Decision-making meetings are crucial for solving problems, generating ideas, and aligning teams. However, they can also be frustrating, unproductive, and time-consuming if not planned and facilitated well. In this article, you will learn how to prepare, conduct, and follow up on effective decision-making meetings that lead to clear outcomes and actions.
Before you invite anyone to a decision-making meeting, you need to have a clear and specific purpose. What is the problem or opportunity you want to address? What are the criteria and constraints for the decision? What are the expected outcomes and deliverables? Having a clear purpose will help you set the agenda, invite the right people, and communicate the expectations.
The next step is to decide who should attend the meeting and why. You want to have a diverse and relevant group of stakeholders who can contribute to the decision, but not too many that it becomes chaotic or unmanageable. Ideally, you want to have between five to seven people, depending on the complexity and urgency of the decision. You also want to consider the roles and responsibilities of the participants, such as decision-makers, influencers, experts, and implementers.
Once you have the purpose and the participants, you need to create a clear and concise agenda that outlines the objectives, topics, activities, and time frames of the meeting. You should also include any pre-work or materials that the participants need to review or prepare before the meeting. A well-structured agenda will help you keep the meeting focused, organized, and on track.
Critical Thinking Format for Brainstorming A good facilitator can drive the meeting agenda in the seven step format of a critical thinking exercise. This will ensure that every phase of a thinking process is covered and the committee has taken a decision after considering all possible facts, information, alternatives and ideas.
During the meeting, your role as a facilitator is to guide the discussion, encourage participation, manage conflicts, and ensure clarity. You can use various techniques and tools to facilitate the discussion, such as brainstorming, voting, ranking, prioritizing, pros and cons, SWOT analysis, and decision matrices. You should also use visual aids, such as charts, diagrams, or sticky notes, to capture and display the ideas and information. The goal is to generate and evaluate alternatives, and reach a consensus or a compromise on the best option.
Six thinking hats can be another great tool for a facilitator to learn and implement a meeting like this. With this format, the facilitator finds it easy to keep the discussion on topic, resolve differences, conduct fair arguments and drive the team to make a decision on a given amount of time
After the discussion, you need to confirm the decision and document it. You should summarize the main points, arguments, and criteria that led to the decision, and state the decision clearly and explicitly. You should also ask for confirmation from the participants, and address any doubts, objections, or concerns. Confirming the decision will help you avoid ambiguity, confusion, or misunderstanding later on.
The final step is to assign the actions and follow up on the implementation. You should identify the tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and resources that are required to execute the decision. You should also assign an owner for each action, and agree on how and when to communicate the progress and results. Assigning the actions will help you ensure accountability, transparency, and effectiveness of the decision.
Research, Research, Research Attend any meeting you've called for with good background data and information about the topic you're discussing. Statistics, trends, what's current in that space, competitor knowledge and expert opinions. Create a dossier of facts and ideas that you can pull out to structure the discussion and add value to your points. You can also share this dossier before hand as pre-reading material for attendees. And just in case someone in the team wasn't able to read these before hand, include a slot in your meeting agenda to discuss the facts. Having facts and information handy helps in making meetings more focused and on topic, and members tend to digress lesser.