Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman

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       Whiteboarding an idea (visualizing it publicly) allows a group to point at the same thing and say “yes,” or “no.”

      —DANA CHISNELL CODIRECTOR, CENTER FOR CIVIC DESIGN

      Someone who takes notes in meetings can be called a scribe or a meeting secretary. They transcribe the discussion at a nearly impossible level of detail, and if you’re lucky they make those notes available to attendees. In most organizations, the notes are rarely revisited. You leave a meeting focused on the tasks that apply exclusively to you. Once you feel like you’ve got those tasks down, you aren’t likely to reread meeting notes. Those notes disappear in the piles of email messages that are there to make you feel better, but don’t really add to the quality of our work.

      Stop taking notes in meetings this way, now and forever.

      Give the scribe a different job: get those notes in front of everyone’s eyes at the same time, in real time while the discussion is happening. While people are engaged in talking (or for our purposes, “auditory input and output”), the scribe creates a visual record of only the main ideas, the conflicts, and the decisions on the wall. It needs to be large enough so that anyone in the room can read it from wherever they are sitting. That way, when the scribe captures something incorrectly, someone in the meeting can speak up and provide a correction.

      Attendees in this scenario see the conversation unfold visually before them. It creates a feedback loop verifying accuracy between what people hear and see. They don’t have to engage in both all the time, but switching between listening and looking modes becomes possible when it suits the individual. Miss something? Look at the wall, or the screen if you are meeting with a distributed group. Suddenly, meeting notes accommodate multiple input modes, as well as create a central point of focus.

      For example, Jane’s meeting was missing visualized discussion. She relied exclusively on listening to get the same action item into everyone’s mind. A public note taker could have visualized those lists in real time by pulling the parts of the conversation out that fit into each list. Leaving the meeting with that visual would have clearly aligned all three teams on what each list was for, and where different savings they anticipated should go. Jane’s teams would have provided documentation that reduced Jane’s extra effort, as opposed to increasing it, because the structure of the list would have been more clearly defined in their memories.

      The practice of visual facilitation is a little beyond just note taking. It involves using simple visuals and sketches to represent ideas. It’s practiced by accomplished facilitators worldwide, and there are regular conferences dedicated to its practice. Compared to words, a diagram or sketch conveys more information without much additional effort. Concepts of time, connection, disconnection, emotion, and more can be represented more quickly with lines, boxes, arrows, and simple facial drawings. For more on visual approaches facilitation, make sure that you read Chapter 5, “Facilitation Strategy and Style.”

      Getting in Touch with Your Ideas

      Touching other people during a meeting? Probably not a good idea. But physically manipulating objects during a discussion is a great idea. Moving yourself and moving tools that you can hold in your hands provides a platform for interactions between people and ideas (see Figure 2.7). It’s another great input mode for creating understanding between people on complex ideas in less time.

FIGURE 2.7 Using manipulated objects, or manipulatives, is another effective input method.

       The meeting tactics that (are) the most reusable are easy to follow and tactile, requiring manipulation of things in physical (or virtual) spaces.

      —JAMES BOX AND ELLEN DE VRIES DIRECTOR OF USER EXPERIENCE, CLEARLEFT LTD (BOX) & CONTENT STRATEGIST, CLEARLEFT LTD (DE VRIES)

      The most common example of an easily manipulated object, or a “manipulative,” is the sticky note. These notes provide the ability to create and absorb information structures more easily by arranging ideas in physical space. Sticky notes work well in meetings because they engage the part of your brain that interprets meaning from spatial relationships. So . . . move things around in your meetings! The act of getting moving applies Baddeley’s working memory model into the conference room. When you arrange sticky notes on a wall or modify a physical, cardboard prototype with scissors and glue, you are building the “visuospatial sketchpad” in the real world (see Figure 2.8).

FIGURE 2.8 A simple, made-with-scissors-marker-and-paper kindergarten-style prototype from Amy Mae Roberts, Product Designer, Microsoft.

      Visualizations in meetings are living records. Continued interaction with those records will create better memories. While extending Baddeley’s research, Logie posited that the visuospatial sketchpad is broken into two different parts.⁹ A “visual cache” stores information about form and color, while the “inner scribe” deals with movement and position in space. Different parts of the brain are working together to do a better job of committing things to your memory, using a visual metaphor.

      Getting ideas into your brain effectively therefore also means moving them out of the meeting, as a shared public record, so that you can continue to act upon those ideas. Unlike meeting notes you take on a laptop, visualized records of a conversation can be revisited and iterated upon after the meeting is over. That continued engagement with a visual record will pull more of the brain into the work. The more engaged each of these parts of the brain become, the more likely that successful memory creation, synthesis, and application will happen. The stuff discussed in a meeting gets done, and it gets done correctly.

      Putting the Brain to Work for Jane’s Meeting

      Everything you perceive to be real in the world happens as input into your brain. By considering the brain as the primary design constraint for a meeting, you engineer powerful learning experiences, focus teams on the right aspects of projects, and accommodate different modes of input within a meeting.

      Remember Jane and her three teams at the Caribbean airline? By taking advantage of visual capture via Post-it Notes, she could break the ideas for each of the two lists (time savings and cost savings) into a wall-sized representation of the lists themselves. These lists could be created, at least in part, during the meeting. Distributing a photo of the results of the meeting wall immediately afterward would provide enough context for any additional work to be at the appropriate level of detail. Additional meetings could be eliminated, and Jane’s team would have more clarity, because their memories would be more accurate.

       WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

      People, and specifically their brains, are a universal design constraint for meetings. The best way to design for this constraint is by creating ways to support more effective creation of memories. Here are several ways to make that happen:

      • Working memory is the most active stage of memory in a meeting. It lasts on average 30 seconds, but it varies between individuals. You should cover information at a pace that is slower than you would normally use in a one-on-one conversation СКАЧАТЬ