Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman
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FIGURE 2.8 A simple, made-with-scissors-marker-and-paper kindergarten-style prototype from Amy Mae Roberts, Product Designer, Microsoft.
Visualizations in meetings are living records. Continued interaction with those records will create better memories. While extending Baddeley’s research, Logie posited that the visuospatial sketchpad is broken into two different parts.9 A “visual cache” stores information about form and color, while the “inner scribe” deals with movement and position in space. Different parts of the brain are working together to do a better job of committing things to your memory, using a visual metaphor.
Getting ideas into your brain effectively therefore also means moving them out of the meeting, as a shared public record, so that you can continue to act upon those ideas. Unlike meeting notes you take on a laptop, visualized records of a conversation can be revisited and iterated upon after the meeting is over. That continued engagement with a visual record will pull more of the brain into the work. The more engaged each of these parts of the brain become, the more likely that successful memory creation, synthesis, and application will happen. The stuff discussed in a meeting gets done, and it gets done correctly.
Putting the Brain to Work for Jane’s Meeting
Everything you perceive to be real in the world happens as input into your brain. By considering the brain as the primary design constraint for a meeting, you engineer powerful learning experiences, focus teams on the right aspects of projects, and accommodate different modes of input within a meeting.
Remember Jane and her three teams at the Caribbean airline? By taking advantage of visual capture via Post-it Notes, she could break the ideas for each of the two lists (time savings and cost savings) into a wall-sized representation of the lists themselves. These lists could be created, at least in part, during the meeting. Distributing a photo of the results of the meeting wall immediately afterward would provide enough context for any additional work to be at the appropriate level of detail. Additional meetings could be eliminated, and Jane’s team would have more clarity, because their memories would be more accurate.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
People, and specifically their brains, are a universal design constraint for meetings. The best way to design for this constraint is by creating ways to support more effective creation of memories. Here are several ways to make that happen:
• Working memory is the most active stage of memory in a meeting. It lasts on average 30 seconds, but it varies between individuals. You should cover information at a pace that is slower than you would normally use in a one-on-one conversation and break it into even chunks.
• Working memory has distinct ways in which it handles sights and sounds. Engage both by combining visuals with discussions in a complementary, not competing, style.
• The stage of memory that has the most capacity to create work after the meeting is intermediate memory. A meeting’s length can interfere with keeping good intermediate memories if it is too long.
• The brain receives information in meetings via sound, sight, and touch inputs.
• People will listen better (and form stronger memories) by breaking content into 20- to 30-minute presentations, activities, or interactions. Each interaction should also include time for discussion of what was learned. This helps move working memories into intermediate ones.
• Eating healthy fats and proteins will do a better job of sustaining people’s attention in longer meetings than donuts and cookies.
• Creating and reinforcing memories with visuals are great ways to activate part of the brain that isn’t otherwise possible. Visual facilitation is the practice of exclusively using sketching to facilitate discussions, and it is an example of why simple visuals are uniquely effective.
• Objects you can physically manipulate, such as sticky notes and small physical prototypes, further empower the relationship between visualization and listening in the brain. These are called manipulatives.
CHAPTER 3
Build Agendas Out of Ideas, People, and Time
Dave is an independent consultant who helps organizations figure out the relationship between how they organize information in digital products (websites, apps) and the job those products are intended to do. As an independent contractor, he adapts to the working culture of each client. Dave’s latest client is a multinational insurance firm with inefficient design processes and an overworked in-house design team.
Dave scheduled a meeting to present six design principles he had developed to simplify the ongoing production work of the design team. The intention of the meeting was to build a shared understanding of these principles among the five members of the design team and the two senior stakeholders; he was not soliciting feedback for revisions. Dave restricted the agenda to around 10 minutes per principle. During each 10-minute session, he covered one or two examples of how each principle was applied. A brief period of time was reserved at the end of each 10-minute block for discussion. Here’s what Dave’s agenda looked like:
DAVE’S DESIGN PRINCIPLE AGENDA
• Review a principle (8 minutes)
• Discuss a principle (2 minutes)
• (Repeat six times, once for each principle)
It was a lot to cover. He expected to orient the team just enough to begin applying the principles in their work. Once they began to do so, Dave was on-hand to answer more questions via email.
Dave felt confident as the meeting was started. However, two minutes into the meeting, the CEO of the company, James, interrupted Dave with a question that belied a fundamental misunderstanding of the meeting’s intent.
“On page 36 of the document, there’s a blue button in the example diagram. Can that button be green?”
Jan, the Chief Design Officer, intervened, trying to help Dave.
“I think we’re jumping ahead here, let’s try to stay on topic. My team needs to be able to start applying these principles this week.”
James replied:
“Well, I’m not sure I agree with the agenda of this meeting. I thought we were going to get a detailed review of the design of all of our different applications.”
Jan disagreed:
“James, that would be a waste of time. We can read these documents on our own time. Let’s use this time to explore how we could apply these principles on our own.”
During the next 30 minutes, Dave was only able to get through a single design principle, due to continued interruptions from the two senior stakeholders. The remaining time was steamrolled by those stakeholders’ continued debate regarding differing expectations of agendas. Sadly, Dave only went through two of the six principles he had planned to cover in the hour. He was unable to convey the intended ideas in the time allotted.
The Illusion of the Agenda
It sucks when you lose control of a meeting. In Dave’s presentation, three different people had entered the meeting with three different agendas, and each agenda disrupted the other. Dave’s agenda fell victim to a power struggle. Jan lost the benefits she had hoped to get for her design team. James’ expectations were broken at the beginning, due to a lack of preparation on his part. Dave had distributed agendas in advance, and even personally emailed the “hippos” (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the office to give them the opportunity to express additional expectations. But like a lot of busy people, James didn’t have (or make)