Make Your Meetings More Engaging With Design Thinking
Tips to Make Your Meetings More Useful
This may sound shocking, but meetings don’t have to fill you with dread or feel like a chore. Done right, they can even be fun. I’ve spent countless hours in meetings over my career, and as a coach and facilitator I teach others how to meet more effectively. The most important thing I’ve learned is to think like a UX designer and consider the experience of the meeting’s attendees. Here are some tips I’ve learned to help you design better meetings.
IDOARTT
One helpful mnemonic device for meeting organizers is the acronym IDOARTT, which I learned from Hyper Island. They describe it on this board and in this overview. I’ll discuss many of these concepts in more detail below. The acronym stands for:
- [I]ntention: your meeting’s purpose
- [D]esired [O]utcomes: the specific outcomes you hope to achieve during the meeting
- [A]genda: how you will structure the meeting
- [R]oles: who will do what during the meeting
- [R]ules: how people will act during the meeting
- [T]ime: how long the meeting will be
Start With Why
Borrowing this term from Simon Sinek, the most important thing you can do is be clear on why you are having a meeting. Define this before the meeting so that you can go into it with a clear purpose. Make sure everyone attending knows what that purpose is.
Everything else about the meeting will flow from its purpose. The purpose will dictate who you invite, how you structure the meeting, what your desired outcome is, how much time you need, and what tools to bring to the meeting.
If you can’t figure out the purpose, consider whether you really need to meet. If you’re meeting because someone else asked you to organize a meeting, ask them what the purpose is and summarize to make sure you are understanding.
Make Sure a Meeting is the Right Format
Once you’ve determined the purpose, ask yourself whether you need to have a meeting. If the purpose is to answer a question, can that question be answered via Slack? If the purpose is to update people, can you create a written update instead?
Most people were already tired of meetings before quarantine and the resulting Zoom fatigue. So if you can eliminate an unnecessary meeting, you can get time back for yourself and your colleagues, and save everyone some much-needed energy.
Find the Right Structure for Your Meeting
Perhaps the most overlooked element of meetings is their structure. At its core, a meeting is a gathering of people. And as different gatherings (e.g. getting together with a good friend vs meeting your significant other’s parents) have different forms, so too should different meetings. Use your purpose to pick a structure. Some will require a formal agenda, while others are more informal. Here are some examples:
1:1s
These are useful when your goal is to listen and help. For example, you can use these questions. When holding 1:1s with your team, be careful to make sure you aren’t just using them for status updates. I suggest letting each person who reports to you drive the agenda for their 1:1, including deciding whether to have an agenda.
Information Sharing
If your main goal is to give others an update, again, ask whether you need a meeting. If you do, your role in the meeting will be closer to that of a facilitator, so techniques from facilitation will be helpful. Especially if you find yourself in this role often, consider reading a book like The Workshop Survival Guide. Some of my takeaways were to use a scaffold (i.e. break the information into chunks and decide on how you’ll teach each chunk), define learning objectives beforehand, and to remember that listening is only one way people learn, and that most people can only listen for a short amount of time. So try to build in activities like group or paired discussion and individual brainstorming.
Decision-Making & Debate
Here you probably will want a formal agenda, and discussion is likely the best format. For these meetings, make sure you are as clear as possible on your objectives and if anyone needs to read/review anything, make sure you share that in advance or give people time during the meeting to read/review. I also recommend circulating the agenda with enough time for people to read and think about before the meeting so that they can bring their best ideas to the table. You can also consider asking people to do some pre-work before the meeting by writing down their ideas and sharing/commenting on others’ ideas so that you can better identify and spend more time in the meeting on the most important issues.
Brainstorming & Reflection
Both brainstorms and retrospectives lend themselves well to the post-it note format. If in person, you can give everyone post-its and allow time for people to write down ideas and then share on a board. Virtually, you can do the same using a tool such as Miro. As a leader, it always surprised me how much people enjoy these exercises — probably because they stand out from other meetings.
Invite the Right People, and Identify Who is Optional
It feels bad to be left out of a meeting where you think you could have contributed, and it’s frustrating for everyone when a meeting can’t move forward because a necessary stakeholder is missing. So there are two categories of people for you to consider as the organizer. First are the people who are necessary, and for whom you’d cancel or reschedule if they can’t make it. Second are people who you know may want to be there because they have a stake in the outcome.
The first is fairly straightforward, and most meeting-related drama comes from the second. This can happen because someone feels left out, or because someone is frustrated that they had to attend a meeting that wasn’t necessary for them. To the extent space (virtual or in-person) allows, invite stakeholders who aren’t 100% necessary as “optional,” and make sure they know the meeting is optional for them.
If you need to cap the meeting at a certain number of people, discuss with the people who won’t be invited and let them know you still value their perspective. If you know you should invite someone but you’re worried about the impact they’ll have, e.g. talking too much or being argumentative, try giving them clear feedback beforehand about the meeting’s purpose, the impact their behavior has on you, what you need from them at the meeting. If you’re still worried, consider using ground rules (see below) to address any challenges you anticipate.
Know Your Audience
Roles
If you’ll need people to play different roles during the meeting, e.g. you need someone to take notes or a timekeeper, or you’ll have different expectations for different people, make sure this is clear. You can do this before the meeting, or at the beginning of the meeting.
Ground Rules
To help clarify expectations, ground rules can be helpful. These can touch on topics such as agreed group norms (e.g. confidentiality), or things like using (or not using) phones/slack during the meeting. For virtual meetings, you may want to agree on a signal or prop to let people know when they are done talking, and for others to signal that they want to speak (e.g. the Zoom hand-raise emoji). Whatever the rules, you’ll likely get more buy-in if you give the group a few minutes to brainstorm the rules together.
Needs
Now that you know who is attending, what are their specific needs as they relate to your meeting? If you are a manager doing 1:1s in person, consider a walk or coffee — something more informal that may help your direct report feel more comfortable.
Also, know that people have different capacities for listening and that it may be helpful to engage multiple senses. For example, when we did our values-setting offsite at Quill, we had adult coloring cards and colored pencils people could use when they wanted. While it may sound a bit silly, this seemed to really help when the conversation was stressful.
If you’re planning a meeting longer than an hour, remember that most people need breaks to be at their most productive and make sure you build in ample breaks. Similarly, If you’re planning an all-day team offsite, know that some people may need time to recharge, and consider building in down-time, e.g. making lunch optional.
Next Steps
If you use any of these tips, or you have others that I’ve missed, let me know — email me at tltcoaches@gmail.com, or share a comment below. And if you’re interested in coaching, you can find me at The Leadership Team.
