Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman
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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 away, but not enough to kill you; just enough to be a nuisance. For each one of these meetings, you should always have two questions in the back of your mind:
• Why did you establish this meeting?
• Has that job been done?
If you can’t answer the first, or the second answer is “yes,” the meeting should be deleted or declined. It’s that simple. Part of knowing when a standing meeting like Team Rocket’s course correction meeting is working is recognizing when it’s time to stop having it. Continuing to expect a productive outcome out of the same get-together when the goals have already been achieved (or new goals haven’t been clearly articulated) is a special kind of insanity that only exists in meetings. To combat that insanity, apply the design-thinking checklist.
1. Identify the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Understand that problem sufficiently with research or a clear understanding of constraints.
2. Revisit and experiment with format, including length of time and method of facilitation. Consider skipping a few meetings, just to see what happens.
3. Make changes to the meeting semi-permanent after observing successes. Eliminate changes that don’t produce successes.
4. Walk away from meetings that no longer do the job intended.
Identify the Problem
Team Rocket’s identification of the problem is painfully vague. Preventing “things” from getting “out of hand” is going to mean different things to different team members. Which things? What is the threshold for “out of hand?”
In the hope of making a group of people more collaborative, people throw meetings at problems without sufficiently examining the problem itself. A regular meeting is an expensive way to solve a vague problem (see Figure 1.1), because meetings cost as much as everyone’s combined paycheck for the allotted time. If the goal is to get people talking, there are much cheaper tools than meetings. Instant messaging tools such as Slack,2 Hipchat,3 and even good old-fashioned email allow groups of people to communicate a tremendous amount of information asynchronously, making it “knowledge on demand.” Tools like these can reduce unnecessary face time used for communication if they are applied with a clear purpose. Here’s an example of what I mean by “clear purpose”:
“We use (chat platform/channel) to discuss daily tasks and request assistance. Post your awesome cat pictures