Having an incredible meeting starts with the last meeting. This is our 5C Framework for designing awesome meetings that value peoples time and talents and create better business opportunities.
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Every meeting needs a plan, and that planning starts with the last meetings commitment to do something as a team. This process is circular in the way that it just keeps going, much like any agile framework, one meeting ends and planning for the next must immediately begin. We start with the metrics and key measures that will tell us if we are heading in the right direction and guide our decisions to adapt and change.
As the leader of any meeting, it is your responsibility to communicate with each member of the team at the individual level, and asynchronously at the team level. I love an app called Volley. It's premium and at the moment, it's free, wide open all the features...FREE. I can communicate with my team as I design our next gathering around the commitments that we set at the last meeting.
Once I have all the information, I need to structure our time together in the coming meeting, I send a video to everyone on my team. Again, I use Volley because, COMPLETELY ASYNCHRONOUSLY I can have a primer discussion to supercharge our next meeting. I can even screen share any products or slides we might discuss, and I can provide any relevant information, and stage questions to be answered during our time together.
Using a tool like Volley enables the team to get some of the meaningful discussions out of the way that may have been sidebars during our meeting. We've created a wealth of transparency and continuous inspection and adaptation in our team.
It is critical to establish operating agreements for tools like Volley. Normal rules for the team might be: "No video messages longer than 1min" or "Discussions that become scoped to 1-on-1, should leave the group chat and return once an understanding can be summarized". Essentially, be respectful not to ruin a good thing, and don't make sausage Infront of your peers if they don't need to be involved in processing it.
Now comes the best part, we get to come together and create a product, progress, or outcome. We get to actually work together with the information and progress we each have as individuals. Now, with an objective Infront of us, roles assigned, and an operating agreement for the room in place, LET'S KICK THIS MEETING OFF!!!
Circulate new information before the meeting
We start our gathering with circulating any new information. This probably goes in a flow that answers questions we still have from the weeks asynchronous conversations. It is fine to reshare key insights and measures that could help the team align on an understanding for the solution to be composed.
Cluster relevant insights and key ideas that each attendee feels they should focus on moving forward.
Now, we ask everyone to cluster all relevant insights, key ideas, and problems. It's best to do this by putting a single thought on a single sticky note. The common square stickies are perfect for this, and as an extra bit of finesse, it helps to use permanent markers (the notes are easier to read from afar, and it forces people to write less). If using stickies, I like to build this cluster on a wall or on a table, in any random order.
Collaborate to choose the highest impactful 1-4 relevant insights or ideas to move forward with
Next we are going to collaborate to choose 1-4 notes from the cluster that we want to work on between this and the next meeting. We like to use dot voting as a technique of removing anchoring in the group and allow a silent vote to occur. We've written an awesome blog piece about voting during meetings, Check it out!
I use the term Collaborate because it captures the fact that we all have something on the line. Unlike working together, which might imply its only for the moment, or the work choose might suggest lesser importance. We all have skin in the work that we are producing. By competing less and collaborating more, everyone can see their work progress faster and with greater success.
Compose an actionable plan for how we will move forward and measure success
Composing a plan can be done all together, but we prefer to do this in a divergent way first. We ask each team member to write a 5-step plan, 1-step per sticky (can you tell we like stickies?). After each person has a 5-step plan, we come together, quickly remove duplicates, and consolidate them into a multi-step plan. There is much more that goes into this, and you could read about it in our blog called How to Make a Plan as a Group. The final plan is going to be more than 5 steps, and it is going to be complete, because we all brought our different perspectives in to create it. The plan will be in sequence of operations, allowing the team to find dependencies and visually check for completeness.
Commit individual time and talent to individual tasks and set expected completion dates
Everyone on the team will look across the plan for things that they can commit to. Either they commit their own time or the commit their individual team's time and resources, until every task in the plan has a person and expected completion date assigned to it.
Lastly, the team agrees to and measures for the plan, "how will we know if it worked and what might be the area of failure if it doesn't?" This might be time, quantity, steps; whatever it is, the team has to commit to those measures of success before convening.
By using this framework, every meeting becomes a small workshop. Meetings will be quicker and more involved. People will begin to experience satisfaction and happiness from the meetings the participate in, not just attend.
