Improve Agile Meeting Productivity 2x-5x

Let’s say your personal productivity is awesome. Perhaps it’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. You have habits that are working well. Perhaps you’re waking up, getting some exercise, reading, and working on your big goals.  At work you may even have your e-mail inbox under control.

But your work environment is chaotic and your meetings are wasteful. See if you find anything familiar in this typical scenario.

Example of a Wasteful Meeting

Meeting Idea

Your boss says, “Let’s decide how to create an architecture for the next generation of our software product. I’ll schedule a meeting to discuss the architecture.”

Don’t get alarmed yet, but NEVER have a meeting to DISCUSS something. Only have meetings to DECIDE something.

Meeting Invite

The meeting announcement goes out saying, “Future Architecture Discussion.”

The body of the meeting says, “Let discuss the future architecture of our application that will support the upcoming requirements.”

Now you should be a little alarmed. This meeting is not looking like a good use of your time because there’s no definitive deliverable. 

Meeting Time

The meeting time arrives and all the very opinionated, smart, capable, driven, and highly effective people arrive in the room and take seats around the table. For the purposes of this (nearly historically accurate) example, let’s assume there are 6 people attending the meeting.

If everyone arrives roughly on-time, you have already saved many minutes of the start-stop-restart cycle.

When the meeting host settles down in his or her chair WITHOUT a note pad and only a cup of coffee in hand, you should begin to raise the alert level to DEFCON-3.

This style of meeting will result in NO MINUTES and possibly NO DECISIONS. 

Meeting Flow

During the meeting there is a flurry of different topics that come up.  The meeting starts with architecture, but shifts subtly to some interesting topics:

• What if the marketing guys have got it all wrong?
• What if the CEO won’t fund the architecture?
• What if the current application technical issues cause the team to spend 50% of their effort fixing bugs instead of creating the new architecture?
• Etc.

These are interesting but they’re enticing, emotional, and USELESS in regards to the architecture discussion. 

Alert raised to DEFCON-2.

Meeting End

Near the end of the meeting, people begin to look at their watches saying they are have another meeting to attend. Nothing has been written down.

Like nuclear war, once the missiles are launched it’s too late to rescue this meeting. Raise the alert status to DEFCON-1 - Maximum alert.

Is There Another Way?

The example above is likely to resemble some of the meeting norms where you work. Inefficient and ineffective meetings might be a cultural norm, but it’s not the way it has to be. 

With a little attention at each step in the meeting process you can improve the effectiveness and increase the collaboration in your daily meetings.

Example of a Productive Meeting

Meeting Idea with a Deliverable

The boss suggests that you gather the technical leaders and determine the next steps in the architecture evolution. She says, “Can you get with the team and develop a roadmap for the architecture?”

You’re empowered to create a ROADMAP. This is the deliverable from the meeting.

Meeting Invite With a Purpose

You think for a few minutes and decide on the goal for the meeting. “Create and record a roadmap for application architecture with a 5-year horizon.” 
In addition, you come up with a rough agenda.

Agenda:
1. Review the marketing requirements
2. Record highest risk items
3. Create a list of architecture changes necessary to meet the business goals.

A meeting invite with a purpose can result in 2x improvement because it primes the brains of all the participants to think about the problem ahead of time.
With a goal, you can take your 2x productivity to the bank by shrinking your meeting length by half.  

With a goal and agenda, you could find a 3x impact.  A meeting that normally takes an hour could take 20 minutes.  The meeting ends when you’ve reached your defined goal and know how to get to the goal with a written plan.

Meeting Time With a Prompt Start

Depending on the business norms in your company you’ll experience very different meeting norms: for example, habitual tardiness to meetings. One way to shift business norms is to start on time.

In one meeting I hosted the attendees arrived on time, but were quite talkative about numerous subjects. In order to move the meeting forward, I said, “I can make your Friday shorter if we start on the review right now.” And then we got down to business.

Meeting Flow With a Plan

When it comes to meetings, there’s nothing like a good plan. A colleague  quoted once, “Never attend a meeting that you don’t control.” Perhaps that’s a little extreme, but I would say you should always have a plan for the meetings you host, including slides and/or a facilitation plan.

At the minimum I create Powerpoint slides to keep the meeting focused on a specific outcome. When you have a representation of the goals, people have a much easier time keeping their focus. 

Meeting Flow With a Turbo Charged Plan

Since people are very visual and actually engage with more energy when standing, consider using sticky notes or a whiteboard. Sticky notes are especially effective because they can be moved and re-arranged easily during a discussion.

Copy paper and blue masking tape are also very useful if you have information prepared before hand.  

To increase the effectiveness of sprint grooming or planning meetings I often print out sprint backlog titles to tape to wall. Then I have the team create a task breakdown using sticky notes that are placed in order under the backlog item. I use the Post-It Plus application to take a picture of the the wall.  The application recognizes eat individual sticky and exports the sticky notes in several formats. Excel is useful when I have a large quantity of notes. I then get the notes transcribed.

Meeting End With Closed Loops

At the end of the meeting you should have the following.

1. Actions recorded
2. Decisions recorded.

No matter what kind of meeting you’re holding, the end game must conclude with decisions and actions recorded.

When You Need a 5x Strategy

Under normal meeting circumstances a goal and agenda are sufficient to succeed. But sometimes a meeting deals with highly emotional or widely debated topics that need a 5x strategy. Without a 5x strategy, you’ll lose hours of time and potentially create even more tension.

Productivity of 5x is possible and realistic when you come prepared with a detailed facilitation plan that includes well planned activities. The plan should include strategies and activities for:

• dealing with peoples biases (mental or emotional baggage) 
• effective brainstorming
• taking large quantities of creative input and move it towards a decision
• keeping the level of engagement high so that the participants keep their energy and intellect focused on the topic
• engagement during the meeting with boundaries
• any needed follow-up

The article “You Can Have Better Agile Meetings” provides a overview facilitation flow. 

If collaboration attempts fail and the emotions or topics remain unresolved, the most common alternative is to call in the higher authority to resolve the issue.  

This is a weaker approach that could result in temporary solution, but with a high probability that the parties will find “insurmountable issues" with the top down decisions as soon as the slightest obstacle is encountered.

Conversely, the gains from a 5x strategy can achieve a lasting consensus and full buy-in from your team members.

Please leave a comment about the most debated topic that needs to be solved in your work place? 

How to Learn a Productivity System Part 3: Planning

“Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the greatest crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme Allied Commander 

These were the words spoken before the D-Day invasions were executed.

In light of the immense planning that was required to pull off this amazing multi-nation, multi-front, humungous battle for freedom, another famous quote is also realized.
“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” - Dwight D. Eisenhower.



At home and at work I believe this quote about planning to be spot on.  It’s interesting to see how your brain works differently in a meeting or during an activity if you’ve done some planning versus when you wing it.

Consider Two Scenarios

Scenario #1: You receive an e-mail meeting invitation from a colleague titled, “Acme Contract” and the meeting is schedule for tomorrow. The body of the invitation says,”-Thanks.” You’re aware of the Acme Contract and you know you’ll be working on the Acme contract. If fact, you have some very specific feelings about the Acme Contract and how it will impact you and possibly others on your team.

You show up to the meeting and your colleague says, “We’ve got to update the contract and bid based on new input from my boss.  I’m showing the spreadsheet on the overhead. 

Let’s update the info to reduce the overall cost.”
Scenario #2: You receive an e-mail meeting invitation from a college titled, “Acme Contract Updates.”  The body of the e-mail says,

Goal: Review and Update Acme Contract Cost and Assumptions to Reduce Overall Cost.

Agenda: 

1. Review current contract and bid.

2. Re-assess assumptions

3. Update bid based on new assumptions

See attachment for current contract and bid assumptions.

You show up to the meeting and you know what the outcome is. Your brain has already been working subconsciously on new assumptions and ways to save costs. Your brain has a slight edge over Scenario #1.  

Ask yourself this question, “Assuming a 1 hour meeting, how much time is saved in Scenario #2 over Scenario #1?”

What do you think? 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes?

If there are 3 people in the meeting you would minimally save 15 minutes total for your company and 5 for yourself.

If there are 5 people in the meeting and you save 30 minutes, you just saved 150 minutes for your company and 30 for yourself.  WOW. Do you think it’s realistic to save your company 2 1/2 hours of time?  

Surprisingly, I think you’ll find it’s very realistic and practical. If you do this, you’ll be a hero among your peers and in the eyes of your superiors because you’re creating more value in less time.

You might be saying, “Sounds pretty idealistic and like it will take a lot of work to create that goal and agenda.” 

A Mechanism to Train Yourself to Plan

1. Commit to never sending a meeting invite out unless you have at least one sentence in the body of the meeting notice, The GOAL: “Goal: ……”

It will take 1-5 minutes to write this single line but you will ALWAYS recoup that time by saving a minimum of 5 minutes in every meeting you host.

When you write the Goal statement in your e-mails it will force you to think just a little deeper. 

2.  Always include a concrete outcome in the goal statement.  

You would not use “Goal: Discuss developing a new app” as a goal statement. The word “Discuss” is not a concrete deliverable. The real PURPOSE of a meeting is not to discuss something. The PURPOSE of a meeting is to come to agreement and record decisions and action steps.  

A better goal, then, would be, “Goal: Create a Development Plan for the New App.” Now I have a pre-defined output for my meeting. At least for myself I know what I expect to get out of the meeting. At the end of the meeting I should have a draft plan to get from zero to new application.  

It works even better if you reiterate the goal at the start of the meeting so the brains of all the participants are tuned into the PURPOSE of the meeting. It’s like a magnet. The GOAL is one side of magnet and the people’s brains the other side of the magnet. Now the magnetic forces align.



Often when I write the goal it requires me to dig deeper so I actually do some thinking and PLANNING. Within 1-5 minutes I clarify my intentions for myself and for others and my return on investment will be much greater than the time it took to do the hard work of thinking.

People don’t like wasting time in meetings, but when you put together a 5-minute meeting plan and you execute that plan and you get the necessary buy-in and collaboration with multiple people, you really create a win-win.

In fact, I consider holding and conducting meetings as a productivity enhancer because I can actually get a high level of collaboration and alignment from group sessions.  When you have strong and capable people working on complex projects, you might need more meetings to get alignment. But you don’t want meetings that result in throwing around random off-topic ideas or bringing up the baggage of how, “it didn’t work last time we tried this, so it’s doomed to fail this time."  

You need to get the creative energy FOCUSED on solution-oriented thinking. The GOAL will guide you to that end. Facilitation training can also be very useful. Read more about that skill in a full-scale facilitation process, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic).”

Please let me know the outcome of your experience using the “Goal:…” statement in your meetings.