Why Most Meetings are Forgettable

I had to read The Odyssey in college as part of a required humanities class. I was not a fan. It was confusing, repetitive, and weird. I didn’t care about Odysseus, the Cyclops, or the dozen other characters I couldn’t keep straight. Reading The Iliad alongside it didn't help.

A humanities class is where you’re expected to read “the classics.”  But I couldn’t figure out what made this one a classic other than it had almost no competition when Homer wrote it almost 3000 years ago.

I retained enough for the exam and tried not to think about it again. I don’t know anyone who loved it. It’s never on anyone’s “favorite books” list the way The Alchemist somehow always is. Other than being a rite-of-passage assignment and an early example of the hero’s journey, it’s not exactly front of mind for most people.

Until this summer, when I saw a trailer in the theater for a new Odyssey adaption. I turned to my husband to say “Pass!” (our required go/no go ruling on any preview) when I saw the director was Christopher Nolan. I’m a big fan of his storytelling. Back in 2001, I was at a friend’s house when they put on Memento. I’ve thought about that about one a month for the past 25 years.

Every time I see one of his movies, I'm struck by how he makes complex subjects land. I may not understand everything early on, but I trust it will come together by the end. He’s careful not to waste the audience’s time. My only complaint is that the music often overpowers the dialogue. But I’m there, every time.

This summer, I’ll go see his version of The Odyssey. I already know it will be more relatable, compelling, and interesting than the version I read in college. And I can’t stop thinking about that gap.

‍ Competition for Attention

The competition for Nolan is nothing like what Homer faced. Homer was the content ecosystem. Nolan is up against every other movie, the news cycle, and the phone in our pocket. How do you hold attention when the alternatives are infinite?

I’ve been thinking about attention a lot this year, including what Netflix understands about it and what that means for presentations. Scarcity used to decide what got through. Now there’s no shortage of anything except time.

We routinely forget how little of other people’s time we’re entitled to. Our meetings prove it daily. It’s tempting to blame all of this on shrinking attention spans. That explanation is convenient because it doesn’t implicate the communicator. It’s the audience’s fault. They’re distracted, impatient, or addicted to their phones. 

Homer was the #1 NY Times Bestseller of his day, which wasn’t much of a feat since most people were illiterate, and his stories were performed aloud. He may be the original audiobook. Either way, scarcity did his marketing for him. There was no second screen or endless stream of new content. If you wanted a story, you got Homer, and you were grateful. He never had to earn the room. He was the only offer in it.

We are not in that world. We are oversaturated and overscheduled. No one sets out to be boring, but without scarcity, bland becomes the default. Our true challenge is a quality problem dressed up in an attention-span costume.

Bland constantly shows up in our meetings and presentations. Oversaturation has buried that pressure and never replaced it with anything. The average communicator rambles and is technically correct, safe, and utterly forgettable. You’d think that would make it easier to stand out and be memorable. Instead, we mostly stopped showing people how to be worth the room.

The Promise

Every communicator makes an implicit promise about what it will be like to listen to them.

We’ve all sat through the Homer version at work: the meeting that could've been a sentence, the email that rambles for four paragraphs before the point, the decks someone reads aloud word for word.

Why do we keep doing this when we know better?

Because most of it isn't a choice. People inherit how they communicate from the room they're in. Doing it differently feels like a risk; going along feels safer than standing out. If you try to be Nolan and it doesn't land, everyone watched you try. If you communicate like Homer (and everyone else in the building), you're covered. Nobody remembers the meeting anyway, so nobody remembers you were the reason it dragged.

We've built entire organizations of people who are terrified of doing things differently, so they drone in unison instead. It's safe because nobody's measuring against anything better. Conformity feels safer than distinctiveness. Most organizations don't train people to be interesting; they train them to sound like everyone else. Most leaders never notice they're teaching people to be forgettable.

The promise precedes you

Here's the thing about a promise like this: it exists before you open your mouth.

I hear "Christopher Nolan," and I already know what I'm getting. He takes impossibly complicated things and brings you through them. He somehow explains it like I'm eight without simplifying it. He just never wastes your time getting you there. That's the promise: stay with me, and it'll click.

Homer never got the chance to make me that promise. By the time he showed up in my life, he was a line item on a syllabus. If Homer walked into the room right now, ready to perform, I'd already be checking my phone because of my assumptions about him.

Same with the guy about to walk you row by row through a spreadsheet. You know before he clicks share screen. The promise arrives before the content does. That should unsettle anyone building a team of people with something to say.

What does this mean for the rooms you’re in?

Organizations spend a lot of money helping people analyze data or practice how to gesture when presenting. Rarely do they invest in helping people speak in a way anyone remembers.  We spend hours every week in meetings, and that time is routinely wasted because people conform to “the classics” instead of learning something better.

Employees are told to be clear, concise, and respectful of people's time. They are rarely shown what that looks like in practice. People default to whatever they’ve absorbed by osmosis, usually whatever the person before them did. Homer gets passed down because no one offers a better model to copy. Does your organization reward being memorable, or just being safe?

That's the real cost. It's not just one boring meeting. It's a whole culture that never questioned whether droning was the standard, because it was never measured against anything better. Every hour spent there is an hour nobody gets back. Multiply that across every meeting, deck, and unread email, and "communication style" is really an unexamined line item.

When your name appears on the calendar invite, what does everyone expect? What promise does your communication make before you begin?

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Karen Eber is an author, TED and keynote speaker, and communication strategist who works with frontline leaders, senior executives, and C-suite teams at Fortune 500 companies. She specializes in breaking down the science of communication and decision making to influence outcomes. Karen partners with teams across sales, marketing, communications, HR, finance, operations, legal, and IT. She works across industries including healthcare, technology, financial services, manufacturing, energy, consumer goods, retail, professional services, education, and nonprofits — helping leaders turn complex information into clear, compelling stories that drive decisions and action. She is the author of The Perfect Story. Learn more about her keynotes and workshops at kareneber.com/speaking.