Meeting Design. Kevin M. Hoffman
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Название: Meeting Design
Автор: Kevin M. Hoffman
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Маркетинг, PR, реклама
isbn: 9781933820378
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• Why did you establish this meeting?
• Has that job been done?
If you can’t answer the first, or the second answer is “yes,” the meeting should be deleted or declined. It’s that simple. Part of knowing when a standing meeting like Team Rocket’s course correction meeting is working is recognizing when it’s time to stop having it. Continuing to expect a productive outcome out of the same get-together when the goals have already been achieved (or new goals haven’t been clearly articulated) is a special kind of insanity that only exists in meetings. To combat that insanity, apply the design-thinking checklist.
1. Identify the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Understand that problem sufficiently with research or a clear understanding of constraints.
2. Revisit and experiment with format, including length of time and method of facilitation. Consider skipping a few meetings, just to see what happens.
3. Make changes to the meeting semi-permanent after observing successes. Eliminate changes that don’t produce successes.
4. Walk away from meetings that no longer do the job intended.
Identify the Problem
Team Rocket’s identification of the problem is painfully vague. Preventing “things” from getting “out of hand” is going to mean different things to different team members. Which things? What is the threshold for “out of hand?”
In the hope of making a group of people more collaborative, people throw meetings at problems without sufficiently examining the problem itself. A regular meeting is an expensive way to solve a vague problem (see Figure 1.1), because meetings cost as much as everyone’s combined paycheck for the allotted time. If the goal is to get people talking, there are much cheaper tools than meetings. Instant messaging tools such as Slack,2 Hipchat,3 and even good old-fashioned email allow groups of people to communicate a tremendous amount of information asynchronously, making it “knowledge on demand.” Tools like these can reduce unnecessary face time used for communication if they are applied with a clear purpose. Here’s an example of what I mean by “clear purpose”:
“We use (chat platform/channel) to discuss daily tasks and request assistance. Post your awesome cat pictures or recipes somewhere else.”
FIGURE 1.1 Meetings can be pretty costly when we are unprepared, because it’s everyone’s paycheck.
If you still need a meeting, the problem needs to be defined. When the problem feels under (or even un-) defined, identify and agree on the problem the meeting is intended to solve. Then diagnose the problem. Can anyone in your group be specific about what a check-in meeting is intended to accomplish? If they can, that’s a good start.
Job performance indicators for Team Rocket’s standing meeting could include an increase in efficiency by reducing the number of steps in a process, a list of ways in which the designs can be “ahead of the curve,” or the amount of new ideas produced around current problems reported by people receiving food delivery. Each of these goals is measurable, establishing a baseline against which the meeting can be examined.
Working from a primary problem, you can identify secondary problems, such as identifying and routinizing successful processes, or confronting individual fears about what could go wrong if Team Rocket weren’t doing its job well. Focusing on what could go wrong also has the potential to repair a negative project culture by providing a transparent forum for building camaraderie and trust.
A meeting is a synchronous approach to communication. It takes full advantage of the ways in which human beings communicate via speech, intentional and unintentional body language, and manipulation of physical space, such as creating a diagram together. A meeting affords tremendous capabilities for communication, but not all problems require this much communication to address. Once you have an agreement about the intended outcome, you’ve take the first step toward designing better meetings. The next step is running some experiments.
Consider Multiple Formats
Team Rocket is trying to position their design work and their client as groundbreaking in the competitive market of online meal delivery. A positive outcome of the ongoing meeting could be measured by the amount of agency (or client) blog posts around unique functionality, as it’s being developed. They are currently producing up to two blog posts per week, but that output isn’t fast enough to keep up with the conversation. Each time they meet, they talk at length about this problem, and then they talk some more.
A conversation is only one of several ways to structure this team’s time. Sadly, most meetings lean heavily on talking and only talking. Instead of talking, they could try collaboratively visualizing the process of getting a blog post published in a flow chart on the wall. A wall diagram, as seen in Figure 1.2, shows how visualizing a process in sequence can reveal efficiency gains by examining and questioning individual steps to publication. Physical objects that can be manipulated, such as sticky notes, can catalog options—pros and cons. What about even spending some time without speaking, where ideas are written and shared before being discussed?
FIGURE 1.2 Sticky notes create models to visualize discussion.
Productive meetings increase clarity about a problem, identify tactics to solve a problem, and evaluate the relative merit of those tactics. Sometimes conversation can get the job done, but constraints presented by the human brain are often inaccurate and too subjective. See Chapter 2, “The Design Constraint of All Meetings,” for an overview of these problems.
Exclusively relying on conversation and human memory is a single pattern for executing a meeting, and often a faulty pattern that creates disagreement where none may exist. There are other patterns for facilitation and capture. You’ll find them throughout the book, with most residing in Chapters 3, 4, and 5: “Build Agendas Out of Ideas, People, and Time,” “Manage Conflict with Facilitation,” and “Facilitation Strategy and Style.”
If you’ve started exploring other options, the next step is to pick the options that sound promising and start making some changes.
Make Small Changes and Assess Improvements
What if Team Rocket never changed their meeting format? Sticking to a meeting format without further experimentation is like flying on autopilot: it only works for a limited amount of time. Symptoms of autopilot meetings include the same, strong personalities repeatedly driving the agenda and people tuning out, agreeing to whatever runs out the clock. Worst of all, the autopilot meeting loses sight of its original intention. With iterative changes over time, a regularly СКАЧАТЬ