Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone

by Kevin M. Hoffman

Something designed has been given appropriate and actionable consideration, with forethought and research guiding its creation and ongoing evolution.

Thinking like a designer means taking an iterative, cyclical approach—an approach that mixes in research and testing of concepts.

Clearly define the problem that a design should solve through observation and good old-fashioned research. 2. Create and consider multiple options, as opposed to sticking to a single solution. 3. Select the option assumed to be the best and begin an iterative effort to refine it from a minimum viable concept. This contrasts with spending excessive time visualizing the finished product in every gory detail. 4. Execute or “ship” at an agreed-upon level of fidelity so that you have an opportunity to see how the design fares in the real world with real people. After that, jump back to step one as needed.

Applying those four steps of the design process to meetings themselves provides a framework for evaluating if an existing meeting is performing adequately. You can apply them to a single, important meeting in order to design it better, or use the steps to evaluate, improve, or even eliminate recurring meetings,

recurring team meetings, also known as standing meetings or check-ins. They are the mosquitoes of meetings.

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?

apply the design-thinking checklist. 1. Identify the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Understand that problem sufficiently with research or a clear understanding of constraints. 2. Revisit and experiment with format, including length of time and method of facilitation. Consider skipping a few meetings, just to see what happens. 3. Make changes to the meeting semi-permanent after observing successes. Eliminate changes that don’t produce successes. 4. Walk away from meetings that no longer do the job intended.

collaboratively visualizing the process of getting a blog post published in a flow chart on the wall. A wall diagram, as seen in Figure 1.2, shows how visualizing a process in sequence can reveal efficiency gains by examining and questioning individual steps to publication. Physical objects that can be manipulated, such as sticky notes, can catalog options—pros and cons.

experiment by introducing time limits for individual speakers. In certain corners of Google, time limits have proven to be one of the single most effective methods of keeping meetings aligned to decision-making.4 The ruthlessness of a simple countdown clock keeps comments on task (see Figure 1.3), warning the group when someone is running out of time to speak.

Agreement about how long a standing meeting is going to be in place can be reached by following that design thinking process through to its natural conclusion: research and understand the problem, try multiple agenda protocols, and iterate or tweak the format until the job is done.

Ask yourself, or your team, two simple questions about that meeting. These questions will help you define its job in a way that reconnects it to a larger purpose. • What is the outcome this meeting will enable? • How can you measure that outcome? That’s a simpler, better definition for a meeting. A meeting is something that enables us to achieve an outcome that we can’t otherwise achieve without it, measured in an agreed-upon fashion.

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.

You can accommodate variations in people’s ability to use working memory by establishing a reasonable pace of information.

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.

In a meeting, absorbing something seen and absorbing something heard require different parts of the brain. Those two parts can work together to improve retention (the quantity and accuracy of information in our brain) or compete to reduce retention.

listening to someone while looking at a complementary photograph or drawing increases the likelihood of committing something to working memory.

Your memory should transform ideas absorbed in meetings into taking an action of some kind afterward.

try to break the meeting content into 20- to 30-minute durations. Within each 20- to 30-minute session, include time to reflect on what participants have heard. That reflection can take the form of conversation with the presenter, conversation with one another, or applying the knowledge in an exercise. Establishing a rhythm based on stages of memory improves listening as an input strategy for meetings.

If you want your audience there, remember, you want them present—and that means you want their energy and attention throughout your time together.

Give the scribe a different job: get those notes in front of everyone’s eyes at the same time, in real time while the discussion is happening.

Meeting derailments happen despite good intentions and solid preparation.

Dave could have designed a better situation by not being tied to his agenda and instead prioritizing three things: • 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?

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.

break into two smaller groups.

Conducting “meetings-before-the-meeting” is good for high-stakes meetings, especially when they are more complex workshops or intensive working sessions.

Use these basic guidelines when conducting pre-meeting interviews: • Maintain an “off-the-record” and friendly tone. • Find a personal connection to the interview subject early if possible. Look for shared background or interests, such as a city you’ve lived in or a sports team you like. If it’s someone that you feel intimidated by, like a CEO, keep it light and general. Just don’t force it or spend too much time on it; the goal is just to open a trusting connection. • Gather specific expectations regarding the meeting’s purpose and outcomes. • Ask clear and direct questions, such as “What will this thing that we are building do? How does that help your business?”

She shared two easy guidelines about how to scale ideas over time. Both are as applicable to boardrooms as they are to classrooms. • People can only remember about seven or so complex concepts at a time, over a period of about 10 minutes. (It’s a scientifically observed phenomenon, which George Miller called the “magical number seven plus or minus two.”1) • Stop and review your previous seven (plus or minus two) concepts before moving to the next group every 10 minutes or so.

Constrain yourself to around five, or ideally no more than seven items, on each slide (see Figure 3.3). After you go through each group of five concepts, lead the group in a review, discussion, or activity to apply what they have learned.

With structured small groups, people end up regulating their own tangents without you needing to monitor everything that’s being said.

What if instead of a 12-person, all-hands discussion, you break into two groups of six, seated together?

Breaking into groups during meetings redistributes the cognitive load of understanding, especially when you have more than seven people in a meeting.

Even though conflict shouldn’t be feared or avoided, it does need to be managed (see Figure 4.1). When managed effectively, conflict supports a group’s ability to make a good decision.

a facilitator presents a structure that the discussion will follow, usually known as the meeting agenda. Second, the facilitator guides participants through that agenda, keeping everyone on task with minimum interference.

The obvious part of the role of facilitators occurs during the meeting: they manage the process and coordinate discussion. They pay attention to who is speaking and assess how well the conversation is reaching its intended goal, as it takes place. They adjust the agenda as necessary by managing who speaks, limiting how long they speak, or providing ways to make contributions other than speaking.

Facilitators frequently fail in two ways. The first happens before the meeting has started. A facilitator should collaborate with stakeholders (dubbed “leaders” by Doyle and Strauss) to determine the best structure for a discussion, rather than arbitrarily decide on their own.

The second way facilitators fail is when they forget to stay neutral.

A recorder captures key concepts during a discussion in a publicly visible way in real time.

Recording in this reduced, public fashion—handwritten or hand-drawn, large, and visually accessible by the group—creates a support system for listening.

A leader is a stakeholder who is accountable for the meeting’s outcome, but not necessarily for the meeting experience itself.

The last common error that leaders and stakeholders make is attending meetings when they shouldn’t. It’s fine if someone in a leadership position doesn’t attend a meeting that they themselves called; it can be better when they aren’t present. There’s less pressure in the room—for example, attendees won’t feel evaluated and therefore they will take more risks.

a remote recorder can’t force people to pay attention to a shared screen. From time to time, the remote recorder should check in with everyone, saying, “Are these the ideas we’ve covered so far? Does this accurately reflect the decisions we’ve made?” You should allow the person doing remote capture to have a few minutes near the end of the meeting to review what has been discussed or decided, point-by-point.

There are two kinds of thinking required to take advantage of tangents without wasting time. The first is divergent thinking, where you are increasing the diversity and the quantity of ideas you explore in a meeting. The second is convergent thinking, where you are increasing the quality of ideas by prioritizing the best of those ideas and reducing the quantity.

Where divergent thinking is about being OK with disagreement, convergent thinking is about eliminating excess, or the least likely stuff to succeed.

Creativity and discomfort go hand-in-hand. If your team feels comfortable, your team may not be pushing itself hard enough. Discomfort can push you to more inventive solutions or address previously unspoken issues.

There are two simple steps that help put discomfort in a productive place:

Acknowledge potential discomfort and ask permission to guide them through.

When people start shifting in their seats, the room is suddenly dead silent, or you sense confusion or open combat, interrupt.

It’s easier to identify and manage conflicts in a meeting when a facilitator has been identified.

Facilitate without bias—don’t facilitate discussions when you have strong opinions about the outcome.

Identify someone in each meeting to create a public recording, writing and sketching key concepts to create a visual feedback loop supporting the discussion.