Remember that meetings should add value by providing a sense of progress. Design your meetings to support the working memory of the attendees—people need time afterwards to materialize the discussion, and to make a plan. Preparing for this will improve your meetings.
#The purpose of meeting
- Meetings should add value to your life by providing a sense of progress. Problems should get defined, decisions get made, priorities being prioritized, and solutions being built upon with the benefit of multiple perspectives.
- But how do you get there? How do you separate things that matter from junk? That’s what designing a meeting is all about—think about your meetings from the lens of a designer.
#Designing a meeting
For any given meeting you should always have two questions in the back of your mind:
- Why did you establish this meeting?
- Has that job been done?
Meetings can use a basic design process as a checklist for planning and evaluating:
- Identify the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Understand that problem sufficiently with research or a clear understanding of constraints.
- Revisit and experiment with format, including length of time and method of facilitation. Consider skipping a few meetings, just to see what happens.
- Make changes to the meeting semi-permanent after observing successes. Eliminate changes that don’t produce successes.
- Walk away from meetings that no longer do the job intended.
#Define a better definition of “Meeting”
When you apply a design process to meetings, you reconnect getting together with having a reason to do so. A meeting is something that enables you to achieve an outcome that you can’t otherwise achieve without it, measured in an agreed-upon fashion.
For any given meeting think about:
- What is the outcome this meeting will enable?
- How can you measure that outcome?
#Better meetings make better memories
If there is one key task for a meeting to accomplish, it is to answer the question: How do we make better memories?
Your brain’s job in meetings is to accept input and store it as memory. Then applying those absorbed ideas in discussion. Designing meeting experiences to support the working memory of the brain for your attendees will improve meetings.
A well-designed meeting moves the right information from working to intermediate memory. Ideas generated and decisions made should materialize into actions that takes place outside the meeting.
A meeting is a system that facilitates knowledge input and output while having the potential to create new perspectives at the same time. Good meetings move information quickly and provide space for unexpected new ideas. Great meetings allow for time after the meeting to materialize the ideas you generated. Leave space after a meeting to write down/plan/ work on the ideas you got.