"It's just a meeting, ok?" What everyone needs to understand about meetings.

 

In today’s FrictionFree, I’m going to show you how to think about meetings and how we change them. It’s the foundational understanding to share with others and unlock the full value of all the content I share.

There is no shortage of opinions on ‘how to run a good meeting’.

 

 

If we have the answer  already, why haven’t we fixed meetings? 

Wherever I go, people give me the same four problems:

1. Meetings are too long

2. They’re unfocused

3. And too many people go

4. The same people dominate

(Unless they are the ones dominating and then, flip that - people don’t contribute!).

 

All these are symptoms of a couple of things: 

1. A lack of conscious design of meeting and other collaboration norms

2. Wider organisational issues around priorities, roles, decisions and power.

 

How did we get here?

A few things collided together.

We inherited meetings from the industrial era - where automation was the key to value and process and hierarchy the best way to manage this. 

Our work has changed. In the knowledge era, value is created through complex, collaborative projects.

Work has changed a lot in 100 years but meetings haven't ...

 

Meetings are not just ‘meetings’

They don’t exist in isolation – they are a function of our working culture, relationships and projects.

They reflect the high volume of collaborative work most organisations are asking teams to do 

They touch on our most human/primal selves – our identity, feelings of power (or powerlessness!) and the sense we make of our working world. They’re not just places where tasks get reviewed and agreed.

They are where make sense of our work - and where we learn what behaviours and attitudes are acceptable and unacceptable in this organisation.

What meetings are for

 

Meetings are a huge opportunity for organisation. They are settings where culture and behaviours can be shaped and shifted. They are levers of change.

  

So what's the answer?

Meetings are not easily plucked out of context and improved. If they were, we would have done it by now! We need a few things.

A manifesto for great meetings 

Build a value for doing meetings and collaboration well - to see meetings as a crucial setting for leadership and progress.

Shift mindsets so that no longer to be acceptable to sit in a meeting, unsure of what it’s for, why you are there and how best to contribute.

Develop the awareness, skill and toolkit for all meeting leaders to host a smart, open, active meeting that changes something that matters.

Help attendees moderate, not just participate - and to equip everyone the words and techniques to get a meeting back on track - from any seat.

Address the wider cultural, structural and political drivers that keep good people in not-useful meetings so much of the time.

 

Simple, right? :-)

And when I say skills... 

 

Knowledge era meeting skills 

Here are the skills I think meeting leaders need in this new era:

Session craft: design a session that is fit for purpose

Strong space creation: set up an environment in which people speak with candour and care

Scaffolding: use light scaffolds to make the best use of time and equalise voices

Conflict facilitation: help the group conflict well around a task and avoid relationship conflict.

Co-regulation: handle and translate your own emotions help others do the same

Breakthrough: pilot the group to progress even when there is lack of clarity, low trust and obstacles strewn in the path

Capturing: turn the session into a shared artefact that is durable and designed for sharing (like my Capture Canvas)

 

..very different from the meeting formats we inherited from the industrial era and the skills that created value 100 years ago!