Deliverables should drive meetings, even review meetings.

Meeting time is too expensive to conduct unstructured discussions and hope some of it sticks. Here you will find three strong reasons for conducting review meetings. Moreover, you will better understand the different types of deliverables, frequency, and structure for each.

Make Review Meetings Participatory

Participants should NOT spend their time listening to report presentations during review meetings. However, they should have become familiar with the main topics through their pre-read and preparation, and have developed some input for consideration. Build your agenda for review meetings around discrete deliverables from each step, and make sure the deliverables can be documented. If your deliverable is too abstract (e.g., ‘shared awareness’), then it is inappropriate for these three types of meetings. Remember that a world-class strategy is impotent if it is not converted into operational plans that are executed against the agreed-upon performance targets.

The role of session leader (aka facilitator) is frequently filled by the same person who also provides the role of meeting designer. Since there is usually more than one right answer (or meeting design, that leads to the deliverable), how do you determine the optimal approach?

As you may know from MGRUSH structured facilitation, a robust decision-making method suggests creating your options and then separately evaluating them against a set of prioritized criteria; including SMART criteria, fuzzy criteria, and other important considerations.

Additionally, the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) encourages you to “select clear methods and processes that . . .

• Foster open participation with respect for client culture, norms, and participant
  

  How To Direct Review Meetings

• Engage the participation of those with varied learning/thinking styles
• Achieve a high-quality product/outcome that meets the client’s needs”

Foster Open Participation

Support the plurality goal of the IAF’s first point by carefully selecting and blending your meeting participants. Keep in mind the type of change effort you are leading. If your deliverable contributes evolutionary advances to the project cause, you may want to get done quickly, with people who know each other and work together effectively. If your deliverable contributes toward revolutionary advances, then invigorate your blend of meeting or workshop participants. Remember, if you want the same old answer, then clone yourself. If you need something truly innovative, then invite people who may be viewed as outsiders or confederates, and depend on them to help stir things up. We know empirically that more options correlate strongly with higher-quality decisions.

Engage participation

Support their engagement and participation (second bullet above) with the frequent and extended use of break-out teams and sessions. Groups get more done as their sizes are reduced. Breakout teams give quiet people permission to speak freely. Provide creative team names (e.g., stellar constellations or mountain names) and appoint a CEO for each breakout team (i.e., chief easel operator). Be well prepared with your tools or your supplies and handouts.

Achieve

Manage breakout teams closely by wandering around and listening. Keep the teams focused on the question(s) as you would with a larger group, preventing scope creep that yields unproductive time. When you pull the teams back together, use our Bookend Rhetoric (tool) to aggregate and collapse the perspectives into one, unified response.

Next, the International Association of Facilitators encourages you to “prepare time and space to support group process

• Arrange physical space to support the purpose of the meeting
• Plan effective use of time
• Provide effective atmosphere and drama for sessions”

When confined to one room, typically arrange easels in different corners. With virtual meetings, convert local call-in centers (e.g., a group conferencing in from another city) into discrete sub-teams. If possible, plan on separate rooms for break-out sessions, pre-supplied with easels, markers, handouts, etc.

Minimize the allotted time. It’s shocking what teams can complete in three minutes with clear instructions. Even with a three-minute assignment, by the time you have appointed CEOs (Chief Easel Operators), instructions, and participants have assembled and then returned; a three-minute assignment quickly turns into five minutes, five minutes turns into ten, etc.  Again, minimize the allotted time, but be flexible and afford more time if the teams remain productive and need more time that adds value.

The more you do in advance to prepare your instructions and the physical space, the more you can expect back in return.  If you are blasé and assign team numbers, and randomly assign participants 1,2, 3, etc.—then expect blasé results. If you are creative and involved, you can expect creativity and engagement from your participants.

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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.)

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Facilitation Expert

Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.