The art of IDOARRT 🙌

In this article you’ll learn how to bring structure to your meetings, by using IDOARRT. It’s a simple, but valuable trick. Also, I’ll share how we introduced it in our office.

Once upon a time, at work 🏢

📥 “Exciting, I’ve got another email!”
📆 It’s an invitation to a meeting with the subject: Catch up on project X.
🤦 “Wait, that’s all? No agenda?”

A colleague would organize a meeting, create a calendar event and start inviting like Oprah handing out Christmas gifts.

Then, a group of co-workers would gather. People run in late, we spend the first 10 minutes chatting about Netflix, lunch or anything random.

After that, we get into the subject: ‘project X’. Each of us taking multiple turns to talk. When done, we walk out.

The result, as you might recognize from your own experience: everyone walks out of the room thinking ‘what happened and what do we do now?’

We decided we should have better meetings 🤝

We realized this way of doing is a waste of our time and energy. Meetings like these are less productive than they could be, they’re buzz killers.

People can’t be good pros (or a team) if they don’t know what’s expected of them, or what the goal of the event is.

So, we did something about it.

Introducing IDOARRT for meeting design

In our pursue to spend time more useful we chose to try IDOARRT Meeting Design. This tool provides a structure that’s more than your average agenda. It gives full context for everyone involved, stating everything about the meeting: the Intention, Desired Outcome, Agenda, Roles, Rules and Time.

What we learned about IDOARRT 📝

First of all, using IDOARRT works pretty well for us. The people involved, from inside and outside our company, tell us it’s nice to have structure during a meeting. Also, by providing an IDOARRT, people perceive the gathering as well prepared and therefore more valuable.

However, it took us several weeks to make this method our own. We reviewed and improved, constantly. Here are some guidelines we provided for ourselves.

• Be easy on the use of all the letters. The letters IDOA are definitive keepers. RRT aren’t always necessary (also because Timing can also be seen in the length of the calendar event). Depending on the meeting (regulars with colleagues, or presentations with clients) the organizer of the event can decide what’s needed.
• Always kick off with it. The organizer should walk casually through the IDOARRT at the beginning of the meeting. Learn it by heart as much as possible. This makes it more personal and creates a connection with the team. Ask if they want to add something.
• Create while talking. Sometimes it’s difficult to define roles and rules beforehand. For roles, you might use it as an introduction of the attendees. Ask them to introduce themselves by asking them to share why they’re joining. For rules, this can be solved by writing a few generalities down (like focus, openness or feedback e.g.), and ask the team to talk about what these things mean to them.
• Spontaneous still works. We feared that we couldn’t have unplanned get-togethers anymore. That doesn’t have to be the case. Last-minute meetings can still take place, just briefly touch upon the structure in the beginning of the conversation.

How we apply IDOARRT

We started to experiment with a small group of 5 people. Getting others along was - and sometimes is - a challenge for us, because some were not on the bandwagon from the start.

So, we developed a few options to solve this. When we now get invited to a meeting and there is no proper preparation, we consider the following:

1. Simply ask the one who sends the invitation to make an IDOARRT. Simple as that. Explain time is valuable and we want to get the most out of the team and meeting.
2. Lead by example, we make one ourself and send it to the one who organizes the meeting to see if it’s on point. Don’t worry if it’s too pushy, by doing this you’ll help them.
3. The last resort: don’t go. If the organizer won’t accept the input, we don’t know what’s expected of everyone. Explain time is valuable, and we won’t attend if there is no good planning. That’s ok.

How we discover what works for us ✨

Practicing the art of IDOARRT is not the only trick we try at Clockwork. We improve our way of working by doing experiments. This method is called Tweak.

The basic steps for tweaking our team’s way of working.

If you’re hungry for more 🥗

We started by defining our first alternative to a default. After that it’s all about reviewing and refining. When our team considers that new method as a keeper, they’ll try something new again.

Want to know more? Sweet! Please contact me, ask anything you like about this. All is good. Looking forward to hear from you 👋

Ps. For all you Dutchies: ik zoek teams om Tweak te testen, buiten de muren van Clockwork. Dat doe ik in mijn vrije tijd, omdat ik er snoeihard in geloof. Wil je meedoen? Stuur me een berichtje.