Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman

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CHAPTER 3

      Build Agendas Out of Ideas, People, and Time

      Dave is an independent consultant who helps organizations figure out the relationship between how they organize information in digital products (websites, apps) and the job those products are intended to do. As an independent contractor, he adapts to the working culture of each client. Dave’s latest client is a multinational insurance firm with inefficient design processes and an overworked in-house design team.

      Dave scheduled a meeting to present six design principles he had developed to simplify the ongoing production work of the design team. The intention of the meeting was to build a shared understanding of these principles among the five members of the design team and the two senior stakeholders; he was not soliciting feedback for revisions. Dave restricted the agenda to around 10 minutes per principle. During each 10-minute session, he covered one or two examples of how each principle was applied. A brief period of time was reserved at the end of each 10-minute block for discussion. Here’s what Dave’s agenda looked like:

       DAVE’S DESIGN PRINCIPLE AGENDA

      • Review a principle (8 minutes)

      • Discuss a principle (2 minutes)

      • (Repeat six times, once for each principle)

      It was a lot to cover. He expected to orient the team just enough to begin applying the principles in their work. Once they began to do so, Dave was on-hand to answer more questions via email.

      Dave felt confident as the meeting was started. However, two minutes into the meeting, the CEO of the company, James, interrupted Dave with a question that belied a fundamental misunderstanding of the meeting’s intent.

      “On page 36 of the document, there’s a blue button in the example diagram. Can that button be green?”

      Jan, the Chief Design Officer, intervened, trying to help Dave.

      “I think we’re jumping ahead here, let’s try to stay on topic. My team needs to be able to start applying these principles this week.”

      James replied:

      “Well, I’m not sure I agree with the agenda of this meeting. I thought we were going to get a detailed review of the design of all of our different applications.”

      Jan disagreed:

      “James, that would be a waste of time. We can read these documents on our own time. Let’s use this time to explore how we could apply these principles on our own.”

      During the next 30 minutes, Dave was only able to get through a single design principle, due to continued interruptions from the two senior stakeholders. The remaining time was steamrolled by those stakeholders’ continued debate regarding differing expectations of agendas. Sadly, Dave only went through two of the six principles he had planned to cover in the hour. He was unable to convey the intended ideas in the time allotted.

      The Illusion of the Agenda

      It sucks when you lose control of a meeting. In Dave’s presentation, three different people had entered the meeting with three different agendas, and each agenda disrupted the other. Dave’s agenda fell victim to a power struggle. Jan lost the benefits she had hoped to get for her design team. James’ expectations were broken at the beginning, due to a lack of preparation on his part. Dave had distributed agendas in advance, and even personally emailed the “hippos” (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the office to give them the opportunity to express additional expectations. But like a lot of busy people, James didn’t have (or make) time to prepare. It’s an excuse, but it’s also a real design constraint that meetings face.

       A well-designed agenda should work when it’s “mostly broken.” If unforeseen circumstances render an agenda impossible to execute, it was too brittle to begin with.

      —JAMES MACANUFO CREATIVE DIRECTOR, PIXEL PRESS AND COAUTHOR, GAMESTORMING

      Meeting derailments happen despite good intentions and solid preparation. It’s frustrating when you put time and energy into preparing a plan that didn’t work out. It feels disrespectful to you and the attendees who came prepared.

      But all is not lost. The basic components that make up a meeting agenda are still present. The duration is not unlimited: there is a beginning, middle, and end. There are a quantifiable number of people present. Those people carry a limited set of expectations—ideas in their brains about why they showed up in the first place. Dave could have designed a better situation by not being tied to his agenda and instead prioritizing three things:

      • What ideas did he intend to explore?

      • How did the people in the room expect to receive those ideas (or were they expecting entirely different ideas)?

      • How much time did he have to get through the material?

      It’s good to stay flexible about agendas, but important to be crystal clear about the three core elements of agenda building: ideas, people, and time. Sticking to these three elements, while being flexible about how you get there, keeps an agenda from being too brittle.

      Count Your Ideas, Then Count Your People

      The hour-long business meeting often ends up on your calendar because calendaring software (and the clock) defaults to that length of time. An hour is longer than necessary for a quick check-in, but depending on the group, it might not be long enough to fully explore many ideas or “just-complex-enough concepts.” So, first, count how many of these you intend to address. That number gives you the ability to assess a meeting’s scale.

      How СКАЧАТЬ