Fantastic Studios leading a innovation workshop at Fotografiska in Stockholm

The rise of participatory meetings

Digital tools are making most information meetings obsolete. Here is how you should spend your time instead!

Written by Henrik Johansson/Yannick Porter (Fantastic Studios) and Ola Möller (MethodKit)

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Picture all meetings you have been in. How many times did the thought ‘what am I doing here’ cross your mind? All those never ever ending meetings you’ve attended, or the times when you wished that your manager or colleagues would’ve just sent a message with the information instead.

This is a post about meetings, about a shift we see in the meeting landscape.

And how digital tools are shaping our prioritization of time. We still live in a time where information needs to be shared. But most information meetings are turning into a waste of time, not because we don’t need the information, but rather that we have more effective ways of giving it. What is arising in its place is the need for coming together in workplaces and project teams to solve complex challenges, together. This need is more important now than ever.

Where are work meetings heading, really?

Digital structures and better information systems are enabling effective one-way communication, and more effective ways to comment and engage around detailed content. Methods and tools such as internal online communities, Slack, Google Docs, videos etc. are making unengaging, information heavy meetings increasingly less relevant.

The need for working together is however no less relevant now. Most organisations have similar challenges. Four recurring challenges that we have observed are:

1. To create a flourishing creative culture
2. To be able to solve complex problems
3. To be able to understand and analyze customers
4. The skills and capacity to create innovative products and services

Finding solutions and ways of working that solve the above challenges requires both participation and a creative mindset. This will lead to an increased demand for well facilitated and engaging meetings, workshops and processes to solve and put structures into place that over time will make the organisation more creative, effective and innovative.

Two types of meeting facilitation

We have observed two distinct types of meeting facilitation. One focusing on content and another focusing on process.

A content-focused facilitator works most with what content the meeting should contain.

• The task
• The agenda items
• The goals and decisions being made

Process facilitators focus on the how. As in, how the process of the meeting leads the group to the desired outcomes.

• The tools, methods and processes
• Group dynamics and relations
• Ambience, guidelines, norms, rules

In our observations we have identified an unbalance in the roles, where most meetings have poor or little focus on process facilitation. Often the content facilitator is expected to also assume the process facilitator’s role, and yet doesn’t take the role seriously enough or doesn’t know how to do it well. We have seen the effects of what happens when content and process are well facilitated, not only does it make the group more effective, it also enables significant breakthroughs in what the group produces.

4 things you need to do
to make the most out of meetings

Here are a few recommendations when facilitating a participatory meeting:

1) Become a process-focused facilitator
Those that lead meetings need to be able to facilitate the process, not only know the content! Most people find it hard to manage both the content and process. A way to deal with this is separating those responsibilities. Delegate either content facilitation or process facilitation to someone else and experiment with your role from meeting to meeting. With time you will be able to master both roles simultaneously, taking a big leap into the role of a facilitative leader.

2) Prepare a structured process for the meeting
Planning your meetings will be crucial to make the most out of a group. To plan well and fast you will get far with a few methods and mindsets. We have put together a meeting design guide to help you plan your next meeting. Meeting Design Guide.

3) Create inclusive dialogue
We often experience the use of speaker lists in meetings, something we believe takes away the flow of things. Here is a simple process that we have seen works more efficiently.

• Start with sharing the necessary information to get the group going in the right direction.
• Have a prepared question for the group to find answers to. Have the participants work in small groups or pairs.
• Share results with the whole group. If it is input for a decision, make sure the participants write down their ideas or input.
• Repeat the process for the next topic or question. Make sure to focus on one topic at the time.

A crucial mindset to have in this process is separating divergent (i.e. discussion, ideation etc) and convergent (i.e. decision making, summarizing) thinking. An inclusive dialogue will engage participants during the meeting and create ownership of the topics and ideas, thus making the implementation process more efficient.

4) Visualize and use physical material
A recurring challenge when leading participatory meetings is that the content isn’t captured in a format that can be taken forward and that the conversations seem to be going in circles. Here, we have noticed that physical material is of great help.

• Use cards, pictures and personas as prompts for coming up with answers to a question.
• Use post-its or Google Docs to capture ideas
• Use templates to finalize and analyze concepts.

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A post written by Henrik Johansson/Yannick Porter (Fantastic Studios) and Ola Möller (MethodKit)

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