The essential collection

 

🍋  A fresh way to think about meetings for the collaborative era

Why a meeting is not just 'a meeting', why there is such a white space for change and the culture shift and skills we need for the collaborative era.

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6️⃣  The 6-minute system that creates a genuinely useful 60-minute meeting

Create a high-functioning 'pop up team' (AKA meeting) with my simple system.

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📩  My template for sending clear, engaging meeting invitations

The meeting invite is prime real estate for expectation setting. Let's reinvent it for the collaborative era.

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🪄  How I activate people to prepare for meetings

After 5,000+ meetings, I figured out a way to get people to arrive, ready to make the best use of all our time...

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👷‍♀️  How to open a meeting - with psychological safety

Here are three ways I open meetings to help people contribute frankly and positively (including the actual words I say).

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🏗️   A 90-second tool for adding helpful structure to a meeting

Structure (or what I would call 'scaffolding') can help everyone contribute better - and here's the simplest way to add some to any session.

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🏗️🏗️🏗️  My three go-to scaffolds to sharpen any meeting

Scaffolds are supportive, explicit rules that encourage great contributions in meetings. Here are three I use all the time.

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⏰  How to compress a 60min meeting into 30mins

A lot of companies are defaulting to 30-minutes in the calendar rather than 60. But how do you achieve everything in less time without just putting the whole thing on fast forward?

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🧭  The easiest way to improve any meeting

Meetings resist change for four reasons. Here's how to improve them, almost without even trying...

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📜  A simple format for capturing the value of every meeting

Make clean agreements at the end of each meeting and capture them quickly.

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Handling curve balls  

 

😤  How I turn bad conflict into good conflict 

We need conflict - but only the health kind. Here's a conversation pattern for refocusing unhealthy conflict in meetings.

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🧗‍♀️  My go-to script for de-risking a tough conversation 

"I need to talk to you about something important" --> GULP
Here's how to have that tough conversation you know you need to have.

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🐅  Three ways I diffuse egos in meetings

 When egos dominate, meetings get unproductive quickly. Here are three ways to reduce ego and get back to productivity.

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⏱️  How I handle latecomers in meetings (it's not the way most people do it)

Hint: it's not about creating more rules. It's about understanding that lateness breaks a social contract.

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💬  Over-talkers: the most common meeting challenge people bring to me

 Tangents, weeds and rabbit holes - what to do when people talk too much.

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🚫  How to see off resistance in meetings

When you know there's an elephant in the room, you can expect resistance. Here's how I handle this.

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👂  The six listening skills that will transform how you lead meetings

Hardly any of us truly listen in meetings. But it's a world-class skill with huge impact. Here's how to do it well, when you're busy.

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📐  How the drama triangle can help you understand and avoid conflict

If you have tricky and persistent relationship dynamics, they may be explained and transformed by the the Karpman Drama Triangle.

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👀  Dear Leader, this is how I see you in meetings (an honest reflection of how people might be experiencing you in meetings)

I share the straight-up feedback your team might give you, if they could - as supportively as I can!

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🌦️  Help your team handle stuff that's out of their control in meetings

We'll run through two key scenarios - including what to say, show and do to help break the impasse.

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🌟  A fun, creative technique for resetting a regular meeting that has got lost

Actually, I have two approaches here - a really fun one and a more conventional one as a back up!

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💆  A conversation pattern for resolving under-the-surface tension

Here's how I handle passive aggression in meetings.

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Meeting design: helpful structures and scaffolds

 

🏗️  Introduction to scaffolding -  13 techniques I use all the time

Make meetings more interactive, speed up contribution and equalise voices.

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👊  Agreement levels: a simple way to improve decision making

My favourite technique to encourage helpful disagreement and make a group decision.

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⏱️  Scaffolding to make meetings better but shorter

How to turn a 60-minute meeting into a 30-minute session with scaffolding.

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💡  Teach your team (and yourself) this technique for proposing ideas

Make sure every idea (and every person proposing it) get the consideration they deserve.  

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⏰  A 90-second tool for adding helpful structure to a meeting

Structure can help everyone contribute better - and here's the simplest way to add some.  

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♾️  Introduction to The Ecocycle - an alternative to long winded strategic planning sessions

Guest contributor, Barb Bickford, explains why The Ecocycle (a Liberating Structure) is so effective, and how to use it well.  

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📨  The power of naming your meetings

Meeting names - a simple hack to make this prime real estate work harder for you  

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⏭️  Three alternatives to a meeting, designed to save you three hours a week

There's a whole load of stuff that just doesn't need to be done in meeting time....

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💬  How to get people to use Group Chat (e.g. Teams chat)

 Group chat is just ‘another Thing I’m supposed to use’ - until it's faster than EVERYTHING else... 

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Consciously design how you collaborate as a team

Streamline how you meet and communicate in projects and teams, ditch "collabureaucracy" and make progress.

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