroups are more broad - synthesis-based one week, assay-based the other week, rather than having a particular project meet separately, leading ultimately to me being by myself for meetings.  I like the format better because it does what it sets out to do - gives folks in the lab who are not working on your project the chance to bring an outside perspective and insight into what you're trying to accomplish.

Feedback time - how do you group meeting?  Informal discussions, formal presentations, or a combination of the two?  Do you have to present for an hour once every few weeks/months, or 15 minutes on a more frequent basis?  As someone who is now a refugee and seeing the world for the first time, I'd be interested to hear how you do it in a group. 

I'm Adam L.
Thanks for listening.  :/-