People are always complaining about meetings — either their too long or unproductive and when time is short this is very frustrating. So what to do about it?

These are my top tips using a Speed Thinking perspective:

1. Send the agenda out a few days before the meeting with one problem or decision highlighted. Then ask participants to bring along nine different possibilities (ask them to speed think it). If they do not have any thoughts then suggest that they do not come. Using this principle, in the first few minutes, if you have say ten people you will have 90 possibilities.

2. Decide which items on the agenda are strategic or day-to-day. Change the agenda to place all the day to day decisions up front. Then Speed Thinking these. In ten minutes the group will have made five decisions then move on to the strategic decisions. The group will have made some progress and participants will feel better as they tackle the bigger issues.

3. However long your meetings are at the moment –half the time. According to Parkinson’s Law –work expands to fill the time available. It is the same with meetings. Meetings expand to the time you have allocated. Therefore it is better to have half the time as participants will have to think faster, they become more focused, make better decisions and they remain more energized. It is better to have shorter, more regular meetings than the three-four hour marathon.

4. The extension of Parkinson’s Law is Hudson’s Law which states that the meeting slows down to the slowest participant. A slow thinking meeting is frustrating for everyone. You can either try and speedup the slowest member, try a few of the tips i have suggested or don’t invite this person to any future meetings.

5. Have formal gut-feel time in every meeting. This is a formal, dedicated time in every meeting to allow people to use their intuition — particularly after the group has made a decision. Participants are encouraged to express what their ‘gut-feel’ is telling them e.g. ‘i know the number don’t add up but it still feels like their is an opportunity here.’  Giving participants the freedom of using their intuition is valuable because nearly every decision is informed by our emotions and we know from research that our intuition works at a lightning speed –way ahead of our rational mind. This means that our intuition might just stumble on a breakthrough that is not obvious to the rational, logical mind.

6.  Allow everyone to create ideas or solve a problem at once. One of the barriers to meetings is the idea that we must listen to everyone else. This is polite and civil but slows down every meeting which means that a ideas are lost because of this slowing down effect. Much better to give everyone a sticky note pad so that when they have an idea they can write it down immediately and put it on the wall regardless of who is speaking.

. Ideally this is when you need a facilitator that is trained in Speed Thinking Principles.

Give these suggestions a go and send me a note on how it went

 

Ken Hudson