should add value to your life by providing a sense of progress—problems being defined, decisions getting made, priorities being prioritized, and solutions being built upon the benefit of multiple perspectives. But meetings become a lazy reflex. You show up for as many meetings on your calendar as you can, but don’t feel fully present in all of them. When you question that reflex, it will help you have meetings that do a better job of working for you.
Why Do I Care About Meetings?
When I first joined the workforce, I was unprepared for how much of my work would be dependent upon the success or failure within meetings. As part of my first full-time job working in the public library system of Baltimore, Maryland, I attended community group meetings where neighborhood residents tried to build consensus on what changes could improve their lives and the lives of their families. But conflicting community values—such as strong emotions about a neighborhood competing with strong respect for different viewpoints within a neighborhood—resulted in meandering, unproductive conversations. Discussions were democratic to a fault. Everyone contributed, but it seemed never-ending and full of irrelevant tangents. Strong personalities ruled the day while quiet people with good ideas went unheard. It was as fascinating to me as it was frustrating.
That mix of fascination and frustration with meetings followed me throughout my career of leading and facilitating large digital design projects for design agencies, as well as my own design consultancy. My clients put tremendous thought and energy into developing a project’s scope before fighting for the dollars, people, and partnerships to turn that scope into a reality. But too often I’ve seen projects littered with thoughtless meetings, devoid of any progress-fueling energy whatsoever. Here’s a classic example: an hour spent listening to a client read requirements aloud over the phone. A better use of that time would be to read those documents beforehand and use the meeting to understand—or even begin to solve—the problems we were facing (see Figure I.1).
FIGURE I.1 The dreaded document review, when you assemble . . . to just read.
After one aimless discussion, I decided that the meetings themselves could be reframed as a design problem. This simple premise—a meeting is something that could be designed to be useful and compelling—opens up a world of possibilities. You can understand more about why meetings fail by getting to know their design constraints. You can observe relationships between facilitation style, organizational culture, and the outcomes the meeting should produce. By taking a design approach to meetings, it’s possible to improve their effectiveness, even within big, complex businesses. It requires applying the same level of research and intention as you would to other design process targets, such as a website or a brand.
I Want to Help You Do Your Job in Meetings
I’ll bet you’ve had similar negative experiences with meetings in your career. This book provides a foundation to design your approach to meetings in two parts. Part 1, “The Theory and Practice of Meeting Design,” begins with a simple method to measure how well your meetings are doing their intended job. Then it lists meeting design constraints, presents an agenda design approach, explores facilitation methods, and provides helpful patterns that should improve the job any meeting is doing for you. Part 2, “Designed Meetings,” includes templates for common meeting types with sample agendas that you can and should extend and customize for your needs.
If having bad meetings is a problem where you are employed, these approaches can make your job, and the work of your colleagues and collaborators, easier. When people in an organization become familiar with better-designed meetings, the organization itself matures. Everyone on the team becomes more aware of a company’s meeting habits and develops the kind of flexibility that keeps gatherings effective.
The title of this book refers to two kinds of people: makers and managers. Everyone falls somewhere between these two identities. These correlate with the natural evolution of any career. You start your career as a maker by making things, such as software, documents, code, or other products and outcomes. The more success you have, the more likely you are to take on the responsibility of overseeing other people who make the things you used to make, and you become a manager.
If you are a maker, you can use the checklist presented in Chapter 1, “How to Design a Meeting,” to take a critical look at the meetings you get pulled into. In the following chapters, there are ways for you to improve meetings even when you aren’t in charge, with hacks for the ones that aren’t working and patterns to accelerate the ones that are. Both the checklist and the techniques that follow will help you make more stuff (ideas, decisions, even software) within your meetings and spend less time in meetings that aren’t helping you make anything useful.
When you begin leading meetings, you have a responsibility to model behaviors that will result in positive outcomes—those decisions, priorities, and solutions mentioned earlier. But with the responsibility of management comes the power to call meetings, and it’s a power that’s easy to abuse. This book will help you establish good reasons for calling your meeting, as well as behavioral boundaries that will build trust and help you tailor your meetings to fit the company’s cultural constraints. It will also help you be a better manager by leading meetings that empower your team to find more interesting solutions to tough problems.
I’ve interviewed a number of my colleagues about how they have been more intentional with their meetings, what’s been successful for them, and why. A few of them were nice enough to contribute a sidebar. I’ve peppered their unique insights throughout the book. Hopefully their mix of easy-to-apply ideas and considered analysis will help you as much as it has helped me.
I wrote this book for one simple reason: like it or not, meetings are a part of your job, no matter what you do. My goal is to help you be better at your job by having better meetings.
PART 1 The Theory and Practice of Meeting Design
Meetings can create great outcomes if you want them to: new ideas, better strategies, stronger relationships, good decisions, and organizational changes. These outcomes come from being intentional with the time you spend together. Meeting design is the practice of expressing that intention.
Anyone can learn and practice this skill, regardless of your experience, position, seniority, or type of workplace. Once established, a good process of meeting design will help you construct effective agendas that address how people think, how to follow time constraints, and even what could be the bad habits of your organization. With practice, you’ll be able to manage conflict more effectively, define your own facilitation style, and change your style to suit the job at hand. Intentionally conceived meetings will become a window into better relationships with your work and the people you do that work with.
CHAPTER 1
How to Design a Meeting
When hundreds of hours of his design team’s sweat, blood, and tears seemed to go up in flames in a single meeting with a group of vice presidents, Jim could have easily panicked. So that’s what he did.
Jim is a creative director at a successful and highly respected boutique design agency—let’s
