Don't give bad meetings a bad name

Simply because there aren't bad meetings, only stubborn or distracted managers.

I wonder if the above isn't too bold of a statement to start an article? But if you decide to read further (this article may take 12 minutes to read) you will soon discover I meant something else.

My argument is that anyone can host great meetings and conferences by opening up the participation playing field (and a few other tips). As always, you can simply skim through below to watch the images and read the highlights.

1. Why making good meetings better?

RayDalio is a renowned entrepreneur and best selling author whom I admire a lot. Especially after we had a brief interaction here on LinkedIn.

Ray argues that a person's 'believability' is a critical element to consider an opinion to make a sound decision. Well, on that stance, a person like me with a PhD in Management Science (my thesis here) can be sufficiently believable to be consulted on 'managerial issues' and probably to be a reliable source to identify cases of 'bad management', right?

Well, not exactly. At this point, I questioned Ray about what does it means to be considered 'believable' and gave his case as an example when he almost broke his company due to issuing a piece of business advice that proved wrong.

Can any scientist or expert claim today to be a 'believable' source on anything without risking being dismissed in just a few years? The major contributions from my PhD research proved to me that the notion of 'believability' is by itself problematic because it's not a steady and permanent state. It's more like flux or transactional state, you can be perceived to have a lot of it or none in a different context. I have discovered that in the field of social sciences, where the soft skills of management are built upon, uncertainty and provisionally of knowledge are the norms. Instead of differentiating between a good or bad manager, I prefer to say that a manager can be more or less adapted to the circumstances.

The 'good' manager is the one who learns faster than others. Running better meetings and conferences can certainly make you a better manager.

Just as I publish this article, WHO is convening a global research and innovation forum to mobilize international action in response to the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV). It's our only survival chance as a species, to excel on how to harness the wisdom from our collective intelligence in a meeting.

2. How to host better meetings?

There aren't bad meetings, only poorly managed meetings.

I argue this case on my book's blog here: On being a Facilitator vs. being a Facilitative Leader. Let me just summarise here a couple of points.

#1. Poorly managed meetings

Whenever you are attending a meeting where the host doesn't sets a clear purpose for the gathering, or puts people down with humiliating comments, or lets the discussions rambling on and on, with vague or poor note-taking, don't give this bad meeting a bad name. It's just a poorly managed meeting. In most organizations, this kind of meetings just mirror the prevailing organizational culture, so trying to change them on your own could be disastrous without professional assistance.

#2. Facilitation paramedics

Any manager or agile coach that wants to host better meetings can be trained to acquire Facilitation skills and by learning more about the values and principles of group facilitation he or she can also become a 'Facilitative Leader'. My colleagues Pepe Nummi (the Finish facilitator) and Sanjay Dugar have published books about this (Ref #9).

A Facilitative Leader respects and trust the collective intelligence of the team, rather than her or his own 'individual believability'.

#3. Open the playing field

By being clear about the purpose of the meeting but vulnerable on the process of running great meetings, the meeting leader is opening up the playing field for anyone in the group to contribute in proposing a set of rules and procedures for the meeting to be more effective. For instances, as a host you can say:

• "Thank you all for joining this meeting, we are gathered here to achieve this.... (meeting purpose). Anyone has any suggestions on how to make this a more productive meeting that helps us reach our goals?"

Then, simply trust the group and you will be surprised by the suggestions your team will be making that you can decide to follow or not.

#4. Facilitation as a shared responsibility

By opening this playing field, the meeting host is creating a participative meeting culture, where the responsibility for meeting facilitation becomes a shared one. Many roles concur to produce a more effective meeting and all should be clarified and assigned at the start of a meeting. In my book's blog, I have marked in colours several different roles that contribute to a facilitated meeting besides the ‘group facilitator’ whose major responsibilities are:

1. Identify key issues,
2. Confirm purpose and agenda,
3. Review ground rules,
4. Keep a steady meeting flow,
5. Focus discussions
6. Allow for thoughtful decision making.

A professional facilitator helps the group to identify key issues, focus discussions and allow for thoughtful decision-making.

#5. What all effective meetings have in common

Have you tried searching google with 'host effective meetings'? There is an accumulated wealth of knowledge freely available. I have made the following compilation:

The conclusion is that every cook has a unique recipe so you might as well try to find your own, asking your team for feedback at the end of each meeting, how can we improve? This is something that can be easily automated and there are a number of digital tools that help you create useful meeting templates that you can re-use and AI-based software tools to evaluate your meetings (contact me for a Skype or Zoom coffee I would love to talk more about this). In the meantime, you may want to read the State of Meetings in 2020 report, by Elise Keith a renowned expert in meeting productivity or a latest survival guide on virtual meetings by Penny Walker (Ref #11).

Besides learning by doing, any manager can be trained to host more effective meetings and learn how to apply meeting best practices (Refs. #7, #8). If you live in Portugal check col.lab's next training courses here.

3. How to host better conferences?

If trusting a small group, like your team, can be a challenge for some managers, then trusting the wisdom of the crowd in a large group can be daunting. This is understandable and I truly empathise with all managers or conference organizers that are not daring this leap of faith into more participatory and engaging meetings.

My colleague Ian McKechnie wrote a seminal article that better explains this and distils the following credo (see also Ref. #6).

#1. The conference host credo

1.    The belief they need to lead and control every part of the meeting.

2.    Deep need to come across as an expert on every subject.

3.    The anxiety they may not have all the answers and will be seen as non-professional.

4.    Fear that a contrary opinion or new idea may derail agenda leading to chaos and confusion.

5.    The certainty that any learning is contained in ‘the content’ they have put together.

6.    The belief that discussion and debate is ultimately a waste of time.

#2. Pointless meetings

But the truth is that if you live by this credo your conferences are likely to suck. As Ian describes it brilliantly: "The effect of this approach is that people just sit there in a daze because they can. They don’t engage, they don’t enjoy, they don’t create, they don’t remember. And most importantly, they don’t do anything differently as a result. So, it’s all a bit pointless." (Ref. #4)

#3. The coffee breaks

So why do companies keep spending incommensurable amounts of money in creating huge conferences with lots of speakers that talk for hours with minimal time for interaction?

The reason was discovered by Harrison Owen, after spending over a year organizing a conference, the reports he received were that the best parts of the conference were the coffee breaks, the only space where people can actually freely meet and engage with each other. HO wondered if there was a way to sustain the experience of the coffee breaks during the whole of the event and so he invented Open Space Technology, a different approach to designing a conference that also became a management philosophy adopted by highly successful companies. (Ref. #5 and #10)

#4. Meet the experts

Today a number of renowned facilitators worldwide offer you interesting participatory ways to design better conferences. For instances, Adrian Segar provides here a detailed blueprint to create Peer Conferences. Bo Kruger, from Denmark, presents an innovative tool for meeting planners - the meeting design game. Likewise, Ruud Jasen from Switzerland has developed the Event Canvas methodology and offers facilitation training for event planners. David Gurteen conceived the Knowledge Café, a minimalist approach to facilitation that provides outstanding results. But also Ed Bernacki from Ontario or Jeffer London in Brussels with an amazing proposition for the Tiny Book on Dialogue, last but not least, Maarten Vaneste the founder of the Meeting Design Institute and the author of Meeting Architecture a best seller that lays the foundations of a discipline of designing and executing meetings and events based on measurable objectives.

Of course, this movement is global and I hope to have a lot more facilitators who dedicate their expertise to host better conferences participating in the IAF Global Facilitation Summit, next October.

#3. Don't miss opportunities

When the startup I have founded in the late '90s became a large company in the 10s, I was challenged to design our yearly company retreats with an increasingly bigger number of participants. Careful consideration was always given in the making of those events as fun and engaging moments that also provided an opportunity to develop collaborative skills among all staff. Yet, in hindsight today, I realise I missed important opportunities to use these unique moments to do a lot more.

In fact, whenever we design a conference with a clear and tangible quest in mind and establish a 'participatory thread' to get us there (which can be totally self-organized), the results can be surprisingly better. For instances, you can use a company retreat to:

• Jointly investigate how your company culture can have a decisive impact on your organization productivity, just by influencing the way daily meetings should be run.
• Understand how your company's daily meeting effectiveness is at the cornerstone of a truly collaborative workplace and design better templates for them.
• Discover how to become a more autonomous and assertive organization that saves thousands of hours spent on non-productive email conversations and the cost of corrective actions for poorly made decisions.  
• Create plans that are consistent with the desires and aspirations of the ones who are going to implement them rather than superimpose a course of action that is accepted based on 'groupthink' or by the fear to challenge the status quo.  

Or you can use a large conference and customer event to:

• Get candid feedback about what customers value the most of you, as well as the least, and generate ideas about ways to become more relevant to your customers' business.
• Understand the driving forces of innovation in your sector or field of activity and what are the buying customer's expectations about the way your industry should be evolving and why this is considered important for them.
• Offer your own thought leadership and vision on the future but not from an 'I know it all' position, instead, by using humble facilitation adherence to your goals will create a genuine love-of-brand sentiment.
• Get the much-needed information to create products and services that will be contributing to the value-chain in your industry in a more sustainable and profitable manner.
• Find the cure to transmissible disease like the current COVID-19 outbreak.

Walk the talk

Last Fall, I was honoured to have worked with several renowned companies to facilitate a Think Tank on the future the Portuguese National Healthcare Service. The meeting workbook can be shared upon request (@nunesdea) detailing all the steps that were co-designed to reach a collective outcome. This high-level group of experts highlighted key elements to shape the national strategy for Digital Health that is going to be approved by the Government for the next 4 years.

My next conference gig

Next Spring, I will be hosting the Health Data Forum, whose draft agenda can be seen below. I plan to use a knowledge café after the conference dinner and to open space to all participants in a traditional 'unconference' session during the second day. The innovation village will be a 'Peer conference', resembling the spirit of medieval markets where participants will mingle to share and learn from each other. Any comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Conclusions

Meetings form part of your organization overall collaboration flow. The greatest of meetings are the ones that don't happen.

Meetings do not happen in a void. We must also pay attention to the wider context where they take place. Meetings form part of your organization overall collaboration flow. Is the overall organization truly collaborative? Are there any stronger forces preventing your team to be effective as you would wish? If you reach this level of doubt, then you're probably in the need to hire a group facilitator (Ref. #1) that can work as specialized OD consultant to help you design a collaboration culture conducive to host meetings like Google, Apple, Amazon or Facebook (Ref. #2) or, simply, to create clear templates for your tactical and governance meetings (Ref. #3). This is the least you can hope for until the day your organization learns to thrive without any meetings at all.

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Finally, if you like to purchase my books, please visit my Amazon's author page here.

References:

1. The International Association of Facilitators offers here a public directory where you can find about group facilitators:https://www.iaf-world.org/site/facilitators
2. Check this interesting article with great inside information about how these great companies (Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook) meet.
3. Another interesting example of how an organizational context can impact meeting effectiveness is Holacracy's tactical and governance meetings.
4. Ian McKechnie (2017) How to facilitate a meeting – the lesson from tennis
5. About Open Space Technology. https://osius.org/content/about-open-space-technology
6. Ivaylo Durmonski - Why Attending Conferences Sucks and What to do Instead.
7. John Keith - Smarter Meeting Planning: The Process Approach
8. 7 Reasons Your Most Important Meetings Have Been a Waste of Time
9. Check more about IAF members' book authors here.
10. Harrison Owen's author page here.
11. Penny Walker interesting article on virtual meetings: COVID-19 AND YOUR MEETINGS