101 Ways To Make Meetings Active

If you have ever sat through a meeting that could have been an email, a memo, a carrier pigeon, or a brief nod in a corridor, then 101 Ways to Make Meetings Active may be the book for you. Written by Mel Silberman in the optimistic closing days of the twentieth century, this volume tackles one of civilisation’s most enduring mysteries: why gather a room full of adults together only to send them gently into a state of collective hibernation?

Silberman approaches the problem with admirable determination, offering not one, not ten, but one hundred and one ways to inject life into meetings. This is a book for trainers, managers, team leaders, facilitators, and anyone who has ever stared across a conference table wondering whether their colleagues were listening, sleeping, or quietly planning an escape through the emergency exit. The suggested activities aim to encourage participation, discussion, creativity, and the radical notion that people attending a meeting might actually contribute something.

Published by Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer in 1999, this book hails from a fascinating period when flip charts still ruled the earth, overhead projectors lurked in darkened corners, and PowerPoint was only beginning its long campaign against human attention spans. Yet much of the advice remains surprisingly relevant. Human beings, it turns out, have changed rather less than office technology.

Inside you will find exercises, techniques, icebreakers, group activities, discussion starters, and enough participatory ideas to transform a dreary committee gathering into something approaching organised enthusiasm. Whether this is viewed as a benefit or a warning depends entirely upon your feelings about team-building exercises.

This copy is in good condition, meaning it has survived countless opportunities to be waved dramatically during brainstorming sessions or deployed as a defensive shield against motivational consultants. The pages remain clean and presentable, ready to help a new generation of meeting organisers avoid the dreaded phrase, "Could we all just sit through another forty slides?"

A practical guide, a workplace time capsule, and perhaps a reminder that meetings have always been slightly ridiculous, 101 Ways to Make Meetings Active remains a cheerful attempt to improve one of office life’s most stubborn institutions. Buy it for the management expert in your life, the serial meeting organiser, or simply as evidence that by 1999 humanity was already desperately trying to solve the problem of boring meetings.

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