new job at a Fortune 100 client—they were ready to spend half a million dollars to build the best website experience possible in a competitive market: online meal delivery. After several weeks of discovery, his team had assembled a design direction that they believed could be effective. Baked into a collection of mocked-up mobile screens were strategies guiding content voice, brand execution, photographic style, and user interface functionality. To move into the next phase, Jim’s job was to make sure that the senior leadership at the company believed in the proposed direction just as strongly as his team did. Project managers on the client side navigated the rat’s nest of the leadership’s meeting availability to find a standing monthly hour in which Jim and his team could provide progress updates.
At one of these check-in meetings, Jim walked the gathered group of vice presidents and directors through a series of screens, stopping to accent unique elements and key decisions along the way. Despite asking people to hold questions until the end, there were a handful of odd interruptions, like this gem:
“That’s a really strong yellow. I just don’t know about that.”
Jim found the interruptions unnerving, each one forcing him to reset his presentation rhythm and remind the group to wait until he was finished. When he reached the end of his walkthrough, a bit rattled, he opened the floor for an unstructured session of comments and questions. The comments and questions came fast, furious, and, of course, unstructured, like invaders from all sides breaching a fortified position:
“What will you do differently to accommodate our unique business rules around delivery partners?”
“This must work within our existing JavaScript framework, so that will happen, right?”
“Were you aware that we’ve got an internal team working on this exact same issue, and they’ve already wireframed the whole thing?”
Jim struggled through, answering each off-topic comment and occasionally handing questions off to the most qualified individuals on his team. But his frustration wasn’t masked in the slightest: Jim interrupted people mid-comment, stammered when surprised, and answered brusquely with “that’s out of scope!” in response to the last few questions.
In conceiving the agenda for this presentation, Jim made an error that nearly cost his team the project. He didn’t design the conversation to help key stakeholders understand what had gone into all of these decisions. Instead, he did what he had learned to do by example from his boss, the previous creative director, which is often how agencies teach people to present work. Jim provided a “real estate tour” of the finished product, assuming the rationale behind the designs was obvious. But to client leadership that hadn’t been along for the ride, the destination was startling and unclear.
What Is a Well-Designed Meeting?
Well-designed things make our lives simpler or more pleasing. Design is an intangible currency that separates things that matter from junk. Something designed has been given appropriate and actionable consideration, with forethought and research guiding its creation and ongoing evolution.
Meetings are usually not designed. They are rather used as blunt force, expensive but ill-considered tools to solve communications problems. These problems don’t always warrant such a costly, high-fidelity solution. But even when they do merit that kind of solution, insufficient intention and energy go into creating the meeting experience itself.
If you are feeling like there’s no agenda and not sure why everyone is there, you’re likely not the only one.
—CARRIE HANE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY COACH, TANZEN
A lack of a clearly defined agenda is a symptom of the problem, but designing a meeting means more than just having an agenda. The problem is that meetings aren’t considered in the same way that designers consider problems they are trying to solve. That’s what “designing a meeting” is all about: thinking about your meetings as though you were a designer.
Thinking like a designer means taking an iterative, cyclical approach—an approach that mixes in research and testing of concepts. Using a basic design process as a checklist for planning and evaluating meetings is how this is done. This design process approach, credited to Tim Brown,1 describes four discrete steps that turn an ordinary process for making something into one that leads to a more positive outcome.
1. Clearly define the problem that a design should solve through observation and good old-fashioned research.
2. Create and consider multiple options, as opposed to sticking to a single solution.
3. Select the option assumed to be the best and begin an iterative effort to refine it from a minimum viable concept. This contrasts with spending excessive time visualizing the finished product in every gory detail.
4. Execute or “ship” at an agreed-upon level of fidelity so that you have an opportunity to see how the design fares in the real world with real people. After that, jump back to step one as needed.
This design process has led to countless innovations in all aspects of our lives. It is often credited as the process that allowed disruptive and successful ideas to emerge in the market. But imagine your workplace culture—perhaps you work for a large corporation with hundreds (or hundreds of thousands) of employees that engage in many ceremonial meetings, based upon hierarchy, tradition, and previous but unsustainable successes. Or you might work for a small, nimble, start-up business of just a few smart people, who only assemble when there is a shared sense of necessity.
On either side of that spectrum, it is likely that the organization isn’t thinking about the specific jobs that each meeting should perform. Applying those four steps of the design process to meetings themselves provides a framework for evaluating if an existing meeting is performing adequately. You can apply them to a single, important meeting in order to design it better, or use the steps to evaluate, improve, or even eliminate recurring meetings, such as a standing check-in for a project team, like the one Jim had with the vice presidents from the beginning of the chapter.
Apply Design Thinking to Existing Meetings
We’ll call Jim’s cross-disciplinary team on Rocket Design’s big project “Team Rocket.” Team Rocket just made it through a difficult design effort and presented their final efforts in the form of a series of screens. The team includes product managers, user interface designers, front-end and back-end developers, some marketing or social media folks, and a part-time business analyst. They may or may not work in a formal agile style—it doesn’t really matter.
The team is in bad shape after that meeting, from lots of disagreements over the final product, long hours, and disappointed stakeholders. The designs are perceived as being behind the curve compared to their competitors’ efforts, despite Team Rocket having strong feelings to the contrary. They decide to institute a new recurring meeting to “prevent things from getting out of hand in the future.”
Recognize where your meeting habits come from, and if they are truly still working.
—DAVID SLEIGHT DESIGN DIRECTOR, PROPUBLICA
When you get busy, your calendar is littered with recurring team meetings, also known as standing meetings or check-ins. They are the mosquitoes of meetings. They seem to be myriad, and each one takes a little bit of your life
