Move the table out of your meeting room
Let’s talk about tables.
I’m in the middle of reading Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, a story about Pixar’s origin and how to create and sustain a culture of creativity and collaboration.
Chapter 1 begins with a passage about a table that reminded me of a client experience I had couple years ago.
For thirteen years we had a table in the large conference room at Pixar that we call West One. Through it was beautiful, I grew to hate this table. It was long and skinny, like one of those things you’d see in a comedy sketch about an old wealthy couple that sits down for dinner–one person at either end, a candelabra in the middle–and has to shout to make conversation. The table had been chosen by a design Steve Jobs liked, and it was elegant, all right–but it impeded our work.
We’d hold regular meetings about our movies around that table–thirty of us facing off in two long lines, often with more people stated along the walls–and everyone was so spread out that it was difficult to communicate. For those unlucky enough to be seated at the far ends, ideas didn’t flow because it was nearly impossible to make eye contact without craning your neck. Moreover, because it was important that the director and producer of the film in question be able to hear what everyone was saying, they had to be placed at the center of the table. So did Pixar’s creative leaders: John Lasseter, Pixar’s creative officer, and me, and a handful of our most experienced directors, producers, and writers. To ensure that these people were always seated together, someone began making place cards. We might as well have been at a formal dinner party.
When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe. But unwittingly, we were allowing this table–and the resulting place card ritual–to send a different message. The closer you were seated to the middle of the table, it implied, the more important–the more central–you must be. And the farther away, the less likely you were to speak up–you distanced from the heart of the conversation made participating feel intrusive. If the table was crowded, as it often was, still more people would sit in chairs around the edges of the room, creating yet a third tier of participants (those at the center of the table, those at the ends, and those not at the table at all). Without intending to, we’d created an obstacle that discouraged people from jumping in…
It wasn’t until we happened to have a meeting in a smaller room with a square table that John and I realized what was wrong. Sitting around the table, the interplay was better, the exchange of ideas more free-flowing, the eye contact automatic. Every person there, no matter their job title, felt free to speak up. This was not only what we wanted, it was a fundamental Pixar belief: Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position. At our long, skinny table, comfortable in our middle seats, we had utterly failed to recognize that we were behaving contrary to that basic tenet. Over time, we’d fallen into a trap. Even though we were conscious that a room’s dynamics are critical to any good discussion, even though we believed that we were constantly on the lookout for problems, our vantage point blinded us to what was right before our eyes
Emboldened by this new insight, I went to our facilities department. “Please,” I said, “I don’t care how you do it, but get that table out of there.” I wanted something that could be arranged into a more intimate square so people could address each other directly and not feel like they didn’t matter. A few days later, as a critical meeting on an upcoming movie approached, our new table was installed, solving the problem.
Changing the shape of the table to reduce hierarchy and increase inclusivity is a step in the right direction.
Catmull diagnosed the problem of the long table and used a more inclusive square table as a solution. But, I think Catmull and the Pixar team could have gone further.
Take tables off the table
I enjoy and prefer to plan and design in-person sessions, well, in-person. Sure it’s possible and convenient to design remotely, but I find that being with a client sponsor team in the same physical space is much more effective.
A couple of years ago I was preparing for a session with an insurance company’s executive team with the intent of creating a vision for a digitally-enabled culture and workforce of the future to support changing technologies, customer expectations, and digital maturity. We kicked off the planning process with an in-person meeting with our senior client sponsor team at their headquarters.
The style of the meeting was a 90–2–90, a 90 minute meeting with the client to scope the session and articulate the session purpose and objectives, followed by 2 hours for my team to draft an initial design for the session, followed by another 90 minute meeting with the client to share the draft design, get feedback, and refine the session parameters. These 90–2–90s are very effective in jumpstarting the planning and design process. They’re fun, productive, helpful for building relationships with the client, and credentialing for our team.
The facilitator and I showed up early for our 90–2–90 and had one of our sponsors take us to the room we would be meeting in so that we could set up and prepare. Our assigned meeting room was a mid-size executive conference room with natural light and windows. There were a couple of small tables pushed together in the middle of the room to create one larger table surrounded by wheeled office chairs. On the edges of the room were an ornamental couch and a couple of stationary, ornamental chairs.
Within moments of entering the room, we knew the layout was not ideal for the type of meeting we wanted to have. We wanted to have a meeting that was open and candid. We wanted our meeting to build relationships and connect people. We wanted to remove as many barriers to openness and directness as we could and we wanted people to feel comfortable while having conversations.
We knew the tables had to go.
Sure, tables can be helpful during a meeting — they allow meeting participants to put things like laptops and mugs on top of them for easy access. But, easy access to a laptop or phone on a table invites distraction and disengagement. Most of the time, you shouldn’t need a laptop in a well-designed meeting unless that expectation has been set ahead of time. I’d be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people who bring a laptop to a meeting are guaranteed to end up doing something on that laptop not related to that meeting. A table is also a literal barrier between people in a meeting. It is something people can hide behind — it literally hides more than half the body and in doing so, hides body language. Tables are valuable but they are primarily a tool of convenience rather than necessity.
Take a look at the image at the beginning. Look at the table. Now imagine the room without the table. The room feels different. The dynamic changes. The chairs are exposed, more intimate, and any interaction from one chair to the others is more direct.
So, we split the amalgamated big table back into little tables and moved them to the edges of the room. We created a circle of chairs, including the ornamental ones, and added the couch for a more intimate conversation.
As our sponsors entered the room one by one as the meeting start time neared, each paused as they entered the room and many commented on the layout. This was a room they had countless meetings in, but it was the first time they had ever seen it with the layout we had created. One of the comments I remember distinctly: “I don’t think anyone has used the couch since the room was first built”.
Our client sponsors settled into chairs and to our delight, two got on the couch. Each of the senior executives had also brought their laptops to the meeting even though my team was running the meeting and had brought the only supplies we would need: large sticky flip-charts, sticky notes, markers, and pens. With no table, laptops and phones went under the chairs or to the side of the couch.
Once everyone arrived, we started.
From the moment our sponsors walked into the room, they new they were in an atypical meeting. Changing the normal room layout showed we were approaching things differently rather than us simply saying “we’re approaching things differently.”
Both our 90-minute conversations that day went extremely well — and removing table had contributed to that. For example, in the morning session we had each sponsor find a blank flipchart we had set up around the room and answer key questions. Without a central table, participants were able to easily get up from their seats and maneuver around the room. Our sponsors found the room layout intentional and conducive for what we wanted to do in the meetings and how we wanted to do it.
Turn the tables on your tables
We’re only just starting to go back into offices. That means we have the perfect opportunity to reset bad habits and take a fresh look at how we meet and gather in-person.
The environment of a meeting affects how meeting attendees feel and work. It is important for meeting attendees to feel they are entering a space that has been customized for the time they are about to spend together and the objectives they are aiming to accomplish.
In the before times, I’m guessing that when most of us (including your truly) would host an in-person meeting, we would go to the designated meeting room and prepare according to the default layout. And when we would participate in an in-person meeting, we would usually enter a room without any expectation that the room would be different to each and every other time we’d walked into the room.
The next time you enter a meeting room, ask yourself, “Am I matching my meeting to the environment or am I matching my environment to my meeting?”
Don’t take meeting rooms at face value. Challenge the default layout and question why a room is setup the way it is. Create a space that fits the purpose of your meeting. Make your participants understand the tone of the meeting from the moment they cross the threshold.
As a mentor of mine taught me, “the conversation is only as good as the container you have it in.”
Curiously Yours — Seb
P.S. I’d love to hear about ways you’ve customized and transformed default physical meeting spaces (especially conference rooms) to better enable your meeting objectives.
Sources and Suggested Reading
- Catmull, E. E., & Wallace, A. (2014). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. Random House.
