Do you ever weep for boredom in eight-person meetings where only two people talk?

Do you die a little inside when your day is 80% full of committees?

Do you wish your staffers would pay better attention to the agenda and stop emailing?

Do you ever want to throw your laptop against the wall to end a remote meeting?

Meetings are essential for making sense and making decisions and making headway. No organization can thrive without them. So why are meetings so often the saddest, clumsiest, and most irksome hours of our working lives?

If that question’s pestered you, please pull up to the Mode/Switch roundtable and learn from author and organizational designer, Jurriaan Kamer. His book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization offers great sanity on all things organizational. This week, we tap his wisdom on bettering our meetings.

The philosopher Martin Buber once said, “All real living is meetings.” In other words, human life is really living when it occasions authentic encounter. Why can’t meetings be life-giving like that? Good news. They can be, thanks to Jurriaan’s advice.

This week’s Mode/Switchers—David Wilstermann, Betty Gronsman, Jake Aupperlee, and I—ask scads of questions of Jurriaan from our different generational experiences. Even better, we share questions from you our listeners as well. And we discuss scenarios you’ll recognize from meetings whose memory you’ve tried to repress.

Biggest takeaway from the Mode/Switch Pod this week? Sometimes you have to put the fish on the table. It’s an indispensable Dutch idiom. And if you want to use it in your next meeting, you’ll need to press play on this pod.

Want to learn more about Jurriaan’s work and hire his team to unblock your company? Check out his website. He’s also very active on LinkedIn.