Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman
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of fat and protein! Premade breakfast burritos that incorporate avocado and black beans are another tasty source of healthy fat and protein. Yogurt with no added sugar meets many dietary needs, too, combining carbohydrates, protein, and minimal fat in one convenient, single-serving container.
Mid-day Meetings
To head off a post-lunch slump, again, put biology to work on your behalf. Put together a menu with more complex carbohydrates by trading white bread for whole wheat on the sandwiches—the longer those carbohydrate chains are, the more time they take to break down. Ensure that everyone, regardless of their dietary restrictions, can find sources of protein.
Afternoon Meetings
Later in the afternoon consider more nutrient-rich snacks than the ubiquitous cookie plate. Trail mix with dried fruit and nuts, yogurt cups, a communal cheese plate, or a raw vegetable platter can help everyone focus and engage with the content.
If you want your audience there, remember, you want them present—and that means you want their energy and attention throughout your time together.
Providing reasonably paced content and refueling with appropriate food will improve listening in meetings. But better listening alone is not enough. Studies of teaching strategies have proven that people learn across multiple mediums. The concept of multimedia learning is based on the cognitive theory of multi-modal perception, which covers how you make sense of the world around you using all available senses.7 Your brain finds more meaning by combining listening with seeing or with touch. The degree to which that meaning is accurate can be increased (or decreased) by the interactions that take place between different “modes” of information consumption.
There are lots of ways that the interplay of learning modes can trick you. Ventriloquists use visual perception to change auditory perception by creating the illusion that a human voice is coming from a wooden puppet. Human brains are predisposed to visual input being perceived as dominant; if what you see contradicts what you hear, you are more likely to believe what you see. So how does the brain “see” information in meetings, and how can you use sight to build better memories?
Visual Listening
Visualization is a surprisingly effective method of getting memories into your brain (see Figure 2.6). In his book Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer summarizes studies that demonstrate when shown an image, your brain has a nearly infallible ability to know whether or not it’s been seen previously.8 This fact applies to a small set of images or thousands of images, and it works over extended periods of time. But keep in mind (pun intended) that memory is still unreliable and can be exhausted—this is the design constraint all meetings face. Creating and reinforcing memories with visuals can manage and even reduce this constraint.
FIGURE 2.6 Visualization as an input mechanism can be used far more effectively in most meetings.
Whiteboarding an idea (visualizing it publicly) allows a group to point at the same thing and say “yes,” or “no.”
—DANA CHISNELL CODIRECTOR, CENTER FOR CIVIC DESIGN
Someone who takes notes in meetings can be called a scribe or a meeting secretary. They transcribe the discussion at a nearly impossible level of detail, and if you’re lucky they make those notes available to attendees. In most organizations, the notes are rarely revisited. You leave a meeting focused on the tasks that apply exclusively to you. Once you feel like you’ve got those tasks down, you aren’t likely to reread meeting notes. Those notes disappear in the piles of email messages that are there to make you feel better, but don’t really add to the quality of our work.
Stop taking notes in meetings this way, now and forever.
Give the scribe a different job: get those notes in front of everyone’s eyes at the same time, in real time while the discussion is happening. While people are engaged in talking (or for our purposes, “auditory input and output”), the scribe creates a visual record of only the main ideas, the conflicts, and the decisions on the wall. It needs to be large enough so that anyone in the room can read it from wherever they are sitting. That way, when the scribe captures something incorrectly, someone in the meeting can speak up and provide a correction.
Attendees in this scenario see the conversation unfold visually before them. It creates a feedback loop verifying accuracy between what people hear and see. They don’t have to engage in both all the time, but switching between listening and looking modes becomes possible when it suits the individual. Miss something? Look at the wall, or the screen if you are meeting with a distributed group. Suddenly, meeting notes accommodate multiple input modes, as well as create a central point of focus.
For example, Jane’s meeting was missing visualized discussion. She relied exclusively on listening to get the same action item into everyone’s mind. A public note taker could have visualized those lists in real time by pulling the parts of the conversation out that fit into each list. Leaving the meeting with that visual would have clearly aligned all three teams on what each list was for, and where different savings they anticipated should go. Jane’s teams would have provided documentation that reduced Jane’s extra effort, as opposed to increasing it, because the structure of the list would have been more clearly defined in their memories.
The practice of visual facilitation is a little beyond just note taking. It involves using simple visuals and sketches to represent ideas. It’s practiced by accomplished facilitators worldwide, and there are regular conferences dedicated to its practice. Compared to words, a diagram or sketch conveys more information without much additional effort. Concepts of time, connection, disconnection, emotion, and more can be represented more quickly with lines, boxes, arrows, and simple facial drawings. For more on visual approaches facilitation, make sure that you read Chapter 5, “Facilitation Strategy and Style.”
Getting in Touch with Your Ideas
Touching other people during a meeting? Probably not a good idea. But physically manipulating objects during a discussion is a great idea. Moving yourself and moving tools that you can hold in your hands provides a platform for interactions between people and ideas (see Figure 2.7). It’s another great input mode for creating understanding between people on complex ideas in less time.
FIGURE 2.7 Using manipulated objects, or manipulatives, is another effective input method.
The meeting tactics that (are) the most reusable are easy to follow and tactile, requiring manipulation of things in physical (or virtual) spaces.
—JAMES BOX AND ELLEN DE VRIES DIRECTOR OF USER EXPERIENCE, CLEARLEFT LTD (BOX) & CONTENT STRATEGIST, CLEARLEFT LTD (DE VRIES)
The most common example of an easily manipulated object, or a “manipulative,” is the sticky note. These notes provide the ability to create and absorb information structures more easily by arranging ideas in physical space. Sticky notes work well in meetings because they engage the part of your brain that interprets meaning from spatial relationships. So . . . move things around in your meetings! The act of getting moving applies Baddeley’s working memory model into the conference room. When you arrange sticky notes on a wall or modify a physical, cardboard prototype with scissors and glue, you are building the “visuospatial sketchpad” in the real world (see Figure 2.8).