Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman

Chapter 8. Chart the Course Using Middle Meetings

      Stuck in the middle of a project? Need to course correct? Use a well-designed conversation to map the terrain.

       Chapter 9. Find Closure with End Meetings

      Wrap up your work with meetings that lead to continued growth and evolution.

       In Closing

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

      Foreword

      When I was commuting regularly to New York City for work, I’d look at my calendar on the train ride in and see what meetings lay ahead. Based on how productive I felt each one was going to be, I’d plan out how to pass the time in the meeting. For most, I figured I could knock out some email on my phone under the table. For a couple, I could probably get away with answering some questions from my team in chat. For one, two max, I knew I’d have to pay attention and participate and, in all likelihood, show up prepared.

      Why? What was the difference between these meetings where I knew I could tune out versus the ones where I’d have to lean in?

      Let’s face it—most of my meetings were awful. They were hastily called, poorly planned, and involved far too many people to yield any kind of traction. So what’s the solution? It seems to be more meetings. When you add in every company’s adoption of Agile rituals—stand-ups, iteration planning meetings, and retrospectives—and multiply that times the number of projects each person supports, it becomes a miracle that anything actually ever gets done at work.

      And yet, to do our best work, collaboration is required. It’s a successful company’s secret weapon. We need to meet with our colleagues, hear their opinions, debate options, and make clear the decisions on the next steps.

      But how many meetings have you attended recently that actually yielded concrete next steps and felt like a good use of your time? If you’re like most people, the answer is probably pretty low. Creating great meetings is a people problem. It requires empathy for the participants, as well as a clear sense of their goals and the decision-making framework for not only deciding how to structure the meeting but whether one should happen at all.

      In the software world, we advocate for changing our mindset from one focused on outputs—delivering features—to one motivated to drive outcomes—meaningful and measurable changes in customer behaviors. This mindset reshapes our definition of “done.” The same model can be applied to meetings. In some organizations, the measure of success for some people is how many meetings they attend (i.e., output). The goal is, seemingly, to spend as much time in meetings to showcase the individual’s productivity, importance, and contributions. How do we know that this contribution yielded anything positive to the cause we’re pursuing? Just because the meetings took place doesn’t mean that we had an impact of any kind on the success of our team, project, or company.

      Instead, how can we figure out what outcomes our colleagues are trying to achieve by attending this meeting? Our job should be to design solutions that help them reach those outcomes. Sometimes that will be a meeting. In other cases, it might be some other activity or no activity at all.

      In Meeting Design, Kevin lays out exactly how to take on meetings as a design problem, but you don’t have to be a designer to appreciate this advice. He deftly illustrates how the designer’s toolkit—a collection of questions, activities, and conversations—can be applied to create the best outcomes for these age-old activities.

      Kevin applies design thinking in tactical ways to teach you how to learn what your colleagues truly need. His approach lays out tactic after tactic for structuring agendas, ensuring broad, active participation, and guaranteeing that no one leaves another meeting again feeling that time was wasted. Perhaps most importantly, he provides a clear way to assess whether a meeting is actually required and how to push back to sharpen its focus or cancel it altogether.

      I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with Kevin personally and professionally. I’ve always been impressed by his balance of detailed research, pragmatism, and sense of humor, which all translate to a remarkably well-thought-out and useful book.

      —Jeff Gothelf, designer, Agile practitioner, and author of Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously and Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

      Introduction

      Meetings Are a Design Problem

      How well do the meetings you have every day do their intended job? Before you answer, consider how much of your career is spent in meetings. In more than twenty years of working in design, I’ve been in thousands of them. Some were good, but many weren’t—filled with agendaless rambling, unstructured discussion without outcomes, and needless aversion to conflict. And I’m the first to admit that I’ve made many meeting mistakes along the way. I’ve doodled out of boredom, distracted myself with unrelated emails and text messages, and even fallen asleep at least once—OK, maybe twice.

      These negative experiences happened during a time when meetings were supposedly getting better. You can find new approaches to meetings in business and management books, workshop design and sketch facilitation books, online meeting software, agile approaches to software development, and dozens of blogs, websites, and magazines. Despite these new approaches, most people still find that they have more meetings than they like, and those meetings aren’t any better than they used to be. If you’re a manager or you run a company, that quantity-to-quality ratio is worse: you might feel as though meetings are all that you do.

      Meetings should add value to your life by providing a sense of progress—problems being defined, decisions getting made, priorities being prioritized, and solutions being built upon the benefit of multiple perspectives. But meetings become a lazy reflex. You show up for as many meetings on your calendar as you can, but don’t feel fully present in all of them. When you question that reflex, it will help you have meetings that do a better job of working for you.

      Why Do I Care About Meetings?

      When I first joined the workforce, I was unprepared for how much of my work would be dependent upon the success or failure within meetings. As part of my first full-time job working in the public library system of Baltimore, Maryland, I attended community group meetings where neighborhood residents tried to build consensus on what changes could improve their lives and the lives of their families. But conflicting community values—such as strong emotions about a neighborhood competing with strong respect for different viewpoints within a neighborhood—resulted in meandering, unproductive conversations. Discussions were democratic to a fault. Everyone contributed, but it seemed never-ending and full of irrelevant tangents. Strong personalities ruled the day while quiet people with good ideas went unheard. It was as fascinating to me as it was frustrating.

      That mix of fascination and frustration with meetings followed me throughout my career of leading and facilitating large digital design projects for design agencies, as well as my own design consultancy. My clients put tremendous thought and energy into developing a project’s scope before fighting for the dollars, people, and partnerships to turn that scope into a reality. But too often I’ve seen projects littered with thoughtless meetings, devoid of any progress-fueling energy whatsoever. Here’s a classic example: an hour spent listening to a client read requirements