As a learning experience design manager, I want to run our regular recurring meetings in a way that facilitates success. Here are a few ideas that have helped me and our team.
Why are you meeting?
The best method for saving other human beings from bad meeting bondage is to decide what the point of your meeting really is … and stick to it.
In her book The Making of a Manager, design leader Julie Zhou articulates 5 reasons for a meeting:
- Build relationships
- Share information
- Brainstorm ideas
- Give and receive feedback
- Make a decision
Considering these purposes, look at meetings you’ve owned over the last week or two. What would you say the purposes of those meetings have been? Was holding a meeting the best way to accomplish that purpose?
As instructional designers, we should be very comfortable pairing outcomes with an ideal delivery format. Just as it is wrong to assume a problem should be solved with eLearning or live facilitation every time, it is also problematic to rely on meetings as the primary mode of communication.
What kinds of meetings matter?
Imagine you woke up tomorrow and were greeted by a meeting magician. He hands you a bright-colored wand and says, “With a wave of this wand you can cancel any meeting you want.” After celebrating, what do you do? What might your team do if given a similar opportunity?
In Death By Meeting, Patrick Lencioni outlines two reasons why meetings have such a bad rap. First is the lack of drama. With the absence of real conflict or opposing viewpoints everyone gets bored out of their minds. Second, most meetings lack context and purpose (see section above). His solution is outlined in the book and can be boiled down into 4 types of meetings for your team:
- Daily check-in
- Weekly tactical
- Monthly strategic
- Quarterly off-site review
While the audience for this book is senior business executives, there is value in this pattern for any leader.
Bonus: Agile Meetings
One final model to mention is the many variations on the theme of agile project management. Scrum or agile “ceremonies” can be simplified into 4 types of meetings (as described by the Digital Project Manager):
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Planning
- Sprint Retrospective
On my team, we don’t do an actual daily meeting. Instead, we have a daily Slackbot prompt that we each respond to. Check out Slack Workflows if your organization is on Slack. Our daily prompt questions include:
- Did you do your one thing?
- What did you learn or recall today?
- What is the one thing you will do tomorrow?
- Concerns or blockers
Additionally, our team has a Sprint retro and planning every two weeks in which we focus explicitly on instructional development work to be done as it relates to quarterly commitments or declared objectives/key results.
Bringing this agile model, Zhou’s purposes, and Lencioni’s meeting types together I’ve found a structure of meetings that works for us.
This strategy is for planned recurring meetings. There will always be ad hoc gatherings for projects, individual needs, and other impromptu discussions. That said, you can make a big difference by pushing these ad hoc meetings towards at least one important purpose or outcome.
2 things for every recurring meeting
A final note. If you have a recurring cadence for a meeting, ensure these two things are done and you just may become the meeting magician yourself.
- Keep a single source of truth (shared notes) for your meeting. Assign a note-taker if you have to.
- Follow up on actions from last time, and always draft new actions to be done by next time. This applies to quarterly or weekly meetings alike!
How do you organize the kinds of meetings you run? Do you have suggestions to share on how to make meetings more effective?
