15 Mar Run a Better Meeting

I once worked for a company where the culture allowed you to skip a meeting if an agenda wasn’t included with the meeting invitation. It was an amazing way to help drive meeting for a purpose, but it wasn’t perfect. You could easily fudge an agenda, make people gather and still have nothing to show for the time spent.

What would have made it better? If the agendas were written as questions.

Start with the big one. Why is this group coming together? What questions to you want answered? What result(s) do you need by the end of the meeting?

The typical agenda lists the topics to be discussed. If you’ve been invited, you either need to hear and/or to contribute to the discussion. No problem.

Let’s say it’s a project meeting one of the agenda items is “Budget”. As the Business Analyst on the project, what data do you bring? Spend-to-date? Spend forecast? Spend vs estimate? Comparison data to past projects?

What if the agenda item was instead, “What is the current spend rate? Is this on track?” Much better. You now know exactly what data to bring and, maybe, if supporting data that will help the team.

Discussions can go on and on and on and on……….when do you stop it? How do you stop it?

Listing agenda items as questions will also help focus the discussion. It’s easy to get side-tracked. When this happens, simply ask how the discussion addresses the question at hand. If data is presented, again, ask how this data helps answer the question.

Questions bring structure and purpose to meetings. They are also amazing at resolving conflict. By breaking down the issue into bite-sized questions, you create space for small wins, deeper understanding, and better issue identification.

Hope this helps. Let me know how it works for you.