3 reasons why that meeting didn't make a decision

‘That’s an hour of my life I’ll never get back’

‘Urgh! There was no point in me even being there’.

‘And the purpose of that was *crickets*…’

If you’ve felt the annoyance of an outcome-less meeting you’ll know it’s lost time, an hour or more of time you ‘can’t get back’.

In an era where everyone’s got stuff to do, priorities of their own and deadlines to make, a time-wasting meeting is frustrating. It’s a career limiter too - particularly if you’re leading the meeting. You’re likely to get known as ‘that person that never gets decisions made’.

The Cost of Lost

Meetings that don’t make a decision are sources of lost time; they’re a waste of the incredible experience and brain-power in the room and there’s the cost of the actual working time of the people in the room. What a tragic ROI?! And don’t even start about the waste of a good meeting room when meeting space can be hard to come by in many workplaces!

But did we get anything done?

Yes, sure, there are times when you don’t need to make a decision in a meeting – it’s a meeting that’s about information sharing, or announcing something or it’s an ideas fest – but most meetings do need to get consensus or agreement or some type of outcome.

It’s what most meetings are judged on: ‘did we get sh*t done?’

What I hear a lot from people when I’m working with them to develop their Leader as Facilitator skills is that the meetings they run just don’t get the decision part done.

And now you’ve got to … Schedule. Another. Freakin’. Meeting.

Yes, you’ll need another meeting time in a week or two to do what should have been done in that meeting that just finished.

Hostage Situations, Time Wasters & High-Priced Parties

I think you need to avoid the ‘hostage situation’ as well as the ‘time waster’ types of meetings. This is where people are there against their will or you’ve got the wrong people in the room or didn’t get to an outcome.

Meetings need to be high on engagement andhigh on outcomes.

Avoid the ‘high-priced party’ meeting too, unless it really is a celebration and there’s little or no work to be done. (That’s where we’re having a great time but not doing anything!)

For meetings in today’s workplaces, it’s about engagement + outcomes. You have to have people contributing and participating AND you need to get stuff done, the good stuff, the right stuff… not just any stuff.

3 Reasons why there's no decision

There are three reasons why meetings don’t make decisions when they should have.

[Remember though that meetings are made up of people; people talking and working together. It’s not an automatic robotic machine meeting. We aren’t machines – we are people. We are people and we do things so we need to do something to make adjustments in meetings to make sure the right things get done. And decisions are a big part of that.]

The three reasons why that meeting didn’t make a decision is ... something wasn’t clear:

1.  The reason why you were making the decision wasn’t clear.

2.  The decision to be made wasn’t clear.

3.  The way you were going to decide wasn’t clear.

You see, it’s all too fuzzy. If it were clear, it would have happened. The leader, the meeting, the people would have been able to navigate through. But you didn’t. And I reckon it’s one or more of the three reasons. Here they are in a slightly new way of thinking:

1.           You (or the group or the leader or facilitator) didn’t decide why you were making the decision.

2.           You (or the group or the leader or facilitator) didn’t decide what the decision is

3.           You (or the group or the leader or facilitator) didn’t decide how you were going to decide

That’s a Why, What and How. Sounds a little like ‘Start with Why’ doesn’t it?

So before any type of meeting where a decision is expected, hoped or needing to be made:

1.  Know WHY you need to make the decision

2.  Know WHAT the decision is that needs to be made

3.  Decide HOW you’re going to decide.

That third one sound funny? Deciding how to decide? Yes, it’s a thing. (More on how to make the decision in my next post).

Don't leave it to hope or luck

Too many workplaces simply bring people together and hope they’ll talk enough to finally get to a point where they decide – or give in through exhaustion and frustration!

Don’t leave decision-making to random events, luck or hope. You may have to do some deciding before the meeting or at least, before the meeting makes that all-important decision.

Get clear on your why, what and how of decisions to be made and you’ll get known as ‘the person who helps us get sh*t done’!

When your meeting culture sucks: 8 ways to refresh

The meeting culture in many companies sucks. It’s no surprise given how last century some of our meeting behaviours are. We have meetings that are too many, too long, too little achieved, too much talk, too frustrating… it’s all too much!

The culture of how we meet can be deeply ingrained in an organisation. There are plenty of unwritten and unspoken rules that get followed simply because that’s how it’s been done for years.

And because we expect (or hope?) that so much will get done in our meetings, we owe it to our schedules, customers, colleagues (and families) to get as productive as we can.

Here’s how to inject some fresh thinking and behaviour into your workplace meetings for this week, month, year:

1. Have less: Say ‘no’

This is a classic piece of advice. Start fresh this year. Don’t meet if you don’t need to and if you do need to...

2. Have shorter: Time box it

Ok yes, you’re going to meet but keep the duration shorter. Use the technique of time-boxing; set a timer on your phone and go for the surprise of a seven, 16 or 23-minute meeting. I like to use a humorous ringtone for the alarm like zombie noises, spaceships or the theme from a well-known sit-com. It always gets a laugh, breaks the tension and inspires people to refocus for the next topic.

3. Go visual: Show me

Help people cut through all the blah-blah. When people can see what you mean, they’ll understand quicker and you’ll make faster progress. Everyday I work with leaders and teams and use sensemaking or mapping techniques with them. You don’t need to be able to draw. Pick up a marker and capture the key points, those ‘in-a-nutshell’ comments on a flip chart, whiteboard, tablet or note pad. What shape is their idea? Map that. The meeting will be 25% shorter once people can see what they’re talking about.  

4. Follow a process: This then that

Too many meetings follow an agenda - if you’re lucky - but no process. A process outlines how you’re going to handle each agenda item.

The default tends to be ‘let’s all talk about it’. Here the whole group of the meeting talk (or interrupt each other) to put their views forward. But it’s so challenging to move from the talking about your opinion, to the brainstorming solutions part and then try and get to making a decision – all in the one breath. 

Borrowed from the world of professional facilitators, a process will help you confirm the facts or background, then hear opinions, then generate ideas and finally, agree to actions. Here’s my advice on an Accelerated Meeting Framework that just works and how to do it. 

5. Stay creative: Yes and…

Aim to include more creative techniques in your meetings, workshops and sessions. I’m not talking about ‘Pass the Orange’ or ‘Bust the Balloon’ party games by the way! I love to borrow from the world of improvisation. The Improv Encyclopedia is a rich trove of creative loot for groups and teams to be more innovative, ingenious and collaborative when they get together.

6. Get inspiration: good better best

It’s practical to aspire towards ‘better practice’ if you can’t quite get to best practice yet. Do this by learning from other fields and businesses that nail their meeting productivity and culture 

There is a lot to learn about productive collaboration from the Scrum methodology used by many software and tech companies, and increasingly other industries and businesses. This is thanks Jeff Sutherland – one of the inventors of Scrum and his practical book ‘Scrum’. 

7. Stand up sometimes: No chairs required

A popular scrum approach is to have a daily standup meeting. Simply start by removing the chairs and tables from your meeting; you’ll have shorter, more focused and productive meetings right away. You don’t even need a meeting room for this! Stand up in your workspace. I saw a Zara retail team having their morning standup huddle between the shorts and the shoes!

8. Change your environment: Love thy neighbour

Break your habits and patterns of same/same; the same rooms for the same meetings. In workplaces where it’s challenging to find a meeting room, why not go outside? Try walking meetings, go to a cafe or other unusual and inspiring venue like sports courts, community colleges, bowling alleys, community theatres, swimming pools, the beach or lake, local park or other recreation facility. Take a deep breath while you’re there!

A client recently hunted out some meeting room locations in the businesses that were next door or nearby. Now they have some inspiring collaborative ventures up and running that started just by finding out who was in the neighborhood and whether they might have some meeting space available.

9. Bonus tip: Stay open

If someone else in the team brings along some creative and cultural shifts to the way you meet, collaborate or communicate this year, take it… stay open. Say ‘yes’. Experiment, test and try.

Try hitting ‘refresh’ on your meetings, workplace, collaboration and communication habits. Test and experiment with things to find what works and keep at it. Avoid falling back into lazy meeting habits or you’ll have the same things, creating the same outcomes and getting the same results. That’s so last century!

When seat kicking is a good thing

Lengthy meetings, short on outcomes can be frustrating time wasters.

You'd think we'd have the hang of how to make our interactions in groups work better for us...it's nearly 50 years since Bruce Tuckman's team performance model suggested we needed to form, norm and storm before we'd perform.

Oh yawn! Who has the time!?

No wonder we look for a digital drug fix on one of our devices in dull meetings and workshops. Zzzzzzzz!

Low levels of engagement and poor participation isn't 'their' problem... It's up to us to fix it, every time we are in a meeting that isn't working. In 2012, web conferencing company SalesCrunch, created a “Don’t Suck at Meetings” guide
based on more than 10,000 meetings hosted in their online meeting platform. The guide revealed
that people’s attention and participation starts to decline after the 30 minute mark and they begin to give 1/4 of their attention to something else. It also showed that 92% of the attendees
participate in the discussion if they are actively engaged.

Andrew Knight, a business school professor at Washington University in St. Louis, headed a study on the impact of standing meetings in 2014. He wired participants with small sensors to measure their physiological arousal - defined as how their bodies react when they get excited. Participants were asked to work together in teams for half an hour to come up with a new university recruitment video. Half of them collaborated in a standard meeting room, complete with chairs and tables while the other half worked together in a space with no seats.

Yes, it was seatless!

Knight and his team evaluated the results for their collaboration and creativity.  The results were dramatic. Knight found “teams who stood had greater physiological arousal and
were less territorial about ideas than those in the seated arrangement. Members of the standing groups reported that their team members were less protective of their ideas. This reduced territoriality, led to more information sharing and to higher-quality videos.”

It’s time to stand up.

Your meetings will be 34% shorter if you're on your feet. This kind of meeting is also widely used in Scrum methodologies and practices in agile technology teams. They're high on collaboration and killer at delivery!

We spend a lot of our day sitting so 30 minutes or less of standing won't hurt. And people who sit less have a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases.

So kick that seat.

Propel your meetings forward with productive, collaborative and creative action. A meeting with the team that's like that deserves a standing ovation.

A P.S. to the Standup

Good news! The team I talked about in my recent post The best meeting : 10 minutes, no water bottles, no chairs, no tables, has now had four stand up meetings... FOUR.... and they're hooked!

Yes there was uncertainty. There was doubt. There was disbelief.

But there was also focus, clarity and progress.

They laughed. They even applauded spontaneously at the end of the first meeting.

And then off they went and started... doing! Hooray.

I'm still standing by them as they stand up, mainly to guide the leader with some facilitation skills. Of course, that leader already has some great facilitation skills, but you know what it's like when you're working with PEOPLE! :-)

We're all human and so the human leader just needs to deliver some more human to the humans in the stand up.

So a little coaching, guidance and debriefing for the leader on the fine art of 'handling the sh*t that goes down in groups' is what we've be doing after each of the stand ups.

I'll keep standing by their stand ups and look forward to seeing them getting on with great progress and celebrating - whether they stumble, fall, get up, fail, or go wildly beyond what they were expecting.

Are you standing up yet?

How to get the good stuff done

It truly is time to stop meeting like this. There have been some valiant attempts to get us to reinvent how, when, why and if we need to meet over recent years ... but it’s not changing quickly enough.

I think if you’re leading change, you just need to ‘step in’. Put your hand up, step up and say ‘yep, I’ll facilitate this one.’

Then say: ‘We’re making this a ‘doing’... not a meeting!’

Yep, meetings should be called ‘doings’. So you get stuff done. Otherwise, our meetings will continue to be dysfunctional. Too much time. Too little output. Too much talk. Too little listening. Too few actions. Too little impact. Too big a cost. 

I worked with a team recently to facilitate their team planning and strategy days and they were amazed at what they achieved in the time available. A day here. A day there. Yes that's what good facilitation will do for a group and the clear objective they had!

But it is also about HOW the meeting was set up, what the agenda looked like, how they worked together, what they did throughout the sessions and how there was a strong bias for action.

I'm all for setting aside some time for talk but that's what I do - set aside some time. Timebox it. You say 'this is how much time we have to talk about this topic.' Then go! Talk about it. I capture the key points raised, the key arguments and the main ideas and agreements. But we are always thinking about forward movement and progress. Doing.

So... timebox it 

Use the time boxing technique to get good stuff done.

I worked with some cool technology developers recently ho were working on a project for a major retail chain. Prior to the important client work, the team got together, to get their sh*t together. Smart team!

They had their strategy and planning day. And they were used to working together so what they did was use a clock with short timeframes to keep them moving, keep them progressing and keep them active. One of them was a keen runner, so they used a running clock on their iPad to segment out time for tasks throughout the day. Short intervals of just a couple of minutes.

It was brilliant to see. This team, pushed to decision making, action and prioritizing in two minutes. What!? I wondered if they could do it.... and yes, they did it. Time and time again throughout the day. Plenty of time to talk and discuss, but then it was down to action to decide and prioritise and they did it super-quick.

Get on with the doing, less of the meeting and you'll make a great start to your project and piece of work. Go. Do.