Most meetings consist of listening to presentations and discussions held around a table. This 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. We need to be better at encouraging contributions from them. And there are far better means available for doing this. Read More
Encouraging contribution through shifting the paradigm
Meeting paradigms tend to be rooted in more hierarchical and conservative approaches to dissemination and debate. These tend to be better at governance than engagement. And these approaches are so much part of our pattern, they are often assumed and unquestioned. They are part of our 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 mind’s eye is usually drawn to a picture of a group of people sat round a table discussing things. But many other means to exploration, decision making, and encouraging contribution have been developed over the years. Many of these are naturally multi-channel, multiple medium approaches (tools). As a result. they are much better suited to encouraging contribution and participation, and for enabling insight and consensus to evolve.
Tools
The Meeting Toolchest lists almost 30 tools for encouraging contribution 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
Starting simple
You may not yet be familiar with using different tools and activities to progress the objectives of your meetings. But 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 Meeting Toolchest 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.
Once you have selected what you want, the instant participation links will have you up and running in ten seconds flat.
Benefits of encouraging contribution
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. As a result, you will better utilise the potential of social media, web-meetings and internet tools. And this will enable asynchronous components to your meetings – encouraging contribution before, after, and around the meeting.
For further insight into the usefulness of tools and exercises, take a look at the clinic item on learning styles.
Access related support in Section 5 of the ToolChest where you can explore the various tools that are available, and some of the thinking that supports their adoption.
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
Creativity applies everywhere
Innovation is most commonly seen in products and services. But it can also be in manufacture, operations, customer-service, HR, facilities, offices, communications. In fact, anywhere and everywhere new ideas can provide new efficiencies, or a service edge ,which gives an advantage over the current practice.
Plan for creativity in your meetings
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 encourage creative contributions into your meetings. Many of these can be found on the public side of the meetings clinic pages in Section 6 of the ToolChest
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.
For a complete copy of the Maturity Model, click here.
Or for other resources which support ‘activity’, please go to: https://meeting.toolchest.org/tag/activity/
