Designing and Facilitating Effective Meetings
Meetings
“Minutes taken and hours lost!” - The all too familiar refrain of people leaving yet one more unproductive and frustrating meeting. There are two ways to know if a meeting has been effective: 1) What decisions were made, what problems solved, what steps for moving forward identified and agreed to? But that’s only half of the story. The other and equally important aspect of a successful meeting is the “how” – how did decisions get made? How well did the participants work together? Did everyone get a chance to participate? Was the meeting informative, stimulating, enjoyable? Were working relationships enhanced or diminished?
More information:
Because meetings are one of our most common strategies for making decisions and solving problems we owe it to ourselves to do a better job of designing and facilitating them.
Resources:
- Breaking Roberts’s Rules: The New Way to Run Your Meeting, Build Consensus, and Get Results; Lawrence Susskind and Jeffrey Cruikshank, Oxford University Press, 2006.
- How to Make Collaboration Work, D. Strauss, Berrett-Koehler, 2002.
- Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, Sam Kaner et. al, New Society Publishers, 2003.