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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Strong personalities ruled the day while quiet people with good ideas went unheard. It was as fascinating to me as it was frustrating.
The problem is that meetings aren’t considered in the same way that designers consider problems they are trying to solve. That’s what “designing a meeting” is all about: thinking about your meetings as though you were a designer.
• What is the outcome this meeting will enable? • How can you measure that outcome?
You can accommodate variations in people’s ability to use working memory by establishing a reasonable pace of information. The pace of information is directly connected to how well aligned attendees’ working memories become. 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.
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.
When there are more than 30 minutes of straight listening to do, but 30 minutes are all that a reasonable brain can handle, that’s a problem. To account for this, 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.
Later in the afternoon consider more nutrient-rich snacks than the ubiquitous cookie plate. Trail mix with dried fruit and nuts, yogurt cups, a communal cheese plate, or a raw vegetable platter can help everyone focus and engage with the content.
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. 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.
Conducting “meetings-before-the-meeting” is good for high-stakes meetings, especially when they are more complex workshops or intensive working sessions.
• 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.
Breaking into groups during meetings redistributes the cognitive load of understanding, especially when you have more than seven people in a meeting. If you’ve got eight, break into two groups of four. Got 15? Do three groups of five. This pattern easily scales into large group workshops, such as the one I facilitated for the Holocaust Museum. We had seven groups of up-to-seven people thinking through specific digital exhibition strategies. After two hours, we had come to agreement, as a group of 50(!), about three unique, viable approaches to solving a complex problem.
Consultants do their best work, however, when timelines are flexible enough to accommodate surprises and resources are healthy enough to support better decisions based on research and observations.
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 best structure will produce a desired outcome: final decisions, better understanding of a problem, or whatever form the outcome is supposed to take. That outcome should be heavily informed, if not completely defined, by stakeholders in the organization.
A facilitator should pose questions to stimulate discussion, instruct participants of desired behaviors, and answer questions that come up about what to do next. The facilitator is a balancing force, keeping contributions equal and fair. It’s tempting, but dangerous and sometimes ineffective, to turn passion for a topic into a desire to facilitate a discussion around that topic. It’s difficult to stay neutral about something you care about deeply. However, when the group detects bias, they can no longer trust your facilitation.
If leaders or stakeholders must attend a meeting, it helps if they recast themselves as group members, sometimes holding off on major decisions until the discussion has followed a productive pattern. Being a group member is almost like not attending at all. Being “one of the team” should reduce the feeling that the discussion (and the employee) is being evaluated. A gathering that feels less hierarchical empowers group members to confront conflicts they might otherwise avoid.
State who the facilitator is going to be at the onset of each meeting, and watch awkward silences and weird tangents start to disappear.
Dawn could have facilitated, but she should have added a subject matter expert on responsive design from her team to the conversation. This additional attendee could have addressed questions as they arose, freeing Dawn to focus on the conversation itself.
The facilitator should assemble agendas that open with divergent activities and close with convergent ones.
Say something like “Fantastic! How’s everyone feeling? A little uncomfortable?” Wait for reluctant nods. “Perfect! We are in the right place. What do we need to do to get past this?” Usually, these simple words are often enough to get a group back on track. If they aren’t enough, take a break.
