Could the right question bring some magic to your meetings?
'People throw meetings at problems,' Priya Parker, meeting specialist and author of The Art of Gathering, lamented on the Fixable podcast recently, before offering her solution. Asked for a quick fix, she suggested kicking off with 'a magical question': one that everyone would be interested in answering and in hearing others answer. Her suggestion: 'What was your first ever concert, and who took you?'
I've spoken to Parker and found her exceptionally impressive. But this seems like madness. Wouldn't a round of prolonged reminiscences about first Glastos and bad dates (or in my case, slightly eccentrically, Everything But the Girl in Harrogate with my mum's colleague's husband, Andrew) add a minimum of 10 minutes to even the smallest gathering? Aren't we all just desperate to get it over with?
But with my life mercifully meeting-free these days, perhaps I'm missing the nuances of 2025 meeting etiquette. I enlisted my husband to test this out at his daily team meeting and listened in, clipboard (OK, coffee) in hand. His colleagues seemed a little startled but played along, and the answers were fun: from some very unexpected metalheads to a 15-year-old punk being dragged along to Kool & the Gang to impress a girl. To my ears, the remainder of the meeting sounded exactly like it always does (loudly conducted in what I usually refer to as 'business Martian'), but afterwards my spouse claimed it went well.
If you're tempted, Parker offers other magical question ideas on her Instagram, including 'When was the last time you blew up a balloon by yourself? What was the event?' and 'What's the weirdest thing you have ever found in your pocket?' But I reckon the cartoonist Sam Lau had a better idea in her New Yorker cartoon with the tagline How to run short & effective meetings: it's three people gathered around a laptop, all doing planks.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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