Planning An Effective Meeting

Ever been in a situation where you have a high stakes meeting ahead, and you don’t know how to plan it efficiently? Then this article is for you.

We spend a large chunk of our working hours attending or conducting meetings. We mostly don’t have control over the effectiveness of the meetings we attend or are dragged in to, but we can sure design and conduct great meetings with a little prep and thought. There are two parts to planning meetings — designing the meeting, and planning the delivery. Let’s explore up each part.

1. Designing The Meeting

One simple framework that has consistently worked for me is heavily based on understanding the audience. This are the design elements I use.

a. Intent — Define your intent of the meeting. What will this meeting change/achieve in the larger scheme of things. Think big. Think outrageous.

b. Outcomes — What are the specific outcomes of this meetings. Unlike intent, here you have to define what do you want to achieve at the end of the meeting

c. Outputs — What are the tangible outputs you want by the end of this meeting. Is it a document signed? Is it a concept note? Define the tangible results of the meeting here

d. Anxieties/Big Questions — What are the the biggest anxieties and questions you think the audience has when they are walking into a meeting? This is one of the core elements. If you don’t have much clarity around this, set up few calls or pre-conversations to to get a sense of this.

e. Key Messages — How do you drive the messaging/solutions for each of the anxieties or questions. The agenda design for the meeting will be hugely defined by this.

2. Planning Delivery

This is designing an effective agenda for the delivery of the plan with the design elements.

a. Agenda design -

Use this template to lay out the agenda. Session is the topic you are covering in that particular duration. Plan is how you’ll deliver that session — you could do a group discussion, you could do a toasting session with sticky notes, or you can talk through a deck. It depends on what your session is about. Materials are the the decks/documents/etc you need to execute that plan.

b. Facilitation 101

• Start the meeting by asking people what is the one question, concern they want answered by the end of the meeting. Depending on the size of the group — go one by one or sample set. This is where you’re taking stock of their expectations and making it participatory
• Call out what the expected outcomes and the roles of the people in this meeting are very explicitly. These are your expectations
• Pepper in the audience discussing with each other after every 2 sessions. Don’t make it a passive process

More on facilitation techniques later, but these are some of the basic principles.

Remember, don’t be too rigid with your agenda. You can always shuffle up the sessions as long as they are geared towards achieving the outcomes.