Most meetings consist of listening to presentations and discussions held around a table – which is a process that has remained largely unaltered for at least 2000 years.
However, the current rate of change in the business environment means that we need to better engage our people within meetings, and there are far better means available for doing this. Read More
Meeting paradigms tend to be rooted in more hierarchical and conservative approaches to dissemination and debate, which tend to be better at governance than engagement. And these approaches are so much part of our pattern, that they are often assumed and unquestioned – a paradigm of what it means to meet.
In part this is linguistic – while meetings are clearly an activity (meet is a verb) we tend to think of ‘meeting’ as a noun – when someone uses the term ‘meeting’ our minds eye is usually drawn to a picture of a group of people sat round a table discussing things. But many other means to exploration and decision making have been developed over the years – using multi-channel, multiple medium approaches (tools) which are much better suited to engaging participation and enabling insight and consensus to evolve.
Tools
The Meetings Clinic lists almost 30 tools for use within meetings (both physical and virtual), and hundreds more exist.
Yet such tools are largely overlooked in many meetings simply because the question “What is the best approach to do this?” is not asked – the paradigm of presentation and debate is not challenged. Read More
If you are not yet familiar with using different tools and activities to progress the objectives of your meetings, rest assured that it is not an all or nothing approach. You can start gently by including one or two to tackle specific aspects of the meeting.
The Meetings Clinic has a wealth of resources to help you, but in the early stages the most useful of these is likely to be the tool selection matrix (shown on the right) which will help you to identify which tools are likely to be most useful for your specific need.
Tools and techniques have huge potential to make your meetings more efficient, creative, and successful. They will also better ensure the engagement of people’s talents and commitment into the conclusion. Futhermore, tools and techniques enable you to move beyond the traditional paradigm of meetings and better utilise the potential of social media, web-meetings and internet tools in asynchronous and geographically distributed alternatives.
For further insight into the usefulness of tools and exercises, take a look at the clinic item on learning styles.
For strategies concerned with Tools – click here
Creativity
Innovation is the competitive lifeblood of any business.
Anything we do has potential for some little advantage somewhere – and success can be the aggregation of all those little advantages (or perhaps one great big one).
But where does the innovation come from? Read More
Innovation can be in products and services, but it can also be in manufacture, operations, customer-service, HR, facilities, offices, communications, … anywhere and everywhere new ideas can provide new efficiencies or service edge which gives an advantage over the current practice.
But what is the best way to get together to bounce these ideas around? The answer has to be in meetings, but often our meeting processes are not particularly well designed to identify those big and little innovations. However, there are lots of real opportunities to bring a creative element into your meetings, many of which can be found on the public side of the meetings clinic pages: https://meeting.toolchest.org/tag/creativity/
For strategies concerned with Creativity – click here
Strategic Improvement
Use the model below to develop a vision for how you want your meetings to be different going forward, and then research the resources above to develop a coherent plan for how you plan to bring about improvement.
Or for other resources which support ‘activity’, please go to:
https://meeting.toolchest.org/tag/activity/
