Using structured meetings with facilitation and professional meeting design quickly gets people to focus on the right question at the right time.

Structured meetings capture broad and specific wisdom by sticking to facts. Groups fail (or operate at poor levels) either because they don’t care, don’t have the talent, or don’t know how. Knowing that there is almost always more than one right answer, and with a sincere effort toward ever improving, our method focuses on group decision-making, planning, analysis, and prioritization. Since nearly all of our contacts come from ‘word-of-mouth’, an alumnus called us to help justify a private workshop. Our private workshops include leadership, facilitation, and meeting design. We built this content for their benefit.

Fact One

A lot of meeting time goes unproductive and an entire meeting may be viewed as a waste of time.

• A meeting involves real costs as the frequency and length of meetings continue to grow around the world.
• Studies prove that a normal meeting falls short of being 50 percent productive.
• Poorly run meetings prevail and some people and their entire culture now have “meeting dementia.”
• A meeting can create a common understanding and higher quality decisions than people on their own.

So What?

With structured meetings, groups can avoid 25 to 35 percent of costs or lots of U$D per year.

• While groups lose money due to running a poor meeting, individuals are forced to work longer hours to make up for it.
• The negative culture of a group causes the loss of highly valued people.
• A major company found a 400 percent increase in productivity using a collaborative project when compared to using serial interviews and combining requirements in a similar project.
• It has been observed that many ‘requirements’ are not ‘bad’, rather higher costs are driven by what is omitted or missed.

Now What?

Therefore, on a pilot basis, embrace a structured approach to running a meeting.

• Secure commitment to improve meeting efficacy and to support workshops when advised.
• Enable the supplies and other resources to support the benefit of structured meetings.
• Empower select people with expert, professional training.

Fact Two

Members spend hundreds of hours leading without training in structured meetings or facilitation. Unstructured meetings lead to confusion and even contrary understanding.

• Frequently people find themselves in violent agreement with each other.

 

• The following list highlights 14 frequently mentioned problems by over 1,000 managers (alpha sort):
  

  Structuring Meetings

  • Disorganized
  • Dominators
  • Getting off subject
  • Inconclusive
  • Ineffective for making decisions
  • Ineffective leader/ lack of control
  • Interruptions (inside and out)
  • Irrelevant information discussed
  • No goals or agenda
  • Poor preparation
  • Rambling discussion individuals
  • Started late
  • Time wasted
  • Too lengthy

So What?

The problems listed above have a negative impact on the people and their culture.

• Organizations may regress compared to their competitors and other options.
• Members are not taught to think about options and other opportunities.
• Partial growth becomes the norm rather than rapid growth, as breakthroughs get missed.
• The culture trends toward becoming reactive rather than proactive, following rather than leading.
• Some members are satisfied with any decision and remain unaware of the importance of decision quality.

Now What?

Therefore, promote a new effort toward meeting efficacy and group focus, starting with properly trained leaders.

• Ratify funds to be used both internally for supplies and externally for professional training.
• Enable members to provide comments and feedback to ensure ‘perfect practice’ of new skills learned.
• Given the importance of meetings and effective facilitation, build a Community of Excellence.
• Appreciate the value of ongoing training and anticipate advanced training in the future based on in-house meeting design.

Benefits

• Ability to test for the quality of outputs before meetings end (the worst deliverable of any meeting is another meeting)
• Agendas, tools, and outputs become more consistent
• Analysts obtain higher-quality information
• Coherent communication among meeting participants, project, steering, and other teams
• Members learn HOW TO THINK, and become more effective from “board room to boiler room”
• Faster results: Facilitated sessions speed up the capture of information, especially when meeting participants (aka subject matter experts) arrive and know in advance the questions and issues that need to be answered
• Fewer omissions—Projects speed up with an increase in clarity and a reduction in uncertainty
• Heightened involvement by all stakeholders
• Higher quality results: Groups of people make higher quality decisions than the smartest person in the group. Facilitated sessions encourage diverse points of view that enable the group to identify new options. And, it is a proven fact that people or groups with more options make higher-quality decisions.
• Major reduction of total resources compared to serial interviewing techniques
• People excite people: Facilitated meetings can lead to innovation and become the catalyst for innovative activities because multiple points of view create a richer (360-degree) understanding of a problem, rather than a narrow, myopic view.
• Transfer of ownership: Facilitated sessions build further action by creating outputs that support follow-up
• Witness a decline in smart people making dumb decisions

Glossary

Stakeholders, including both internal and external customers and the project team, are all affected by the outcome.

Workshops are meetings focused on a single topic and output, NOT simply informational exchange, rather they build. Like projects, workshops have at least three phases: preparation, the workshop itself, and activities after:

1. The key to preparation is meeting with members to agree on objectives, estimate and plan the workshop, prepare the members, develop agendas, and finish the logistics.
2. The workshop itself is an environment with the use of visuals striving for win-win situations, defined as consensus.
3. The final phase completes the output, resolves open issues, and communicates with stakeholders about the next steps.

• Other questions about terms? See the MGRush Glossary that you may download at http://mgrush.com/facilitators-glossary/.
• More curriculum content? See Professional Abstract/ Agenda at http://www.mgrush.com/pdf/FAST_Abstract.pdf or specific topics and tools at https://mgrush.com/blog/

❖   Interactive design (defined): A structured meeting designed to extract high-quality information from stakeholders in a compressed time frame using a proven methodology, visual aids, and a workshop process to enhance communications— use a neutral facilitator to guide members through a structured, yet flexible approach, towards a common goal (ie, deliverable).

______

Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.