Your Meeting Agenda is a Design Problem

Meetings are a multi-brain calibration mechanism. If you've been around awhile, you've heard us say that preparing for meetings is important for getting great results from that calibration time together. To help you prepare, think of your meeting as something you need to design.

To design something implies certain attitudes and approaches which I'll get to in a minute. When you don't design your meetings, though, what happens instead? You probably make a laundry list of topics that you and maybe others have submitted. During the meeting you hack your way down the list, reminding meeting-goers that you’d of course like to get through everything, but rarely even getting close.

To approach your meeting with a design mentality means the following:

1. You begin the planning by identifying success criteria.

This is usually in the form of outcomes, meaning: what will come out of the time at the end of the meeting? That (short) list of outcomes includes the most important business results that could be achieved at the time – things like decisions, alignment around strategic next steps, or information sharing of a quality more suited to live meetings versus email. 

It may also have less tangible success criteria, like the team sensing more trust and cohesion, or feeling calmer about an upcoming change. We are human, after all.

2. The meeting time is curated.

Zooming out for a minute, think of how much human capital is spent in meetings. They're a sync-up mechanism so that your project team comes together in real-time to ostensibly do work that is not suited to another format. Point being, time is precious. It needs to be carefully thought out and curated to meet the success criteria.

Curating the time helps you think through the relative competing priorities and choose consciously before immediacy bias tells the group to stay on the current topic.  

3. How, really, will it all happen?

It’s not just about time allotments. Exactly how will this group or project team, with individual agendas and unique brains, achieve the desired success in a short amount of time? I can't answer that for you, but it’s something to really think about prior to the meeting. Not everything is best handled with "open discussion." 

Say, for example, you have 20 minutes to reach a final decision about where the new offices will be located. Think about the starting point of that section of the meeting  as point A. Is everyone at the same point A, or are people starting with different amounts of information? We know point B is a clear decision (decision criteria is a whole other topic!) What needs to happen between point A and point B in order to successfully arrive at point B? This will not only inform what steps happen during your meeting, it may inform the preparation needed by the project team.

So rather than showing up with the previous meeting's minutes to react to, or a loose idea in your head of what needs to be addressed, invest in designing the precious time to achieve the success you want. Use the three concepts above and give us a shout if we can help!