The core principles of Robert's Rules are 100% applicable to work. Its about understanding the "reasons" behind the rules, rather than the rules themselves. 1.

The core principles of Robert's Rules are 100% applicable to work. Its about understanding the "reasons" behind the rules, rather than the rules themselves. 1. Roberts Rules states that the #1 order of business at every meeting is a vote on the prior-meeting's minutes. The written record is king in Robert's rules. In an office environment, this means that any meeting that must "exist" must be written down and secondly (this is _VERY_ important), all stakeholders in the decision need written acknowledgement that the written-record is correct. Consider ISSUE#55, a hypothetical programming feature that should be implemented before version 3.55 of the computer program you're writing. A meeting occurred on January 5th saying Issue#55 needs to fix the GUI to accept usernames of length 20, but not of length 5. Writing down these issues is not enough or sufficient. The most important part of this "issue" is the signoff: all people of the meeting (developers, product managers, customers if possible) should be on the email saying "Yes, Issue#55 as written in Jira is an appropriate summary of what we want, and the feature you want to program is a good idea". Because come 5 months from now when crap happens, we all know everyone's going to point fingers at each other and blame each other. Having an appropriate signoff is as important (if not more important) than the written documentation. So again: Robert's rules on "Agree to the secretary's meeting summary of the last meeting" is HUGELY important, in practice. But you gotta "see" what that really means in your office environment. ---------- Etc. etc. etc. Every other rule exists for a reason in Robert's rules. Minority talking point. Ability to filibuster and shut down debate by filling the space with crap (and how to avoid the Filibuster through time-requirements or other such features). The 2-times-to-talk per issue helps prevent nonsensical loops. Give people a point, and then one opportunity for a counterpoint, and that's enough for most situations. Let dead issues stay dead. Do not allow people to drudge up old issues and distract. Etc. etc. All of Roberts Rules are rules of this nature, but they don't say the "why", instead they're just written as dry "10 minutes per discussion point, 2-times to talk per issue", style because all the rules are so numerous. Its very more important to learn the "spirit of the law" and the reasons why parliamentary theory exists.