The Little Meeting That Could
Once upon a time, there was a meeting with a noble purpose.
It was designed as a forum where leaders of various teams can discuss different topics, share their experience, bring up their concerns.
In practice, it was eating time of a dozen of people. Each week, 2 hours.
Endless discussions leading nowhere. Pointless arguments with no final decision taken.Two persons talking to each other for half an hour while everyone else is out of context. Status reports duplicating what has been communicated through other channels already. People looking into their screens, just waiting when it’s their turn to mumble their status to the boss (not even to others!)…
We’ve all been there. Should we live in Wonderland, we’d be doomed to the endless tea party, given the amount of time we’ve killed there.
But that was long time ago. Now it is a rather short (up to 45 mins) bi-weekly meeting serving its original purpose.
How did we get there? It was legend-
nothing special or new.
Agenda, time-boxing and moderation
Introducing these three items allowed us to stay focused and keep discussions productive and healthy. It also dropped meeting time to 45 minutes almost immediately. In the following weeks we’ve run out of topics and switched to bi-weekly schedule to accumulate some.
For time-boxing, we’ve introduced a rule of 3 minutes to present a topic, and then 7 minutes for discussion. If timer goes off, and there’s still a discussion, we decide, if it makes sense to finish it now, or take it offline.
Moderation included reminding people not to interrupt each other and dive into their devices.
Agenda
As the meeting is designed as a forum to share opinions and bring up different topics, the agenda is organically crowd-sourced. Any attendee can add something there, alongside with a brief description of the topic. We use an Asana project for this (it’s not designed for this particular purpose, but in fact is quite convenient).
Asana’s tasks are used as agenda items. Once discussed, it gets crossed out. We also have several recurring topics like team changes that sit there forever as a reminder to touch them every meeting.
An interesting side-effect of this approach is that not every topic makes it to the meeting. Sometimes, it gets discussed and resolved after a couple of comments. I find it awesome as it saves time of the whole group.
There’s more…
Over time, we added 2 more improvements.
Rules
We’ve defined a set of rules to be followed by everyone in the meeting. Having them written down near agenda allows to refer to them quickly.
The rules are:
- Prepare agenda in advance
A soft deadline for agenda is the end of the day before the meeting day, to give everyone a chance to follow the next rule. The deadline is soft, as sometimes there are unexpected items, and it would be silly to postpone them for two weeks just because it popped up in the morning. - Read the Agenda before the meeting
It’s way easier to express your opinion on the topic if you gave it some thought in advance. That’s why we also require some context, not a generic line of text. Half an hour reminder before the meeting makes it impossible to forget read the Agenda. - Time-boxing
3 minute intro from the author and 7 minute discussion afterwards. - Take longer discussions offline
These 2 are part of moderation explained above. - Be present
It’s about participating in discussions rather than diving into one’s device. Surprisingly, people become much less tolerant to pointless discussions they’re not in when they can’t just dive into their phone. - Be visible
The group is split between 2 offices, meeting is held via hangout. This rule is about staying in camera’s sight.
Follow-up
Yet another thing everyone knows should be done, but rarely does.
Write down topics discussed, decisions taken, information shared. Benefits are obvious:
- Writing down agreements makes it easier if not enables holding someone accountable.
- If someone missed the meeting they can get a grasp what was going on there.
- Having shared this follow-up to a wider audience, not only participants, helps transparency and information spread.
So that’s the story how we fought entropy and shortened the gap between common sense and common practice for a tiny bit.
