Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone

by Kevin M. Hoffman

Continuing to expect a productive outcome out of the same get-together when the goals have already been achieved (or new goals haven’t been clearly articulated) is a special kind of insanity that only exists in meetings. To combat that insanity, apply the design-thinking checklist.

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.

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.

Whiteboarding an idea (visualizing it publicly) allows a group to point at the same thing and say “yes,” or “no.”

Compared to words, a diagram or sketch conveys more information without much additional effort. Concepts of time, connection, disconnection, emotion, and more can be represented more quickly with lines, boxes, arrows, and simple facial drawings.

A well-designed agenda should work when it’s “mostly broken.” If unforeseen circumstances render an agenda impossible to execute, it was too brittle to begin with.

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 you oversee a meeting’s planning and can control who is being invited, start by capping it at six or seven people.

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.

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

Advance interviews with attendees can make the difference between people getting the right story or the wrong one by previewing how much alignment exists among meeting participants.

• 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)