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A meeting between several people from product and sales. Without warning, Nia introduces a new concept.
— I have an idea: let’s combine onboarding and support into one process. What do you think?
Amira says almost nothing. After the meeting, Nia asks:
— Why didn’t you say anything?
— Because that was the first time I heard about it, in front of everyone.
For Nia, a meeting is a place to think together. For Amira, it is a place to discuss something she has had time to think through first.
How does Empatyzer adapt meetings to different working styles?
Empatyzer helps you see that some people think during a conversation, others need time beforehand. It also allows you to see how the meeting format can give voice to both styles.
Features that can help:
- Comparison: Compares your preferences in areas such as thinking aloud, time for reflection and meeting format, so that in the situation of "What is a meeting for?" it's easier to separate a difference in style from a ill intent.
- You vs. the team: Compares how you operate with your team in areas like thinking aloud, time for reflection, and meeting format, making it easier to see where the "What's a meeting for?" confusion comes from.
- Talk to Em about your team: Allows you to discuss with Em the problem "What is a meeting for?" in the context of the entire team and establish a shared rule that prevents similar misunderstandings in the future.
What really happened
Nia has an idea and deliberately does not circulate it in advance because she wants to use the energy of live discussion. For her, the meeting is where an idea meets questions and begins to take shape. Amira assigns a different function to meetings: she prefers to read material first, check the data, and organize her position, then use the meeting to compare considered arguments and make a decision. When Nia introduces a completely new topic live, she reads Amira’s silence as lack of contribution. Amira experiences the same moment as pressure to take a position without preparation. Their profiles make the tension plausible, but the key issue is not that they belong to fixed “meeting types.” The team has not agreed whether the meeting is for generating ideas, evaluating them, or deciding.
What the research says
Live group ideation has a genuine benefit: people can build on one another’s ideas immediately. It also has a cost. In spoken conversation only one person can talk at a time, so others must wait, which can interrupt their own thought process and reduce idea generation — production blocking (Nijstad, Stroebe, & Lodewijkx, 2003). Earlier work found that parallel electronic idea generation could reduce some of that cost (Gallupe, Bastianutti, & Cooper, 1991). This does not prove that individual work is always superior to meetings. It suggests that different stages of thinking benefit from different conditions: generating, critically evaluating, and jointly deciding are not the same cognitive task.
How to handle it
Name the meeting’s function in one sentence beforehand. “Tomorrow we are generating ideas; nothing will be decided” creates a different expectation from “Read the draft; tomorrow we choose an option.” You can also combine the two styles: send a short pre-read the day before, give people a few minutes for individual notes at the start, then open the discussion. Nia keeps the energy of live exchange, while Amira has a chance to prepare her own point of view. The general rule is: do not assume everyone knows what the meeting is for; separate creation, evaluation, and decision explicitly because each stage benefits from a somewhat different way of working.
How Empatyzer and Em can help
Empatyzer can show Nia and Amira that a “good meeting” serves a different function for each of them. Nia may think better through live exchange and gain energy from other people’s reactions, while Amira may need to structure the material first so she can enter the discussion with arguments rather than improvisation. Em does not have to choose one style. It can suggest a hybrid format: a short pre-read with the question to resolve, followed by a meeting for discussion and decision. Across the team, this helps people stop confusing spontaneity with engagement or preparation with inflexibility. Micro-lessons reinforce a simple design principle: let people prepare their thinking before the meeting and use the relationship during it.
Sources
- Bernard A. Nijstad; Wolfgang Stroebe; Hein F. M. Lodewijkx (2003). Production blocking and idea generation: Does blocking interfere with cognitive processes?. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(6), 531-548. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00040-4 10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00040-4
- R. Brent Gallupe; Lana M. Bastianutti; William H. Cooper (1991). Unblocking Brainstorms. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76(1), 137-142. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.76.1.137 10.1037/0021-9010.76.1.137
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