Send clear engaging meeting invitations

Agendas are industrial era. But the invitation is prime real estate. Let's reinvent it for the collaborative era.

The invitation is your prime real estate.

But how many meetings get whacked in the diary with no briefing? Like this...

Now, let’s get it on the record. I'm not keen on the word agenda. Though studies clearly show people prefer an agenda to no agenda, I find an agenda is usually a shopping list of topics to cover. Better than nothing ... but not by much! 

Follow an agenda too closely and you’ll just plough through content. You won’t get to what matters. You won’t hear all voices. A classic example of process over product.

Instead, let’s consider the invitation a briefing, not a list of topics to cover.

The most helpful thing you can do is to:

- Set expectations and norms

- Focus the group on some specific questions to answer together

- Help people come ready to contribute

- Engage people in the session, what they can contribute and why they should care

Here's my template with language prompts for all of these. An easy way to reinvent the agenda via the way you invite people.

Aaaannnnd, here's how it might look in practice - enter Sandhya (the hero of my ecourse ❤️). She's in a really tricky situation where two teams just can't seem to work together.

Here's the invitation she sends to a session to try and fix this.

You don't need to copy all this out. The full template is available in the free resources area of my website. Help yourself. 

Very much hope this is helpful for you and your teams.