All Living is Meeting - Rethinking the Word Meeting

Co-Written by Lili Boyanova Hugh, Steven Byers, and Jennifer McDowell

“All real living is meeting,” writes Martin Buber in his work I and Thou. Though the philosophy of Buber is complex, this essential quote reminds us that the most important part of life, real living, is done in relationship with others. That without another to be in deep, authentic relationship with moment to moment, we are existing in a world of its parts, functions, and pieces. Not the whole. 

We can use this thinking to help us rethink the way in which we, as people existing in organizations, approach what we commonly call meetings. In our traditional experience, a meeting is an event with an agenda whose goal is to produce certain outcomes and which people attend. It is a transactional experience, a necessary step on a path to something else. If we adopt Buber’s thinking that all real living is meeting we open ourselves up to see a meeting as the coming into relationship, even for a moment, of two or full human beings. 

Meetings can be moments in the hallway, a conversation on the bus, a structured time around a conference table, or more, as long as the experience brings two or more people into fuller, deeper, more whole relationship in a way that helps the other move into a more whole self. 

Why does this matter and how does it apply to our work settings?

When we shift our thinking from meetings as things to meetings as powerful moments that happen through interaction with another person, we free ourselves from the confines of traditional meeting culture – productivity over people – and allow a new way of leading and being at work to be invited in.

Maybe the purpose of work isn’t just to produce, but to be transformed through the experience of producing with others? Maybe we can invite more meeting and less doing to-do on the pathway to producing at work? 

Practically, that means that the principles we outline next can be part of any interaction of people. Start with the person. See the person. See yourself in relationship to and with the person. Allow yourself to be changed and expanded because of this other person that exists on the planet and who is now in front of you in this moment. Slow down enough to create space.