Appendices for Meeting by Design

On Page 142 of Meeting by Design we outlined a process of how to get started – this is amplified below:

1. You survey your own organisation (at least in part) to assess where it is similar and where it is different to the averages described in Meeting by Design

One of the biggest issues in driving people to prioritise meeting improvement is the underlying belief that the issue is with someone else. Whilst attendees at meetings might rate the effectiveness of meetings as less than half, the leaders of those same meetings rate them at around 90%.

Conducting a survey of your own people is a great way to develop collective ownership for the timescale and the improvements to be made.

Appendix 3 contains useful guidance on the questions to ask, and it is fairly easy to set these up in a survey tool such as Surveymonkey or ZohoSurvey.

2. You identify in which area of the organisation the multi-channel approach to web-based meetings is likely to have the biggest success as an alternative to travel

While the survey defined above should be anonymous, there should be some sort of affiliation recorded to allow this to identifiable from the survey. However, potential travel saving are only one component. In selecting your pilot group you should also consider their openness to new ideas, the qualities of their manager, and their reputation among the rest of the organisation.

3. You baseline their current situation

Baselines are vitally important both to ensure that the improvement effort is properly managed, and to provide compelling evidence for extending the work to other areas.

Hopefully you will be able to do most of this directly from the survey data in item 1 above. However, in setting clear improvement goals with the team, they may well identify target benefits and improvement areas which require further data.  In this case, you may need to conduct a supplementary survey to gather these baselines.

4. You train people in facilitating multi-channel meetings using the extended functionality available in web-based meetings

While the Meeting ToolChest has lots of great resources and information to support people in changing their meetings, such change to an established way of working can prove controversial and stressful, and this can lead to problems in practice.

The stress can be averted in large part by enabling your people to practice techniques in a save environment. Furthermore, training also enables people to adopt a common vocabulary and mutual support networks which are key to building and maintaining momentum.

5. You agree, as part of this training, their strategy for using the multi-channel approach and gaining the organisational benefits from it

Meeting improvement is not a free-for-all. To optimise the benefits and help people navigate over the (inevitable) obstacles you need to have a clear direction, a plan of action, and achievable milestones for the gains to be delivered.

6. You review the current performance against your baseline

It is vitally important that benefits are quantified, and learning takes place to increase their value. This can be achieved by re-running the survey.

Pages 143-150 of Meeting by Design reflect the functionality of a web-based tool which became obsolete within months of the books publication. Fortunately however, that functionality is now available in a range of other web-based offerings.

Our favourite is ConceptBoard. Conceptboard is an unlimited shared space which enables teams or individuals to:

• Work separately, in syndicates, or all-together – at the same time or asynchronously
• Easily incorporate the range of meeting templates available through Meeting Toolchest
• Conduct a group via ‘follow me’ through the board’s content
• Include images, video, hyperlink and quickly create post-its from spreadsheets
• Set different permissions for participation and quickly change these
• Track participants through their cursors, and use the cursors to provide real-time feedback

ConceptBoard does have a fully functioning audio capability, but our own preference is to use it in conjunction with a video conferencing tool such as Zoom or Teams. This helps to ensure everyone is on the same page and provides a measure of protection against one or other going down. The link between the two is usually the leader sharing their own ConceptBoard screen.

To be realistic, your initial forays into this space will not be perfect, and even after you have become confident in leading virtual meetings there will still be opportunities to innovate and improve (as I continually discover 10 years on from where I started). To maximise your progress you need data on what is working and what can be improved, and to this end we recommend regular meeting reviews.

To get started, we would suggest the following steps (all of which have free versions):

• Follow the directions in the ConceptBoard article to familiarise yourself and set it up
• If you already have a video conferencing solution, use that, but otherwise download Zoom
• Ensure you have two screens, a headset, a good internet connection, and a quiet place
• Set up a short meeting with a friend to try it all out – you may need to do this a few times
• Try it out in a real meeting. Use the tool selector to help you identify the templates to use
• Get feedback, learn from it, and keep improving

During the years that have followed the publishing of Meeting by Design, this is an area that has flourished immensely. There are innovations taking place all the time, and the market is awash with competitive offerings – no sooner does one idea prove successful than there are four or five imitators in the same space.

This development is great in the sense that it constantly drives choice and innovation, but it can be confusing to people who are simply looking for a basic tool. With that in mind, we would simply recommend the following to get started.

• ConceptBoard – even though this is an excellent resource for more involved meetings (see Appendix 7) it can also provide an ongoing repository for offline updates and feedback both between meetings and independently of them.
• Trello – is a Kanban board on steroids. It has amazing potential to visualise progress, keep updates, provide the backbone for a meeting, allocate tasks, and generally manage everything (literally everything – we used Trello to manage every aspect of my previous organisation)
• Slack – allows you to keep threads of dialogue going across a range of topics, and to include and update people as you need to
• Microsoft Teams – provides a means to ‘chat’ through ideas and situations together, and to keep in communication with your colleagues on key topics – it is also a videoconferencing solution, for when the ‘chat’ gets a bit involved

Many of the resources you need you will find in the ToolChest, however, there are four other sources of information we would highlight:

1. Meeting by Design is a free online book which has been written to help people develop a different mindset to meetings
2. Collaboration Superpowers is a website of useful links and guidance on different forms of remote collaboration software (some of it with free versions)
3. Lucid Meetings is a great free information resource from someone who really understands what makes meetings work