The following is the executive summary of the book ‘Meeting by Design: Harnessing the potential of the web to revitalise meetings’. It sets out how our minds have become unwittingly entrapped in an unhelpful paradigm of meetings. And it uses aspects of Design Thinking (before Design Thinking became popular) and virtual meetings (ditto) as a means of releasing us into the potential that meetings really have for us and our people.
The book is now available free of charge. More information can be found after this introduction …
The most pressing question facing chief executives today is, ‘How do I engage the practical creativity and resourcefulness of my people to bring about a step change in performance?’ and the fact is, for the vast majority of organisations, their current approach to meetings is a major obstacle to what they are trying to do.
The very high levels of ineffectiveness in meetings not only consume an undue proportion of management time (time which could be better spent on strategy, coaching, and business development) but it disengages and demotivates staff and actually supresses and misdirects the creativity and resourcefulness they are seeking to access.
The potential of meetings to align our people with the right priorities, to develop their skills and attitudes, and to develop an inspiring and creative culture is far greater than most people realise. Sadly, this lack of realisation means that meetings are rarely constructed to fulfil their potential, and are more than 50 per cent ineffective in most organisations.
In large part this is because we do not treat meetings as a process, and we often default to (and may be unaware of) inappropriate tools within them. Furthermore, since meeting performance is rarely measured, most management teams are largely oblivious to the full extent of this issue.
Conversely, expertly facilitated off-site workshops are often more successful in achieving the strategic, cultural, and operational shifts that are needed, precisely because they do recognise and embrace process, and because their effectiveness is measured and evaluated.
But the situation of routine meetings is mired in a range of established patterns and many years of habit, and is not so easily changed. This is especially evident in attempts to shift meetings to the web-based environment.
Ironically, web-based meetings not only represent the nadir of meeting performance, they are also the impetus and opportunity to transform it. Rather than simply import what we currently do in physical meetings into the web-based environment, we need to recognise the differences in the new medium and exploit these differences to address the issues that lie at the core of our meetings culture.
There are a number of easy, effective, and economic ways of doing this. Developing web-based meetings to be an effective alternative to travel is an ‘easy sell’ which establishes the need for change in current practice, but the techniques that are introduced in this way will establish new appreciation for meetings and, once proven, will be imported naturally into our physical meetings.
Key to making all of this work is for the executive to grasp responsibility for measuring and managing performance and progress, initially in the effectiveness of web-based meetings (which is relatively easy) and subsequently in the effectiveness of meetings overall. Doing so is not only likely to save your organisation half of its current travel costs, but will also double management’s effectiveness in engaging their people’s creativity to deliver a step change in performance.
This site has been compiled to provide the ideas, resources and encouragement to facilitate ‘engaging the practical creativity and resourcefulness of your people’ through meetings. It contains the means to encourage and support a Design Thinking perspective – applied both to the design of your meetings, and to the decisions made within them.
Meeting by Design was written almost a decade ago. But the principles it promotes are more relevant today than they were when it was written. Meetings have become virtual. Design thinking is being adopted. People do need to engage in continuous learning. And meetings are the things that will hold this together, and yet they still underperform.
There is much that Meeting by Design still has to say to those who realise the importance of improving their online meetings. A few of the technological examples may be a bit dated, but surprisingly fewer than you might imagine.
Meeting by Design is now available free of charge as a PDF for anyone who has the desire to read it. I encourage you to do so. It still has the capacity to challenge our paradigms – perhaps even more so, since the current changes in our World make shifting these paradigms even more important.