Fix Your Meetings Workshop

As a society, we have 11 million meetings a day. Of these meetings, around half are unproductive, costing $37bn a year.

Companies frequently over-rely on meetings as their primary collaboration tool for want of a better standard for when something should be a meeting. Compounding this problem, the meetings that might be good uses of time are often frequently ruined by a lack of planning, design and focus.

We built this workshop to address these problems and have seen attendees make rapid progress both in reducing meeting load and making their remaining meetings more thoughtful, human-centered and effective. It's for all professionals who want to spend more time delivering value and less time just talking about it.

In this workshop, you will...

• Learn how to identify whether a meeting is the best choice
• Explore your digital workplace and the use of asynchronous tools as alternatives to meetings
• Practice defining a strong purpose for meetings and creating effective invitations
• Calculate the value-cost tradeoff of meetings
• Choose the minimum set of  invitees needed for meeting success
• Define the outcomes of a meeting, build its agenda and then evaluate its success
• Design meetings for engagement, focus, inclusivity and participation
• Plan for the capture of meeting content
• Identify problem areas and how to mitigate them
• Learn how to create self-organizing agendas
• Explore how to distill information quickly and find points of alignment
• Tour simple decision-making processes
• Make brainstorming more accessible and inclusive
• Practice designing a real meeting using our frameworks
• Work as a group to develop meeting principles for your organization
• Build an action plan for change - encompassing habits, norms and behaviors

Advanced Workshop

Building on the success of our Fix Your Meetings workshop, we created an extended course to include material from our Applied Facilitation workshop. Once meetings are deliberately selected and thoughtfully designed, they also need to be skillfully delivered (ensuring that meeting owners reap the value of their careful planning).

This workshop is particularly suited to professionals either in leadership roles or positions where leading meetings is a critical part of their role (scrum masters, dev managers, product managers etc).

In addition to covering all of the items from Fix Your Meetings, in this workshop, you will...

• Ensure you and others engage with self-awareness and balance
• Learn how to keep meeting conversations aligned and on-track
• Successfully surface and navigate conflict in meetings
• Understand group dynamics and manage harmful behaviors
• Scale activities according to group size
• Identify how to prepare the physical and/or digital space for participants
• Learn how to create working agreements
• Manage participant energy
• Explore visual facilitation tricks
• Practice managing time in meetings and learn how to end meetings quickly, when needed
• Gain techniques for effectively capturing meeting summaries
• Learn how to assess the success of a meeting quickly