Run better meetings: Artful Participation
A few years ago at a client: I just finished introducing a concept called artful participation. We were 14 people in the room starting a meeting.
After hearing my explanation, one man stood up and said:
“I will leave this meeting now. This is the greatest contribution I can make to the effectiveness of this collaboration. I realize that I should not be part of this meeting and that I won’t be able to contribute.”
At first people looked surprised. Then they thanked him and he left. After this, more and more people in the organization started to walk out of meetings they can’t contribute to.
Even better: After a few weeks some other changes took place in regards to how this company prepared and ran its meetings. It wasn’t necessary anymore for people to leave meetings they could not contribute to as they were not invited anymore in the first place. That is a great development for the organization’s meeting culture.
Increase the quality of peoples’ contribution in meetings
So what is artful participation? I first encountered it a few years ago in my learning process with a social technology called Sociocracy30, a social technology for effective collaboration at scale which we at creaffective use at customers and in our own team.
Artful Participation is a simple but powerful reminder for oneself during every moment of a meeting. It asks the following question:
“Is my behavior in this moment the greatest contribution I can make to the effectiveness of this collaboration?”
One the one hand this sounds simple. On the other hand, the consequences — if taken seriously — can be profound.
The question assumes that people act from a stance of response-ability (=responsibility) and take ownership for their contributions in a meeting.
The greatest contribution could then be:
- not to say anything, instead of also saying something just to gain visibility
- consciously interrupt somebody, instead of letting him / her continue to ramble
- objecting to a proposal being made, instead of just saying nothing for the sake of harmony
Have you ever experienced the above behaviors? Or even exhibited them yourself?
I know, this is not unusual. Sometimes it also takes some courage to participate artfully.
In our own team we start introducing certain actions with “for the sake of artful participation…” to make people aware of what is to come.
Principles to run better meetings
Artful participation is one out of ten general principles that I introduce in my new book “Run better meetings — how to design and facilitate productive & effective meetings that people want more of”.
I am currently in the process of writing it.
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