Making it worse / making it better

As more of our days are spent in online meetings, many of our bad meeting behaviours haven’t changed: they’ve transferred online... and likely gotten worse.

Meeting tips and advice often focus on the agenda: have an agenda and send it out before the meeting.

But the agenda is only the ‘what’ to be done. And the agenda is not usually the problem with bad meetings. It’s about the process.

Most meetings follow dull default processes:

- One person talks. Another talks. We vote

- Two people talk and assume everyone agrees

- One person talks. Everyone agrees so we can finish.

The problems are many: low engagement/buy in, less contribution, participation and performance, more invisibility, boredom, distraction, exclusion. If the agenda is the what, the process... is the ‘how’.

Meetings are made better when you improve the process of how you run the meeting. A better process that is run by the leader of the meeting.

To facilitate better meetings is a skill. And to facilitate better meetings online, another skill.

Progress, outcomes and people suffer because bad meetings are made worse when we flip them as-is to online. Better meeting experiences are possible. 

Lighten the online meeting load

After so many online meetings Urgh! We’re foggy, brain-fried ... like we’re in a continuous conference.

This is the human experience of cognitive overload. But it’s exacerbated and multiplied by the load that’s coming via one channel - online. Yes, its different to face to face, next to each other, same room or space.

Here are 3 COGNITIVE LOAD COPING habits:

☀️Change state and break.

Take a short break between every meeting. Yes every one. It ‘releases’ the mental load you’ve been carrying. Like emptying a truck’s load. Don’t do back-to-back. Bad. Just 30 seconds, get up, move and BREAK your state.

☀️Stop soaking information and start sensemaking.

In every meeting, WRITE some handwritten notes. Not typed. Hand written. This is ‘externalizing’ information. It actively relieves those fried feels.

☀️Write down more than a meeting’s end points, actions or decisions.

Catch a quotable quote, a smile moment, a PHRASE that sounded good. This helps retain some focus.

And it’s ok... you’re not failing.

We’re all carrying around a huge concrete slab of shock, change, worry and uncertainty. That’s already some heavy stuff.

Break your state

Write it down

Catch a phrase

7 hours of meetings and no time for work

This is a reality, stuck in meetings each day, trying to do the work, but being locked in back-to-back meetings giving you no time to actually do the work.

Is this your world too?

While we need meetings to collaborate, communicate, co-design and co-create, most organisations still haven’t worked out how to support their leaders to run meetings in ways that are more productive, creative, effective and collaborative.

These are the four outcomes good sensemaking + facilitation delivers in meetings:

🌕 productive

🌕 creative

🌕 effective

🌕 collaborative.

At your next meeting, ask or enquire: What sensemaking techniques are we using today, to help us understand each other and help us make these important decisions?

If you get blank faces as a response, or ’the PowerPoint deck’, or ‘Karen is taking minutes’ … these all get the ’no/wrong’ buzzer from me. Bzzzzt!

With 7 hours of meetings, the meetings aren’t working. They’re not making sense; likely going around in circles; and lacking focus, leadership and outcomes.

You need just one sensemaker in the room to completely change how a meeting works.

Are you the one? 

Are we on the same page yet

Getting on the same page is a collaborative and strategic need we have and yet it can take such an effort for us to get there.

Perhaps some transparency might help. That word 'transparency' ... meaning 'easy to be seen'.

How transparent is your thinking? How well can you see what you're thinking so you can communicate it, share it and transfer it to others?

It can take us so long to get our heads around what we’re thinking, let alone understand what others are thinking! In the meantime, thoughts seem opaque, cloudy and thick - rather than transparent, clear and understandable.

And there's no need to over simplify, just to understand. We can tend to resort to lazy methods like lists and clumps of unsorted information, expecting others to do the connecting of themes, the joining of dots and the revealing of patterns.

But oh, that keeps us on different pages.

We can do better.

Today’s cray-cray world of information, ideas, happenings and data needs us to be able to:

🎫 get to grips with information quickly,

🎫 get ourselves (as a group) on the same page, and then

🎫 decide ... so we can get on with it. This is sensemaking.

Why engagement is harder to do these days

If you’ve watched a movie, tv series or binge-watched anything, you’d know how compelling and enticing this entertainment and communication medium is. Filmmakers are like sensemakers and storytellers on steroids or high performance supplements.

So every day in the workplace, we’re now dealing with a tougher audience.

Our meetings, workshops, planning and strategy sessions have a tough audience who are used to higher quality productions, scintillating storylines and rich and complex characters who do weird and intriguing stuff. It's engaging and entertaining!

No wonder people are bored in everyday boring meetings and workshops. They’re comparatively... boring. Nothing exciting happens; it’s the same meeting as last time; and it doesn’t engage or excite us the way these other drugs of engagement do.

We must lift our game.

To be engaging we must be more engaging.

We don’t have months to work on a script, lighting, story arc or edits. We need to think, design and engage people in ways they now like to be engaged.

The stuff we used to do isn’t doing what it used to do. Next episode starts in 5 4 3 2 1….