A Leadership Experiment for Better Meetings

Let’s start with a little bit of crap meeting bingo… how many of these did you spot in your online meetings last week?

• The person who always shows up late
• The person who checks their emails and texts and thinks you don’t know
• The person who uses 100 words when 10 would do
• The person who never speaks even when they have great ideas
• The person who interrupts all the time
• The person who obviously hasn’t been paying attention
• The person who grandstands

Meetings are supposed to be the place where groups collectively problem-solve, create fresh ideas together and capitalise on the power of the group to make great decisions. Ideally, meetings are what Nancy Klein calls ‘Thinking Environments’ – environments which elicit the group’s freshest and very best thinking. Let’s be honest – they’re not.

In ‘Time to Think’ Nancy Klein proposes there are 10 necessary components of a Thinking Environment including attention & equality (the others for those who are interested are ease, appreciation, encouragement, feelings, information, diversity, incisive questions and place). She also suggests ‘ways of working’ in meetings which help groups embody these, including a technique she calls the ‘Thinking Round’. A Thinking Round hard-wires equality and attention into a meeting, by ensuring:

• everyone shares
• everyone has the same amount of time to share
• there are no interruptions
• people share in the order they’re seated, not by levels of seniority or extraversion
• everyone is invited to pay ‘rapt attention’ to the person speaking

It takes a little while to feel comfortable hosting a meeting using Thinking Rounds but when you do relax into it, trust the process and get over the weirdness you may feel at the start, the dividends are enormous.

Give it a go, see what you discover and, if you find this helpful, please share it.

This Week's Leadership Experiment- The Thinking Round

Step 1 – Set Up

• Pick a subject, topic or question.
• Let the team know you’re going to have a Thinking Round, and what the ‘rules’ are (everyone shares, pay rapt attention, no interruptions).
• Explain that when talking in a Round people will share clockwise from whoever goes first.
• Give them a time limit for shares (3-5 mins depending on the size of the group and length of the meeting). Let them know you will keep time and that you’ll wave at them to encourage them to wrap when they reach the time limit.

Step 2 – Draw a seating plan. Thank you Ginny Baillie, my go-to guru for great meetings, for this brilliant build for online Thinking Rounds. When meeting on VC people don’t necessarily all see each other in the same place on the screen. Draw a ‘seating plan’ and ask everyone to copy it so they know the order to share in.

Step 3 – Pose your question or prompt. Questions that start ‘What are your thoughts about…’ or ‘What’s your freshest thinking about…’ work well.

Step 4 – Have a Thinking Round. Anyone can decide to go first, apart from you;-) The team share clockwise around the virtual table until everyone has spoken. Do NOT allow interruptions. DO wave if people get to the end of their time.

Step 5 – Have another Round. Once everyone has spoken, pose the question ‘What are your reflections and thoughts on what you’ve just heard’ and do another Round.

Step 6 – After Round 2 open up the conversation and resume your meeting-as-normal. Ask people what they noticed, what themes are emerging, what to do with the ideas you’ve just heard.