Lab Meetings

One of the staples of an academic lab is the so-called "lab meeting". I remember lab meeting as this frightening event where suddenly all eyes are pointed towards you and your science gets assessed by your peers and your professor. Will it be thumbs up or down? Will I get asked to do another year of boring control experiments? You get the idea. These are typically weekly meetings that often last one to two hours and assume various formats but it often boils down to trainees getting up and giving updates on their science. In my group, we spent some time thinking about lab meeting and decided to make some changes, here are our thoughts, in the hope they may help others make lab meetings more productive and fun.

• Whatever type of lab meeting you have, still way better than a lab that does not have lab meetings. To me that has always been a sign of major dysfunction if the group does not manage to assemble at a some reasonable interval to discuss science-related matters.
• Often, trainees spend substantial time polishing slides, preparing introductions to their science, and practicing their presentation. Although this helps to improve presentation skills, it has several disadvantages. First, the actual time spent discussing science is limited. Second, it creates this artificial (and wrong) perception that only polished stories can be shared with the group. Rather, the point should be to get plenty of input EARLY in the project when things by design are not yet polished. Overall, steering towards shorter updates - starting early in the project life cycle - is ultimately more helpful and also more interesting.
• Another anxiety-inducing lab meeting style is to go around the table and have everyone give a short update. I am not a fan of this approach since invariably two things happen. First, the trainees who had a rough week (and yes doing science is often rough) leave the meeting demotivated. Second, there is always this one person who hogs plenty of time in the hope to impress the professor with how hardworking and dedicated they are. Not ... a ... fan.

So what is the solution to all this? I am sure there are many and please post below your thoughts - I am eager to read what you have figured out that works. This is all about the learning, also for me. In any case, we have settled on the following format, wich we call innovation meeting to illustrate that it is a new format focused on early-state discussions:
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We meet weekly for two hours and we have a shared spreadsheet where people add what they want to discuss to a queue together with an estimate how much time it will take. Every week, we work through that queue during the meeting (being flexible if urgent stuff has come up to ignore the order of the queue). There is explicit encouragement to present small and preliminary things, perhaps a single plot, a question about experimental design, a confusing result etc. So far, the meetings were highly productive and lots of fun since everyone learned a lot. Mission accomplished...