Not all time is created equal: how to have better meetings
The quality of a meeting is determined before it starts
Meetings are essential to effective decision-making and execution in organizations.
As Bain & Company management consultants, Jenny Davis-Peccoud and Michael Mankins point out in a Bain Brief article, the organizations that are best at making decisions “have learned to manage their meetings as carefully as they manage any other part of their business.”
To help ensure that meetings have a clear purpose and achieve their objectives, Mankins and Davis-Peccoud recommend using a framework called “IDD”: Inform, Discuss, and Decide.
According to their research, the staff at the University of California, Berkeley are expected to begin each meeting with the following statement: “The purpose of this meeting is to inform you about X, to discuss Y, and to decide on Z.”
Organizing meetings this way has the following two benefits:
- It forces you to come up with a specific, well-defined decision that needs to be reached during the meeting.
- Whenever possible, it encourages you to assign any “inform” materials as pre-reading so that you can make the most of the time you are together.
You can also use each of the three functions of the IDD framework to determine the focus of an entire meeting.
Switching around the order, here’s an example of how the framework might be used by a team to launch a new initiative within a broader organization:
- An initial brainstorming session to discuss ideas for the new initiative.
- A follow-up meeting to decide which of those ideas is the best option and agree on the plan for implementing it.
- Finally, a meeting to inform others in the organization about the new initiative’s launch and what to expect.
My reactions:
Most meetings I’ve attended have been poorly managed, and I think that’s a common feeling.
My sense is that the quality of most meetings can be vastly improved with better planning, and IDD is helpful framework to determine the scope and expected outcome of a meeting — even when you’re short on planning time.
The framework can act as a triaging tool for dealing with two phenomena that plague most meetings: too many topics to discuss, and too many people to discuss them.
But an even simpler practice to improve the quality of your meetings is to just prepare an agenda and circulate it beforehand — even a brief outline helps.
One of the reasons for preparing an agenda beforehand is so effective is that not all time is created equal. You’re much better off spending five or ten minutes creating a skeleton of an agenda before the meeting starts rather than trying to figure this out during the meeting itself when everyone is gathered and there’s more pressure to perform.
Thanks for reading!
My name is Cheo (CHAY-oh) and I believe ideas can change the world.
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