Meetings are interesting. Especially the boring ones.
Brooke Struck
?? Your Strategy Partner @ Converge | ?? Here to help you to distill your key objectives & support your team in delivering on them | ?? Philosophy PhD, Systems Thinker, Wearer of Bowties
Meetings are interesting. Especially the boring ones.
When I say “interesting,” I don’t mean literally interesting. Not most meetings, anyway. Most meetings are absolutely dreadful.
A tiny minority of meetings are totally absorbing and get an enormous amount done.
But the overwhelming majority aren’t worth your time. Or anyone else’s.
We’re misusing our meetings
Meetings are a fixture of the modern workplace. Some of us even spend more time in meetings than anywhere else. But I’ve rarely (basically never) heard anybody tell me that they were taught how to run a good meeting, or participate effectively in a meeting.
That’s what’s so fascinating to me. Meetings hide in plain sight, happening all the time and accounting for an enormous amount of the resources we put into our work.
Yet at the same time, they’re so totally commonplace that rarely does anybody take stock of how well (or… not well) they’re working—though all that complaining surely tells us a chunk of the story. And we almost never put a concerted effort into making better meetings. We’re so used to having meetings that we rarely stop to ask ourselves why we’re having them or how to make them better deliver what they’re supposed to.?
At the end of the day, meetings are tools. They’re not just some unavoidable fixture of modern work life; they’re things that we should be using intentionally.?
Like any tool, meetings should start with a purpose. In other words, they need to be calibrated to the problem you’re trying to solve. People shouldn’t be setting meetings just because there’s some decision that needs to be made and they have a gut feeling they “ought” to have a meeting about it. Ultimately, we should be asking ourselves which decisions we want to improve, and then figure out from there what kinds of meetings can facilitate those better decisions.
Tips for more mindful meetings
Off the top, let’s acknowledge that no organization’s meeting culture is going to entirely change overnight. It’s okay to tackle this brick by brick, rather than go tear-down-and-rebuild on a million changes all at once and risk getting bogged down in the mud.
With that in mind, below are some starting points. These tips will help you and your team transform your meetings from mindless hour-long fugue states into purposeful, efficient collaborations.?
If you’re organizing a meeting
1?? Always have an objective for your meetings. I love provocative, imaginative, intuitively gripping prompts, and here’s one that really helps me for meetings: how will I know when the meeting is ready to wrap up? How will I know whether it was a success or a failure? If the answer to those questions is a shrug and an awkward side glance, that’s a good sign that you could stand to clarify your objective. The muscles for these reflections often haven’t got a lot of practice, so here are a few reps to tone you up:
??? Almost every meeting I attend is focused on making a decision: we walk into the room unsure what to do next, and we emerge with a decision about what’s going to be done, by whom, and when.
??? Consider chunking big decisions into multiple meetings and workshops, each with their own sub-objective, which together roll up into solving the overarching objective. For example—If I’m helping a client to clarify their differentiation, one workshop might be focused on various choices available to target customers. The “local” decisions made in that session might trigger action items to do some additional market research, even as the “global” decision is still pending about the updated value proposition, capability audit & sales campaign that we’re building through the entire workshop series.
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2?? Tailor your agenda to your objective. What is the series of steps that we’ll need to take to get from where we are now, to accomplishing that objective? (usually: making that decision).
3?? Flowing from the objective and the agenda, decide on who needs to participate. Participants are usually playing one or more of the following roles: they have accountability for the outcomes of the decision, they have accountability for implementing the decision, or they have key information to guide the decision.
If you don’t have an agenda
What if you don’t have a clear objective or agenda? The answer is simple: don’t call a meeting.?
Too often, we fall back on scheduling meetings as a method of kicking the can down the road. Putting a meeting on next week’s calendar promises us a momentary escape from having to think about whatever obstacles lie in our path. But that escape is illusory. Ultimately, when we schedule these vague “figure-it-out” meetings, we’re really just procrastinating—and taking away valuable time from other folks on the team.??
In these cases, it’s important to pause and ask ourselves: “Why can’t I just proceed already?”?
Moving forward without a meeting
In some cases,? it’s an issue of confidence that keeps us from getting on with it. You might have an idea in your mind, but you want to pressure-test it before you proceed. That’s actually an excellent objective for a meeting (or a longer workshop) —?you just need to make sure you show up prepared to structure that meeting and make effective use of everyone’s time. For that, I suggest you check out my free agenda template, which will help you clarify how to run the meeting and what you need to achieve before it’s over.?
Other times, it may be an issue of accountability. Perhaps you feel responsible for implementing something, but ultimately your boss is responsible for the outcomes, so you don’t want to proceed without checking in first. That’s something that you might be able to tackle as an email: “Here’s what I’ve got in mind, here’s what I think the strengths and weak points are. Are there any adjustments you’d like to see before I proceed?”?
Sometimes, the temptation to call a meeting can also arise from a feeling of ambiguity. When we don’t really understand what needs to get done or how to get there, calling a meeting can be a way of trying to crowdsource that cognitive labour from the team, or distributing the responsibility for figuring things out. In my experience—this is a trap! If there’s ambiguity about what your work is supposed to achieve what’s missing is strategic clarity. (If that’s where you find yourself, call me ??)
Interestingly, the risk indicated by this feeling of ambiguity applies whether or not you have a “project plan” to work from. In fact, if there’s one main reason that I formed Converge, it’s because of how many projects I’ve seen in my career that had a clear project plan but only a fuzzy understanding of the project’s purpose. This leads to massive amounts of wasted creativity and effort, executing super well… on the wrong stuff.?
If you’re invited to a meeting
Last word
I hope that these techniques prove as useful for you as they have been (and continue to be!) for me and my clients.
But as I emphasized in opening this piece: prioritize. There’s a tonne of room for improvement when it comes to meetings, cause there’s a lot of habitual stuff that doesn’t work all that well. If you feel the temptation to change a million things at once, resist. It’s better to implement 2–3 impactful changes that stick and then to tackle 2–3 more, than it is to blitz 10 changes now and have them all fall apart.
And remember, a ton of this stuff is hiding in plain sight. We’re so accustomed to it that we don’t even see it anymore. Want an outside perspective? Give me a shout .