Ineffective meetings due to unclear goals are major obstacles to productivity, yet support for intentionality is surprisingly scant in ourmeeting and allied workflow technologies. To design for intentionality, we need to understand workers’ attitudes and practices aroundgoals. We interviewed 21 employees of a global technology company and identified contrasting mental models of meeting goals:meetings as a means to an end, and meetings as an end in themselves. We explore how these mental models impact how meetinggoals arise, goal prioritization, obstacles to considering goals, and how lack of alignment around goals may create tension betweenorganizers and attendees. We highlight the challenges in balancing preparation, constraining scope, and clear outcomes, with theneed for intentional adaptability and discovery in meetings. Our findings have implications for designing systems which increaseeffectiveness in meetings by catalyzing intentionality and reducing tension in the organisation of meetings.KEYWORDS: videoconferencing, meeting, goal, agenda, intentionality, calendar, teams, workflows
@inproceedings{scott2024mental,
author = {Scott, Ava Elizabeth and Tankelevitch, Lev and Rintel, Sean},
title = {Mental Models of Meeting Goals: Supporting Intentionality in Meeting Technologies},
booktitle = {CHI 2024},
year = {2024},
month = {May},
publisher = {ACM},
url = {https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/mental-models-of-meeting-goals-supporting-intentionality-in-meeting-technologies/},
}