Notes on the book "Meeting Design" by Kevin Hoffman, ISBN: 1-933820-38-1
- Meeting length interferes with memory storage
- Divide into 20-30 min activities. Provide cognitive slack time to turn short term into medium term memories.
- ✘ don't serve simple sugar and carbs if providing food, serve healthy fats and proteins like nuts and cheese
- Use visuals and "manipulatives" (tactile objects like sticky notes) to engage different forms of memory
- ✘ don't make brittle agendas, accomodate that not everyone will read the agenda or be prepared
- Ideas, People, Time - core elements of an agenda
- "Points of agreement" (lines of communication) scale exponentially with # of people in a meeting.
- Add stopping points to recap/review after 10 min or when about 7 new topics have been presented.
- Divide into smaller groups instead of trying to keep police large groups into staying on one topic:
- Review points with whole group,
- Discuss as a group,
- Divide into smaller groups,
- Reconvene and discuss conclusions
- The role of a facilitator is to manage conflict.
- Facilitators create a productive manner of conversation based on divergence and convergence.
- Be clear about what jobs the facilitator will and won't and what attendees will do in service of having a better meeting experience
- There are four main roles in a meeting:
- Facilitator
- Recorder/Capture
- Contributor
- Intent/Leader (who needs the meeting)
- Mistakes facilitators make:
- Not involving stakeholders in defining desired outcome of a meeting. Use pre-meeting, informal 1-1s to help shape the meeting agenda.
- Not staying neutral, trying to facilitate with strong opinions on the outcome
- Mistakes that hinder facilitating a successful meeting:
- The recorder is not a scribe. They should capture and display key points as they are made in real-time, not take notes on a laptop.
- The contributors should not be passive. They should actively help the recorder identify key points and fix errors.
- The leader is not the facilitator. They are accountable for the outcome, not the meeting itself. They don't always need to attend, or can recast as contributors.
- For remote meetings, make sure to share key points as they are made in a document, digital card board, etc. in lieu of a whiteboard
- The goal of divergence is to increase the diversity of ideas.
- Use lists, open-ended discussion, suspend judgment.
- Create lots of ideas.
- The goal of convergence is to increase the quality of ideas.
- Filter and select ideas, then summarize final decisions.
- ✘ Don't ask leading questions.
- "proud inquiry" is where the asker has an answer/solution in mind, in contrast to:
- "humble inquiry", a method for researching gap between espoused and actual culture, asking questions to surface:
- Feelings: "how do you feel about outcome x, if we do y?"
- Motivations: "What were you hoping would happen when you decided to do x?"
- Actions: "What would you do if x?", "What would be the first step if we did y?"
- Systems: "How will the org prioritize x, y, and z?", "What are the risks?"
- Break up obvious patterns with a good question instead of being dismissive to stay on agenda
- Facilitation styles:
- Improvisational vs Scripted
- Drawing vs Speaking
- Space Making vs Space Filling
- Know your style and know how to detect when a meeting needs a different approach
- e.g., if you are improvisational, prepare a fallback script with scenarios in case the meeting gets off-track
- "Parking lot" strategy:
- When a topic is generating lots of discussion, "park it" and come back to the all of the parked points when all the other points have been reviewed. Document follow up actions for unanswered questions.
- When orienting people to change,
- Don't make people feel dumb
- Data isn't a magic wand
- You can't argue your way through fear
- Motivate by fixing pain points
- Amplify the best of a culture
- Remember that people think they are doing the right thing