Do you know their expectations

At the most recent meeting you were in, or you led or facilitated, did you find out what people's expectations of the meeting were?

I know we're often under time pressure - and senior leadership pressure - to 'just get started' with the meeting, but asking about people's expectations is still one of the best things you can do in the early parts of a meeting.

Rather than worrying about hidden agendas popping up during the meeting, or struggling throughout the meeting to keep things on track, finding out about expectations up front is a brilliant pre-emptive move.

Don't downplay or devalue it; it really does help get a lot of information 'out on the table' and helps get clear about why we're all here.

We have expectations at restaurants, of holidays, at weddings and of training, books, customer service and relationships. Why not expectations of where our time is being requested - the workplace meeting?

Spend a little time early on in your next meeting hearing people's expectations, and you'll soon find out if it's going to be a big job to get everyone on the same page, or if you're nearly, almost, already there.

End 'all-talk' meetings

Travelling on a Melbourne tram yesterday, I was riding past a business office not far from where I live. One of the company's meeting rooms faces the street, so I always look in as we pass by to see what they're doing in their meetings.

Of the many, many times I've gone past, they seem to always be:

- sitting at the table,

- looking at each other,

- talking at or with each other.

A fairly standard meeting. I call it an 'all-talk' meeting. They're not looking at anything; just each other.

Sure, eye contact and connection is important but meetings that are all-talk are worse in terms of productivity, engagement, clarity and decision-making.

If a 'common point of visual context' was used - a visual something... anything for them to look at - productivity would peak! A visual on the wall, a whiteboard, a flip chart, heck use the window!

When we're making sense of information and all we use is each other, we miss out on the opportunity to find and build commonality.

Meetings give us information overload; then we go for relief, distraction ...and we switch off.

Shift your meetings from 'all talk' by adding 'some visual'. It's plenty better!

Just thinking, or capturing the thinking

Working on tasks like problem solving, idea generation or planning and decision making means we can get into some pretty heavy thinking.

I wonder... are we doing too much thinking and not enough capturing of the thinking?

Have you had that situation where you've come up with an idea, some clever thoughts and then ... it's gone, disappeared as quickly as it arrived? Can't remember it?

It’s a waste to think great things and not net, trap or curate and gather them. Too often we dismiss our thoughts and ideas as not being valuable, but they’ve just been created as thoughts; they haven’t been further morphed into an action or an implementable thing.

Give yourself the credit that yes, you did come up with an idea, a possibility. Then capture it as soon as you can!

A library of ideas is something to draw from later on.

We can't always sit down and expect brilliant ideas to come to us on demand. Rather, we can capture them when they come throughout our daily habits and activities. This is the clever art of idea curation.

Q: Do you lose your ideas or do you catch them?

When things go around in circles

Have you been in a meeting recently when the discussion seemed to keep spinning around in circles, not getting anywhere?

Aaarrgggh! It’s so frustrating, time-wasting and a waste of efforts, energy and ideas.

It’s also a sure sign that people are talking and thinking about different things… and it’s something that can be remedied. Phew!

What can happen is someone launches off with data or detail, shifts into their opinion and then finishes up with their prescriptive ideas and suggestions of what the actions should be.

It's a mess of information. When things get messy and seem to go around in circles, I separate the mess into these 4 chunks:

1️⃣ facts

2️⃣ opinions

3️⃣ ideas

4️⃣ actions.

Do you see how different these are? It’s tricky for us to hold all 4 elements in our mind at once.

When someone is talking and they manage to cover all of these 4 things (in one breath) and then someone else does the same, yes it feels like it’s going around in circles - all that information, going nowhere. What do we do? Tune in, look out and listen for these 4 different types of communication and expression. Facts. Opinions. Ideas. Actions.

The cost of confusion

How much time do we spend trying to make sense of things, re-reading, scanning, skipping through information trying to piece it all together.

While the world’s productivity gurus are keen on selling us a new app or habit, what if we looked at the cost of confusion and sought to reduce the time we spend confusing people.

Rather than acting like we’ve got it together, what if we set aside a few minutes in a meeting to make sense? What if, instead of saying ’Now, let me give you some context’ and embarking on a 15-minute explanation of the history going back to the 1900s (yes this happened recently) we asked, ‘What do you need to make sense of?’

What if we shut up first.

What if we asked them about the parts they need to make sense of.

Imagine all the unnecessary detail, the overly long ‘context’ monologues and the long-winded ‘let-me-tell-you-about-the-history-of-this-thing’ stories.

Check first. What do they need? Where is their knowledge now; where does it need to be? Don't add to the overload; make sense instead.

Q: What’s a topic you’re confused about right now?