These are real questions that came up during our Meetings That Get Results and Buy-In half-day online team leadership training. We captured the Q&A and answered the practical stuff that managers and team leaders actually wrestle with: meeting design, meeting facilitation, decision-making, action planning, Liberating Structures, hybrid meetings, group dynamics, and inclusion. If you’re trying to run meetings with more clarity, alignment, and next steps, this is a useful place to start.
Liberating Structures & Methods
What are the core principles behind Liberating Structures?
We tend to focus more on the application than the theory, especially in short trainings. Here’s a link to more information about the core principles. Generally, what we like about this methodology is that it is participatory and inclusive and is, in essence, the opposite of a lot of typical meetings that people don’t like and that also don’t work well. Liberating Structures is definitely not a top-down, command and control approach to bringing people together where the wisdom is tied up in one powerful person in front of the room.
Have you encountered folks who don’t want to participate in a certain LS process? If so, how do you handle that?
Be it a technique that comes from Liberating Structures or any of the other methodologies that we use, yes, there are probably cases that we’ve encountered where people don’t want to participate. But, honestly, it’s pretty hard to think of those cases. More often, what probably happens is people are skeptical that a new format or a new approach to a meeting will work. People are used to the same dynamic of watching a PowerPoint presentation or sitting around a round table and going around and around with questions and comments. This is a form of change and change can be difficult for people even if it means a 2-minute tweak to how we brainstorm or make decisions. So it’s probably more likely that someone will roll their eyes and be dubious that this is going to work, participate for the sake of participation, and then be pleasantly surprised that it worked better than what was happening before.
To answer the question a little differently, there is a principle of the related methodology called Open Space Technology that basically says that the right people will show up to the meeting and whoever there is the right group and if you’re not getting value or finding value, you should not be there and go somewhere else. It can seem at the same time both obvious and radical when we think about typical daily meetings in the workplace. We often get invited to meetings that don’t seem relevant to us and that we don’t have much to add to. But the culture dictates that we are there. Looking at how an organization meets can be on one tactical level of what happens in the room but it could also be a more strategic, broader look at the culture around how and why and when we meet and what is and isn’t appropriate.
What would be the in-person equivalent of Chat Storm?
Online a chat window gives us a really easy way to convert ideas to visual text. If we use that as a guide, then there are lots of ways that we can do something similar to a chat storm in person. Probably the easiest analogy is to give everyone a sticky note and have them reply to the prompt and then we all post our sticky notes at the same time in the same place and then have a chance to read and digest all of them. There are lots and lots of different adaptations of this basic method though and it would depend quite a bit on how many people you have, what technology is available to you, the room set up, the materials you have, etc.
With 1-2-4-All, are there any good ways to help people avoid falling into the trap of being polite or just giving way to the person who seems most invested, as opposed to finding the best options?
It’s true that 1-2-4-All does tend to regress to the mean, which is to say that you tend to find safer, more popular ideas or solutions that appeal to the group as a whole. There are other ways where we would get stronger signals and more unique ideas such as using anonymous note cards or a related technique like 25/10. But a strength of this format is that even if one person has really strong opinions and ends up dominating in the pair and then in the group of four, then there are still typically a number of other groups in the room that have come up with other ideas and when the group discusses those other ideas, it avoids the one person dominating the whole process. This is in contrast to what we often see happen in rooms where people sit around a table and it’s basically the “all” stage at the start and one loud, dominant, or impassioned person moves the discussion for the whole room immediately and it’s hard to get out of that trap.
That said, there are a number of levers that you can throw to change how the activity is done. Giving a group more time or less time to discuss the options can change the outcome. Offering groups more or fewer combined options that come out of each round can change the output, such as asking for one idea from a group of four or asking for three ideas from a group of four. Changing how you prompt the group can change the dynamic. Adding more structure to a conversation like people presenting their ideas with equal time or with a talking stick or talking object can change the dynamics. And then there are a variety of other techniques that can help surface broader agreement or disagreement on ideas. One, for example, would be to start with a larger number of ideas from groups and then use “dot voting” to find the ones that resonate the most with the group.
Yes, you can still have a dominant voice change the outcome in a technique like 1-2-4-All, but it’s usually still vastly superior to what happens without that technique and then there are ways to tweak the technique more to change the outcome.
Group Dynamics, Conflict & Psychological Safety
We have an issue with people judging others’ ideas before working to understand the speaker’s perspective.
This probably gets to a larger issue of how we design a meeting and what tools or techniques we use to run that meeting as opposed to the way meetings usually happen. When we train people on meeting and facilitation skills and when we use those same skills ourselves, we think an awful lot about the practical “how” of a challenge in front of us. So what often happens when someone is asked a question like this is that the response is to say something like, “Participants should always keep an open mind and try to understand the speaker’s perspective, not judging an idea prematurely or with insufficient information or background.” And while that might be good advice, we would then ask the innocent question, “Ok, but how?” That’s where there tends to be a gap in the skill set for people leading meetings or being in meetings.
So, for us, we’re thinking probably more about the arc of a meeting and some good design practices to help us have a meeting that make sure people are listening and understanding each other before passing judgment. On one hand, this probably comes down to timing. Lots of meetings are conceived with magical thinking where there is simply too much on the agenda, too many people in the meeting, and a drive to make decisions and get through the meeting quickly. There’s often not the available time or an accepting culture to even ask for clarification before someone asks for a show of hands and then the group moves on.
That’s not to say that all meetings need to take hours and hours and have tons of steps and tread very carefully. We can go fast and be efficient. But it might mean that we break our big group up into small groups with something like 1-2-4-All and give people more of a chance to talk through their ideas and sort of workshop them or clarify them before they are floated up to the full room. It might mean that we collect all the ideas in the room first and try to cluster them or find themes and then talk through what each of those represents or what’s behind it. Or, in planning a meeting, we might realize that to have the right perspective in the room means having someone there that we wouldn’t usually have. Maybe it’s a bunch of executives deciding on something that affects people in the trenches but there’s nobody in the trenches there to talk about the perspective of the people who are directly affected.
And then there are a variety of techniques that help people understand different perspectives. Maybe one of the most common or famous is de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. In essence, you are telling a group that we need to see and understand an issue from different viewpoints and we will actually assign people to have those different viewpoints within the room. Another technique that’s somewhat related is the idea of creating a Red Team or, conversely, a Blue Team with a specific mandate to poke holes in an argument or an idea or lend support to someone or some perspective.
How do you address people avoiding conflict — deferring to the loudest voices or hierarchical rank?
For better or worse, meetings within an organization tend to be a very visceral representation of the culture of that organization. However, in turn, changing how we hold meetings can also have a broader effect on what the culture is within an organization. The reality is that if rank and hierarchy are very strong cultural constraints in an organization, it’s difficult to change them. If it’s the president or a general that is the loudest, most senior, highest ranked person in the room and that person is running the meeting and has lots of power and has no interest in other ideas or opinions, it’s tricky. Not impossible, but tricky. (Also, it’s fair to say that a lot of CEOs or generals are actually looking for dissent and push-back and get frustrated because they don’t get it, partly because they are unwittingly shutting it down even when they try to invite it.) But, on the other hand, if you are someone running a meeting and the attendees have different degrees of rank and power, there are lots of things that you can do.
We could write a whole book on this but here are a few things. First of all, if we meet in the same place with the same structure and the same room setup and the same furniture and the same power dynamics, it’s difficult. If everyone is sitting at a giant conference table and the person at the head of the table is the person who always decides what happens and there’s no dissent, then simply changing the room can have a pretty big effect.
Breaking a big group into smaller groups that function independently and talk independently before coming back together to the group can work wonders to surface different ideas or opinions. 1-2-4-All is great for that.
Anonymizing ideas or suggestions can be really helpful. There are lots of ways to do this but maybe the easiest and most understandable is to have people submit suggestions on anonymous note cards or sticky notes.
It’s also important that we see how a group really feels. So if, for example, we have two competing ideas in the room, it’s quite different to put them on two different pieces of paper in the room and then give people a chance to place voting stickers on them to see that it’s not just one lone voice with a different opinion but at least half the room has concerns about this new product or this new service that we might deliver.
And then assigning a person or a team to poke holes and be an opposite voice in the room can be really helpful. This has been done for years in a military context where a Red Team is assigned to be the bad guy and try to break the prevailing argument or thinking. It’s hard for one lone person to stand and raise a voice against a powerful person in a room but if you tell someone or a few people that their job is to do this, you’re more likely to get push-back that’s constructive and healthy.
Accessibility, Neurodiversity & Inclusion
My husband is legally blind and uses a screen reader. When I think about Mural and other visual, non-verbal brainstorming tools, I know this would exclude him completely. How can meetings be more inclusive for people who have various disabilities? How do we better frame these things for neurodivergence?
Disabilities and neurodivergence are broad and there’s not necessarily a one-size-fits-all answer for how to make meetings better for people with disabilities. In some cases, a change for one disability will make it harder for someone with another disability.
First, let’s acknowledge that the way most meetings are held today (and for the past 100 years), they’re not very accessible or friendly to people with a variety of disabilities, neurodivergence, etc. So even if we’re not totally solving for all the potential challenges and disabilities that could be in front of us, we’re often doing a better job than what would be happening traditionally.
First, it’s true that a collaborative canvas platform like Mural can feel chaotic and it’s obviously quite visual. But Mural also has specific technology for people with vision impairment. Does it create some friction and does it require more time and more adaptation? Yes. But it’s not insurmountable for a participant with vision impairment and it’s not unrealistic to make changes that preserve the value for the rest of the group as well. Probably one of the best, easiest ways to improve meetings overall is to make them more visual. It’s really hard for people to just follow conversations that are happening in the air and we aren’t able to see what the different arguments are and the sub arguments and how things are related. So it certainly depends on who’s in the room and what the challenges are, but we wouldn’t take visuals off the table and would instead look for ways to adapt them or make them more accessible. If something like Mural is too difficult because it’s not as linear, then maybe we use something like a shared Google Doc and maybe we plan to spend more time clarifying what we’re looking at and narrating it.
In terms of neurodivergence, there are some general pillars that we would usually design towards but there’s not a solution that’s going to be the best for all participants and also be the best for efficiency, productivity, engagement, etc.
If we think about a typical meeting of 10 people sitting around a conference table in a business, it’s usually not very neurodivergent friendly. There are lots of challenges with that meeting.
A lot of the techniques that are common across the tactics and the methodologies that we use tend to, on the whole, probably be better for neurodivergence. We tend to work in chunks where we may first talk about what all the issues are facing us and then we do a next chapter or chunk of the meeting where we talk about what the most important ones are, and then we focus on one or two and look for possible solutions, etc. It has more order and a clearer structure to it than a typical meeting.
We tend to give people more instructions and more that are step by step and break tasks down versus the way most meetings happen in the world and that tends to align well with neurodivergence.
We often give people time to think and reflect before, during, and after parts of a meeting rather than just turning to a big group and asking for a full-blown conversation or concept to emerge immediately.
We often use techniques that break big, unwieldy, daunting groups into smaller units or pods like 1-2-4-All does.
We tend to use a lot of visuals or diagrams or sticky notes to record ideas, group them together, make sense of them, etc. Compared to the way most meetings function where you have to be a really astute listener and track multiple ideas at the same time, this is much friendlier.
And, in general, a lot of the tweaks that make meetings more accessible for neurodivergence or disabilities also tend to work well for other participants. Being in lots of meetings over many years tells us that almost no one or no group is particularly good at tracking all the ideas and all the thoughts and all the themes that come up over the course of an hour with 10 people and then trying to make sense of what it all means and what to do next. So helping any group understand that and be able to track it better is an improvement.
On the other hand, methodologies we tend to draw from like Liberating Structures are participatory, collaborative, and meant to be engaging. They are often doing multiple things at once where you have work being done but also people connecting. Be it a form of neurodivergence or another challenge where there is social anxiety that comes from being around other people, these methodologies can be tricky the way they are usually used. Similarly, a lot of the methodologies that we use can be quite rapid fire where there is, for example, a quick, iterative round of 4 minutes of questions instead of a 30-minute discussion and that can be challenging.
But, overall, techniques that we use are probably better than what’s happening in most meetings in most organizations and there are certainly a variety of adaptations that can be utilized as well. In general, we would say that people who lead meetings often have a very limited toolbox of different activities or adaptations that they can employ in their meetings and the more tools and techniques we can give people, the more they are able to adapt and change to meet the group they are working with.
I’ve gotten feedback from people on the spectrum who hate “corporate” or “cheesy” activities and just want to get to the point of the meeting and then leave.
Again, an organization’s culture often influences its meetings but its meetings can also influence that culture, for better or worse. There are probably lots of corporate frameworks or fad activities that corporations use when people gather. Honestly, lots of them are just not very good. We certainly have no desire to just do cheesy things for the sake of doing cheesy things.
What tends to happen is a form of once bitten, twice shy. People have been in so many bad meetings that the logical conclusion they come to is that all meetings are bad and all frameworks for meetings are bad and it’s all a waste of time and we just need to get in and out as fast as possible. There are obviously many different reasons to call a meeting but many of the cases where people say they just want to get in and get out are cases where you probably didn’t even need a meeting in the first place. Those are often the times when it’s a quick update or a quick vote and it probably could have been an email or someone could have just made a decision without bringing a team together.
When we are working with organizations, it’s often the case that we can get people in a room and make decisions or figure out a process in an hour or two that otherwise has been taking months with the way typical meetings are held. The techniques that we are using might look a little different from a typical meeting but they’re not cheesy. And the results tend to speak for themselves. If the thing that people dislike is spending too much time in meetings and feeling like it’s pointless, then we can address those issues and make real progress with some structural changes to how we discuss and decide within our meetings.
How to improve hybrid? Half my team in person and half remote.
The challenge of hybrid meetings is very real. And they definitely can be very difficult and very painful. Unfortunately, if groups insist on meeting in a hybrid manner, there’s often a lot working against them. First, most of the rooms and the technology set up for hybrid meetings are just not very good. Which is to say that most of these setups do a pretty good job if it’s just a case of one person doing a presentation to a bunch of other people and some of them happen to be in person and some of them happen to be remote. But if you’re talking about a meeting that actually has interaction and discussion and debate, technology choices don’t usually support that well. People are remote tiny little faces in a big room and it’s hard to tell who’s talking. People in the room are disconnected from those dialing in.
Although we know that many groups can’t make this change, when we are asked to do something hybrid, we will often push back and say that we will do it all in person or all online but trying to blend it in most cases takes a lot more time and effort and money and technology than is available or realistic. Even having all of the in-person people on computers within the workplace but not sitting in the same room tends to yield a better overall result.
Another aspect of improving hybrid meetings or meetings with a remote component is to think really hard about who’s invited. It’s really easy to invite lots of people to remote meetings because there’s no cap on the size of the room and it is, in theory, easy for people to attend regardless of time and space. But bigger meetings tend to not be as good as smaller meetings. A hybrid meeting with five people is better than one with 20 people. One with 10 people is better than one with 50 people.
And then giving everyone a chance to collaborate together is also often helpful. So even the people in the room might also be on laptops with a shared canvas or document. Or using something like a Chat Storm can be a way to let everyone participate and voice ideas and digest what’s out there without having to go back and forth between screens or the room or a camera or dodgy audio.
But it is a real challenge. If we had a magic wand, one of our wishes would be for better, more practical, more thoughtful technology setups that would better support hybrid meetings.
Small Meetings & Team Context
So many of these exercises work great for larger groups (8+ people?). Many of the meetings I lead are 1:1 or up to 5 people. Thoughts?
Right, the work we tend to do is for groups rather than one-on-one meetings. And a lot of those techniques scale well between a group of four and a group of 400. One-on-one meetings can still have structure and still use helpful techniques but they tend to be more about interpersonal skills. That said, a lot of questions that deal with framing in the techniques we use are very applicable to even one-on-one meetings. We use a lot of frameworks or templates or guides to move people through the right parts of a meeting and that still works with very small groups. The idea of using an opposite question from TRIZ is very applicable. The idea of giving people even a minute to order their thoughts to themselves before jumping in and having to comment or make sense of something is something that we see in 1-2-4-All and is very applicable. Any sort of visual framework that helps people understand big ideas or complexity like the Ecocycle can be applied. Grabbing some sticky notes and writing ideas on them and clustering them is helpful with a group of two people or a group of 200 people. But even doing something like 1-2-4-All with a group of five will still yield good results versus what typically happens in a traditional meeting.
Some of these activities seem great for large groups of people who haven’t worked together before. What about strategies for small teams who work together often?
With the previous question, we covered how you apply these techniques to smaller groups. And many, many of the techniques we use are awesome for really small groups. Also, the more groups work together and use these same techniques, they develop a common language and understand the techniques. If we do something like clustering with sticky notes for 1-2-4-All, a lot of the time and maybe some frustration comes from having to explain it and talk through the process. When you’ve done it even a few times, it becomes quite natural and you just do it without having to talk about the how and the why so it really goes faster. Also, as groups get familiar with the idea of having different meeting tools in their facilitation toolbox, the more they’re able to pull out the right tool and use it or adapt it or come up with something that is specific for that team and that challenge.
So, for example, we really like a variety of forms of Brain Writing that you could do with a really big group or just at one table. If you’ve never seen or used the technique, then you wouldn’t ever think to use it at a certain meeting when it’s going to be a perfect fit and it’s going to save time and frustration and make the team happy. And then after using it a few times, the team may decide that there’s a tweak to it that’s going to be even better for the way that group operates and then it just becomes part of the culture.
With small meetings, how do you empower leadership and not take meetings over?
Culture is a really big part of meetings. Often organizations on the whole tell people that they are empowered and that their voices count and then they do lots of things to signal that that’s not really true. So, for example, if you hold a meeting and tell people that you’re looking for ideas about how to improve something or how to do something and you get those ideas and then none of them are implemented, then people come to understand that there’s no reason to participate.
A lot of the techniques that we use are about decreasing the reliance on the senior, powerful person at the front of the room and distributing the responsibility among the group. But that takes trust and some faith to say that maybe I as the manager or the CEO don’t have all the answers and I’m going to turn over some of my power to the people in the room. If we look at a really simple example of a typical meeting where a CEO sits at the head of a table and asks for ideas after outlining what the right ideas are and then doesn’t get much feedback or participation and then shoots down ideas, it’s quite different for that person to do very little of the talking or guiding or influencing in a room with 1-2-4-All and letting the room offer real feedback and input and only then do we have a discussion about what’s on the table.
Engagement & Meeting Effectiveness
How can we increase engagement so meetings feel purposeful, worthwhile, and not like time wasted?
This could be a whole training itself and it’s at the heart of so much of the work we do, although, in a way, it’s a bit subtle and baked into the activities as opposed to being the headline. When it comes to purpose, it sounds a little silly and self-evident, but lots of people running lots of meetings could probably use a moment of quiet reflection to think about why we’re doing this meeting or why we’re doing this meeting for the 47th time. Lots of meetings just become traditions and they’ve lost a real reason to exist and they can fade away. People are rightly unenthusiastic and unengaged in meetings that don’t seem to have a strong purpose. For meetings that do have a clear purpose, it’s certainly helpful to tell people at the start of the meeting or in the invite very clearly what the goal of that meeting is. Decision making meetings are really easy to understand. A lot of status update meetings have drifted into a zone where they’re not particularly helpful and the purpose is pretty muddy. We use the Nine Whys activity to help groups think through purpose for lots of different things and it could certainly be applied to why we’re holding a specific meeting.
Also, meetings are overly ambitious where we look at an agenda for a group of 10 people that are trying to do 10 things in 30 minutes and we know from the start that there’s just not enough time to do all of those things or do them well so it’s really a case of focus.
Not that lack of engagement is synonymous with presentations but that’s often a really good symptom. Similarly it’s not true that engagement is always synonymous with participation, but that’s a good bet. So an easy set of levers to pull for engagement is to decrease presentations, PowerPoints, slides, and long stretches where one person talks and talks or even where everyone in the room does an update generally, the more you bring people together in a room and they just sit there listening, the more engagement generally suffers. If we think about going to your favorite rock concert where you just sit and listen to someone else performing, it can be pretty engaging. But if you’re in a beige conference room and you’re mostly just sitting and listening, the level of engagement is usually quite low.
Again, part of this question gets down to culture and whether we are just inviting people to meetings because of a tradition or for the sake of including them but they don’t actually need to be there and they don’t want to be there. Lots of meetings feel like there’s no engagement because of the 15 people in the room, only six really care and are really invested in the meeting. It’s a culture question, but it can be a really big change to let people actually not join meetings that they are invited to.
The more people participate and have a chance to be heard and valued in meetings, the more they probably feel engaged and productive. Practically, there are lots and lots of ways to do this but it usually means that we’re using new tools in our meeting skills toolbox that many people have never learned.
As a really basic example, it’s a very different meeting when we put 12 people around a really big table and someone does a 20-minute PowerPoint and then asks if there are any questions and then three questions from the three senior people in the room result in a 10-minute conversation with the presenter while the other eight or nine people are basically silent witnesses.
Compare that to a meeting that is done in a celebrity interview style where the person with the knowledge presents it as an interview and then there’s a middle section where everyone in the room forms small groups to think of questions and then furthers the interview. It’s not only more engaging and we hear from more voices and more people feel like it was worthwhile for them to be there, but it also probably gets to a better outcome.
This is not to say that you can’t ever do a PowerPoint or you can’t ever present a slide, but if we are bringing people together and asking them to spend their time in a room with other people, they’re going to feel like it’s worthwhile if they’re part of the process and not just a studio audience for someone to present to.
How can we improve decision-making and impact — including clearer next steps, assigned due dates, and productive outcomes?
This might sound heretical, but there’s probably too much talking in most meetings. That is to say that we let people talk and explain and revisit ideas and argue for fringe cases and debate each other and we spend lots and lots of time on that in meetings when a lot of that time could probably be replaced by asking people to write their ideas on Post-it notes and we put them up on the board and then find out what the main ideas or questions are and focus on those. And then we could do another round where people voice their objections or questions as a second layer of notes and we address those. Too many meetings spend too much time trying to figure out the meaning of what is being said by lots of people and it’s just not very efficient or enjoyable. It doesn’t mean that people can’t talk in meetings, but having visuals and being able to read what’s happening really does make things more efficient.
When it comes to decision making, again helping the room understand what the decisions on the table even are is something that often doesn’t happen well. If we stick with this idea of just using basic sticky notes, that can cut so much time and uncertainty out of the process.
The other part of this is going in with a strong sense of what you want the meeting to accomplish and being realistic about that. If we’re holding a meeting between three different departments to decide whether to stick with our current product roll out timeline or not, we want to stay focused on that question and have an answer at the end of the meeting. And we want people to come in with that context. Instead, that question is often buried in a much larger agenda within a meeting that has so many things happening with so many people that full, fair discussion of the topic at hand doesn’t happen and then we don’t get to a point where we’re comfortable making a decision.
In terms of actually getting to decision and action and responsibility, we really like simple techniques like Min Specs and something that’s concrete and easy to understand like the What, Who, When Matrix. Lots of meetings end with vague generalities that things will happen or that we are in agreement or that the group will get things done but there’s no actual, specific action item that’s attached to a person and a date.
Be really clear about what the meeting is for and what you need to decide or discuss, be firm about sticking to that one thing, and then be really clear about what the steps are coming out of it and who is going to do what by when.
How can we make mandated or recurring status meetings more engaging and useful rather than routine and draining? And many status meetings because the company mandates it. I’d like to make them more engaging and useful.
Lots of status meetings have become habitual rather than valuable. It may indeed be that all of yours are fundamentally important, but be open to the possibility that the best thing that one can do for a regularly scheduled meeting is to question whether it needs to keep happening. For those status meetings that should happen – as with all meetings – they could probably benefit from an upgrade in structure. It’s way easier to fix the structure of a meeting than to fix the people in the meeting. In other words, if we say that we’re going to what from everyone on the team at each meeting and there’s no real limit or template to what and how people share – and how we structure comments and questions – we’re probably going to get an unhelpful mush of people who unprepared and who are sharing info that isn’t what others need and then a cascade of questions and comments that may take the meeting on tangents. Spending two minutes at the start of a meeting and having people fill out a brief cheat sheet with what is expected from each person probably beats the frequent off-the-cuff sharing that happens. Listing all questions for each person at once rather than answering them one-by-one as they come up probably helps. Directing people to share info as it relates to how they need help or what truly affects other people probably helps; we likely don’t need to know everything about each project. And then formats like a Gallery Walk or writing out more info or having people write out questions – even using a Chat Storm or Sticky Note Clustering – probably outperforms the usual round-the-room speeches.
In the end, ask yourself how you can change the meeting to really work for the group rather than re-running the same format that’s been used (and unsuccessful) for the past 50 years.
Decision Quality, Time & Follow-Through
Pacing challenges — a large portion of the group is arriving at next steps, then someone introduces a wrench or challenge, progress is stalled, and now we’re out of time. Lack of follow-up afterward. Leaving a meeting with nothing new said and no follow-up actions. Redundant information sharing and lack of follow-through.
Pacing can certainly be a challenge. This challenge is often compounded by agendas that have too much in them in meetings that are trying to do too much in too little time. We want meetings to be efficient, yes, but sometimes we really do need to give ourselves more time to, for example, do a really thorough round of divergent thinking where we come up with lots and lots of ideas and do lots of brainstorming so we have a really fertile crop to start with. And then, maybe we really do need to build in time for a step where we look for issues we didn’t foresee or to address challenges.
It’s helpful to use visuals or a framework or a canvas or even pages of a shared Google doc to do this. We are on page one and this is what we’re doing here. We will take the output from this page or this sheet and move it to page two. Now we’re on page two and we’re doing this next part of the process. We take the decision or the action from page two and carry it to page three for action steps to make that happen, etc.
There’s an idea as well of “making the room into a living agenda” where you’re on one wall doing work for the first part of the meeting and then move to the second wall where you do work on the second part and so on. So people see that they’re on a journey and it’s easier to keep them on the journey when they can see where they are and where they’re going. A lot of meetings just happen around the table without any real support and it doesn’t feel like we are living or working within a structure or that we’re on a train that is clearly going somewhere.
There may indeed be cases where you call a meeting and there isn’t any new information or ideas. In that case, it probably speaks to whether you need to have a meeting or if that’s a repeating meeting, if it needs to be repeated. But, in our experience, there’s a very wide gulf between asking a group if there are any questions, waiting a beat and, sensing none, packing it up versus walking people through a process where they have to submit questions. It’s not punitive. But if you give people more time and space and an easier way to come up with questions, you will find that there was often a treasure trove of questions that went unanswered because we just asked for questions in the usual way.
Handing out anonymous note cards and collecting them is an easy way to do that. Breaking people into small groups like 1-2-4-All is an easy way to do that. And then if we’re looking at a challenge where there was seemingly new information presented and no new questions, we will often look at something like a gallery walk where we ask people to put up a poster of what they’re working on and the relevant updates and then we let people walk around, read it to themselves, then add Post-it notes with their questions, comments, or suggestions.
Similarly, we will often ask people for their questions or concerns at the very beginning of a presentation and let the presenter see those so he or she can adapt what they’re about to say to that feedback. In many cases, presenters are presenting what they think people want to hear or need to know and the reality is that the audience is actually in a different place and we don’t discover that until it’s too late.
Attention, Norms & Distraction
How can you manage chat so that it doesn’t become distracting?
It might depend on the context of how and where we are using chat. Sometimes it might be more problematic when there’s nothing in the chat and no engagement versus having it go a little overboard. Most platforms have an option to turn off the chat but that’s probably too big a step to take for most meetings. In big meetings or presentations, a chat window will often take on a life of its own although it’s still usually germane to the topic at hand. Even in smaller meetings, the chat might be really active but what may be happening is people are getting a chance to talk to each other much as they would if they arrived in person at a meeting and caught up with other people before or after. A lot of that is often quite productive. Some of it could probably be private chats and doesn’t have to be something that everyone partakes in so that might be one ask to keep things less crazy and more relevant.
It also might just be a case of establishing a norm for that meeting or how one’s organization handles chat. Maybe we are an organization that’s okay with people sharing personal things on chat and that devolving into other conversations. Maybe we’re an organization where it’s okay to use chat but it has to stay on topic.
Also, unless the chat is really going crazy, people are still probably paying attention to what else is happening. And it might seem more distracting than it actually is.
How do you shut down multitasking (people clearly doing email or texting on their phones)? Establishing norms has proven to be a real challenge (everyone is an adult and a professional, but a few people are the problem).
Multi-tasking is a problem. Part of the challenge is that people just have too many responsibilities and too many meetings. It might be that people are goofing off, but it’s also likely that there’s just a mountain of stuff to get through and people are juggling as best they can. One part of an answer may be that most organizations have never had a conversation about what is and isn’t appropriate in a meeting; the culture of an organization’s meetings has emerged but not been planned, per se. You could make a declaration that “There shall be no texting during meetings!” but it might come across asa heavy-handed. It might be that the same rule comes about when asking people what they want their own meeting culture to be. There’s also an issue of loosening the requirements that people be at meetings – we often over-invite people to be safe and because it’s easy to do so – and making them more participatory for those who are there. It’s sort of like people not appearing on camera when we want people to turn their cameras on; if it basically seems like one is just watching TV (where there’s someone presenting), it doesn’t seem critical that one is seen watching someone speaking. Similarly, if we’re only being talked at, people don’t necessarily feel valued, important, or necessary to the meeting and that may send a message that doing something else is ok. It’s not that “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop” means that you should keep people busy, but when people aren’t involved, aren’t sharing, and aren’t invested in a meeting, they turn to other things.
Influence Without Authority
How do you change a meeting that you don’t own but have to attend?
It’s admittedly easier to change a meeting that you run as opposed to one that you are only attending, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have any power or any influence at meetings where you are an attendee. First, a lot of people who are stuck running meetings don’t want to be running meetings. So there may be an opportunity to volunteer to run a meeting or to put together an agenda for or to send over some ideas for what you think the agenda should be. What often happens is people who are running meetings just don’t have the time or the thought before the meeting to create a framework for success. Volunteering to help out, even if it’s suggesting a framework for an agenda can be a pretty big change.
Sort of a contrarian answer here would be that sometimes you can improve a meeting that you are supposed to attend by not attending that meeting. That’s not to say that you should never go to meetings, but a lot of people get invited to meetings they don’t need to be at and where they don’t add value and it’s generally harder for a leader or facilitator to run a bigger meeting versus a smaller meeting. Offering to not be there and explaining why or maybe just drafting a little memo of the one part that people need to know might be in service to you, the person running the meeting and the other attendees.
If you’re at the meeting, a small thing that you can do that can have a big effect is to just innocently ask at the beginning if we can all get clear on what we need to walk out with or what we’re trying to accomplish here and putting that in the room in a clear way can help remind everyone where we’re going and what is tangential or outside the purpose of that meeting.
Similarly, it might not be crazy for you to ask for a brief moment during the meeting where people get one minute to write down their ideas and just have a chance to think about them or maybe another minute or two to even talk about those ideas with someone next to them. There’s a point where it may look like you’re hijacking a meeting or being disruptive but if it turns out that this little hack makes the meeting more enjoyable and generates better ideas or solutions and also ends up being faster, people will probably be okay with it.
Another little technique that you can use as someone attending a meeting but not running it is to volunteer to be a scribe or a recorder who works in service to the meeting and the other attendees. Many, many meetings suffer from just being a bunch of people talking about a bunch of things in a room and it becomes hard for people to keep track of everything that’s being said that’s really important and how things are related and if we’ve made decisions or who’s responsible for something. It really can be as simple as walking in with a pad of sticky notes and a sharpie and just writing down key things that are being said and putting them on the wall. You could also do this with a shared document or canvas if you’re working online or hybrid. In this case, you’re really just taking notes on what’s being said and you’re taking on a role that’s not one that seems powerful or usurping the power of the person leading the meeting. But it does give you some power and it tends to structure the conversation so people start looking at those visuals and at those notes and adds structure and logic to a conversation. Really small but it has a big impact.
How can you integrate other tools if you decide not to have a meeting, specifically Microsoft Teams since it is an enterprise solution?
We tend to think a lot about the moments where people do decide to have a meeting but it is often a really good, smart, helpful decision to make with a group to not have a meeting. We think a lot about meetings that are collaborative and, in this sense, it’s also collaboration but asynchronous instead of everyone talking or meeting at the same time.
Technology can be a real benefit here but it can also be a roadblock when it adds complexity or friction. Although there are lots of really good collaboration tools out in the world for teams to use, in meetings or asynchronously, we often default to the lowest common denominator that might not be the best tool or technology but is the one that people have access to and already understand. So, for example, we really like the ability of a free form canvas collaboration board like Mural but it can be difficult for people to figure out and use so instead we might default back to something like a shared Google Doc or Microsoft Word doc that is collaborative.
Tools like PowerPoint might be really good for conveying information but they’re not really great for conversation collaboration or decision making.
Continuous chat platforms like we’d see in Teams or something like Slack can also be really helpful but the sheer volume to process all the stuff that happens on them can be a lot. And then this conversation would obviously not be complete without a mention of artificial intelligence.
One of the things that AI does a really good job of is distilling disjointed information into something that is easier to digest and in a more standardized format. If you can imagine that every week your team wants to have an update on what’s going on with certain projects, you might decide that there are five bits of information or components that you want people to fill out. But they might not do it in the right way or capture information the way it’s easiest for the team to digest. So, instead, giving team members a resource where they can basically just talk or type or paste a ton of information and have it automatically output to a standard, easily readable format can pay dividends. That’s also true if we’re talking about times when we decide to have a status meeting and we want people to come in and really be prepared. A few seconds of gathering disparate information to output it into the best format can make it much easier and faster for people to share with each other in a room.
If I am not the facilitator or leader of the meeting, how can I make an impact or be “heard,” REALLY heard?
It’s a good question. Obviously, it’s always easier to control the meeting and make sure that attendees are really being heard if you’re the person running the meeting. Part of the answer might be to raise the concern or to make some suggestions to the person running the meeting. A lot of the techniques that we really like are ones that help people be heard and make sure we’re getting input from different voices but also generate better results and be faster. A lot of times the push-back is that giving people a chance to be heard or have input was going to take too long and isn’t going to matter and our experience is that that just isn’t true if you have the toolbox of techniques that fit the situation.
One of the first things we would point to is trying to make conversations more visual, which is often as simple as taking notes on a board that everyone can see or putting up sticky notes with major points. It’s harder to forget something that comes from someone with a quiet voice or a junior title if it’s sitting in the middle of a board as opposed to it being drowned out by a longer louder speech from a senior person.
We also look at more structured formats where we go around the room in turn or we use a talking object where everyone has real time to say what they need to say without being interrupted. You may have to use a hack like restricting people to what can be said in one breath for one minute or something but it’s still a way to make sure that people are being heard and everyone has to be attentive and respectful.
