Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone

by Kevin M. Hoffman

If you are feeling like there’s no agenda and not sure why everyone is there, you’re likely not the only one. —CARRIE HANE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY COACH, TANZEN

For each one of these meetings, you should always have two questions in the back of your mind: • Why did you establish this meeting? • Has that job been done? If you can’t answer the first, or the second answer is “yes,” the meeting should be deleted or declined. It’s that simple.

Re: standing meetings

If people are the one ingredient that all meetings have in common, there is one design constraint they all bring: their capacity to remember the discussion. That capacity lives in the human brain.

To make sure that everyone is on the same page, you should set a pace that is deliberate, consistent, and slower than your normal pace of thought.

Pace of meetings

Listening to someone speaking while reading the same words on a screen actually decreases the ability to commit something to memory. People who are subjected to presentation slides filled with speaking points face this challenge. But listening to someone while looking at a complementary photograph or drawing increases the likelihood of committing something to working memory.

Any session without breaks that lasts longer than 90 minutes makes the job of your memories moving thought into action fuzzier, and therefore more difficult.

memory is still unreliable and can be exhausted—this is the design constraint all meetings face. Creating and reinforcing memories with visuals can manage and even reduce this constraint.

While people are engaged in talking (or for our purposes, “auditory input and output”), the scribe creates a visual record of only the main ideas, the conflicts, and the decisions on the wall. It needs to be large enough so that anyone in the room can read it from wherever they are sitting. That way, when the scribe captures something incorrectly, someone in the meeting can speak up and provide a correction.

Unlike meeting notes you take on a laptop, visualized records of a conversation can be revisited and iterated upon after the meeting is over. That continued engagement with a visual record will pull more of the brain into the work. The more engaged each of these parts of the brain become, the more likely that successful memory creation, synthesis, and application will happen. The stuff discussed in a meeting gets done, and it gets done correctly.

What ideas did he intend to explore? • How did the people in the room expect to receive those ideas (or were they expecting entirely different ideas)? • How much time did he have to get through the material? It’s good to stay flexible about agendas, but important to be crystal clear about the three core elements of agenda building: ideas, people, and time. Sticking to these three elements, while being flexible about how you get there, keeps an agenda from being too brittle.

If more than seven people cannot be avoided or it’s simply out of your hands, write down the reason that each person needs to be there in a simple statement. What is their anticipated goal? Make sure that each attendee knows your intention for inviting them.

In big meetings, working in smaller groups saves you time, money, and human costs.

Someone who anticipates conflict in meetings is the most likely person to initiate the conflict which they expect. —ADAM CONNOR VP ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN AND TRAINING, MAD*POW AND COAUTHOR, DISCUSSING DESIGN

Four roles that make meeting facilitation work, from Doyle and Strauss.

when the group detects bias, they can no longer trust your facilitation.

Serving a meeting without bias means eliminating the facilitator’s own biases. Biased questions undermine trust in the facilitation process.

Stopping the conversation without warning to unpack something conveys being in tune with the room’s mood.

Use improvisational planning to inject spontaneity when it’s needed. Think of your script as something that you iterate upon, in real time. Be ready to say, “If this question or activity isn’t working, how will I adapt?”

Meetings are usability tests for organizations themselves. Do they create an environment where it’s easy to acclimate to necessary concepts and connect with solutions? Or do they obscure needed information in internal slang and ritual, purposeless gatherings?

When you are new to your job, make an effort to observe more and speak less in your first several routine meetings. —AARON IRIZARRY HEAD OF EXPERIENCE INFRASTRUCTURE, CAPITAL ONE

Early in a new position, Aaron adopted the position of being an observer. He paid attention to executives and product managers in discussions, to see when they responded positively. When contributing, he kept a list of previously observed successful behaviors in mind.

Meetings are an opportunity to provide a model of behavior that other people can replicate. Modeling gets more effective work out of a team than just telling people what to do.

Although Leslie had become a manager, she spent little of her time in meetings actually managing. Instead she encouraged her employees in meetings by listening first and then pushing them beyond what they were comfortable expressing.