How to run meetings in Agile

If you google up “meeting best practices”, you will get similar kinds of lists: define goals, set an agenda, make sure there’s a leader, get the right people, manage the minutes, set the rules, document action points and decisions etc etc.

According to our experience, a large # of C-Suite meetings, for example, are following these “meeting best practices”, but we think these teams are often wasting tons of time, creating very little value and actually slowing things down.

In reality, a large chunk of the C-Suite time is often spent on operational issues, where you look at reports and data and have discussions around whatever operational crisis might be at hand. If you experience a lot of operational crisis and have trouble prioritizing them, they will end up eating up all of your precious C-Suite time.

That’s one of the reasons why the paradigm for tackling emerging strategic issues within a C-Suite meeting can still in 2022 be limited to a 60min slot (shortened to 45), where a pair of mid-level managers (top guns, usual suspects) come in to make an analytical presentation on the topic (the presentation was sent beforehand, hope you read it), there’s a recommendation and an intelligible discussion ensues; this is the part where you’re now supposed to say something smart and try to build value.

We dare to say that insight, engagement and atmosphere are not quite through the roof in these situations. Operations and strategy thingies get mixed up a bit, as do the roles. Without the insight and engagement, especially the difficult topics can be pushed forward to the next meeting, sometimes meeting after a meeting. Months can pass without a clear course of action, more data and analysis is constantly required.

In an Agile Enterprise, one should tackle these topics a bit differently. Here's what we would recommend:

1. Clear more time to tackle the difficult strategic questions in the Executive Team/C-Suite. Instead of outsourcing the work for coming up with recommendations, focus on getting the right data&insight, invest time in facilitation/asking the right questions and get heavily involved yourself. Those ppt shows just won't cut it. This work is critical to be able to come up with the right priorities to support your strategy story. Without this work the confidence regarding the priorities is low, and the urge to jump the gun and react to all kinds of signals is high.
2. Make sure your existing operations (your engine) are running smoothly and give teams autonomy to run them. You need to have the process owners and right metrics in place, otherwise this is not possible. Of course if your engine is very broken, fixing it will take majority of your time in the C-Suite, but this needs to be temporary or you will be in trouble vs. competition. The strategic questions can be left unanswered, and your brand promise is constantly playing catch-up with top competition, which translates often to lost market share.
3. Once the strategic priorities are clear, get going with your initiatives and get involved. Since in strategy even with the best of data a lot of your assumptions might be wrong, using design thinking best practices is the way to go. Make sure also top management (a single member = owner for example) is deeply involved within the initiatives and understands what kind of a role it needs to take. The customers have the the right answers, not the highest rank inside the company. Again, don't park in the ivory tower and wait for ppt reports and recommendations.
4. Improve cadence in each of your activities and make sure that the rapid feedback loops are in place. This is obviously at the heart of agile. If you are not following data and taking care of both your operations and development initiatives with the right cadence, you will typically react too slowly to issues and end up destroying value.

All of these recommendations are just one part of an agile operating model, and are always tailored to fit each client. As you can already see, In Agile the goal should be to spend less time in traditional "meetings". Traditional meetings often aim to mix all the topics up together, and at any given time some participants might feel "this particular topic doesn't concern them". If in your meetings you have a lot of laptops open with people taking care of "their actual work or more important stuff", you most likely have a problem.

Strategy and prioritization work

In the past, strategy work was done once a year, put into books and then on you went with the execution. Since there is an accelerated amount of market action in virtually all industries, many companies have moved to more frequent strategy updates, some decades ago. Some do it every four months, some C-suites choose to stay on top of market changes on a weekly basis and spend a large amount of the meetings doing strategy work – engaged together with the needed experts. (example: The Agile C-Suite by HBR, subscription required)

Most of this work is targeted in determining if our strategic priorities are still valid, or is there something new happening in the market that forces us to do changes to the priorities and start/accelerate/freeze/kill a strategic initiative. The overall plan stays intact and updated all the time as do the financial forecasts. The more traditional yearly strategy plan becomes a snapshot.

The actual strategy work is also done differently; no preset powerpoint presentations with recommendations, but a carefully constructed and facilitated design process and flow which supports true insight and engagement. The availability of high quality market and customer data for running such sessions is a must of course.

This engaging approach ensures the C-Suite has the confidence to decide on the priorities, the courage to take action when needed, decide on a change of course, start working on, testing and validating the assumptions when a new initiative arises. We become a constantly learning organization also when it comes to strategy.

Running the engine

The engine here means operations as is. When you have the key metrics, roles, responsibilities and processes in place, there’s no need to use leadership team's time to try to fix operational things all the time; you should have skilled people doing this already. The leadership team’s responsibility is to make sure the abovementioned elements and priorities are generated from the strategy (such elements as a brand promise), are in place and they support the way we run operations.

The ones responsible for operations need to flag and ask for support and guidance, if there are conflicts or inability to solve whatever issues might arise; that’s where the C-Suite plays an integral part. Otherwise the role for the C-Suite is more or less checking that things are going to the right direction with the right speed and give high fives to everyone involved. And ensure that there’s not too much on people’s plates. This is where we’ve seen even mature agile organizations making a mess.

Running strategic change initiatives (developing & changing the engine)

This is where design thinking comes into picture; you are trying to develop something new to your engine. Depending on the initiative you might want to mix up the Project Management Office (PMO) best practices with design thinking best practices - or then not. It wholly depends on the initiative.

An example of a mix is a global ERP renewal project, where the PMO needs to have a tight grip on things. But one should still recognize all key stakeholders, understand the stakeholder needs at a deep level, test, validate, iterate and change the design as needed. And have rapid feedback loops which are a vital part of agile; this does not mean biweekly ERP steering meetings, where the top brass doesn’t often actually understand what’s happening under the hood.

The rapid feedback loop makes sure you are both heading into the right direction and getting results. There is an enormous variety in the way companies react to feedback between different industries; the cadence needs to always be designed according to company needs.

Probably the fastest cadence we have seen is in online gaming industry where the success metrics change every second on the dashboard. The whole operations are increasingly automated to respond to how the metrics change, and what is the action that should be taken. Here both running and developing the engine are both “ultra agile”.

Some more traditional companies push the envelope by having a progress review for the strategic priority every morning. Typically it’s a short stand-up meeting. A good starting point for a cadence discussion is a 2-week sprint; if the cadence is longer than this, the long external lead times for the strategic priority probably dominate the progress.

These short illustrations of ways or working are all parts of an agile operating model, and they need to be designed based on the industry logic, company size and agile maturity among other things. The upside and the goal for your agile operations design should be clear:

Better hit rate and accelerated results with your strategic priorities

Improved customer experience

Improved engagement and critically, reduced employee turnover