End a Meeting with The Confidence That Everyone Knows The Path Forward

Today I was in a meeting that was intended to be 15 minutes long.  It started late, about 6 minutes past the hour, and got off to a rocky start due to technical issues with conference software.  Many of the participants often get side tracked with deeply technical concerns or quandaries about corner cases.  In fact, I think it was probably about 20% focused on executing the project (the stuff I wanted) and 80% of the discussion was what-if scenarios or providing context for different meeting participants.

Interestingly, the meeting lasted about 25 minutes, and in percentages, the overage was about average for this group of very talented and highly responsible staff.  They have an incredible sense of ownership for their work and as a result, they want to know all the details of pretty much every decision. Especially when it comes to technical decisions that are near or directly inline with their sphere of influence.  Good folks.

Was this meeting wasteful? Perhaps.  But it was successful because I got a list of actions assigned to specific people and I scheduled a daily standup meeting to follow up and insure everything got done.  There was no ambiguity about what needed to happen or who was going to do it.  To me, leaving a meeting with zero or very little ambiguity is a sign of successful outcome.

When you terminate a meeting you need to put an end to ambiguity.  In Better Meeting Magic vocabulary this step is called CLOSING.  Read more about the whole Better Meeting Magic planning paradigm in the article, “Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic).”



Effective CLOSING removes three primary sources of ambiguity:

1) “What did we decide?” or “WHAT” ambiguity,

2) “Who will do it? or “WHO” ambiguity

3) “Will we discuss this again?” or “OPEN LOOP” ambiguity

Tip #1: Kill “WHAT” Ambiguity by Reiterating the Decision and Asking for Confirmation

Destroy ambiguity in every meeting by reiterating orally what you’ve decided to do and ask the participants to confirm the decision.  Example: At the end of the meeting you could say, “The goal of our meeting was to: ‘Decide on a database vendor’.  And I believe we’ve decided to move ahead with vendor XYZ to support our database infrastructure.  Did I capture that correctly?”

By reiterating the meeting goal and the decision, you will likely get the last minute ‘NO WAY’ or you’ll get everyone nodding their head.  If you have dissenting opinions, that’s good because you need to know where you stand before you leave the meeting with a false sense of doneness. If you have consensus, this decision is made and will likely stick.  

Tip #2: Annihilate “WHO” Ambiguity by Assign Actions to Specific People in the Meeting

Destroy “WHO” ambiguity by making sure you have a assignee on each action.  It's good to assign action in the meeting so the assignees can review the action and possibly ask clarifying questions before the team disperses.

This creates a more sticky sense of ownership.  A responsible assignee will try to understand the expectation through dialog.  An unwilling assignee will have the accountability of the group.

Add due dates to further eradicate ambiguity.

Tip #3: Short Circuit “OPEN LOOP” Ambiguity by Picking the Next Meeting Time Before You Leave the Current Meeting

Obliterate “OPEN LOOP” ambiguity by asking the participants whether the topic is closed or there are still more to address. As you develop skills in planning your meetings, you will likely see less carry-over meetings because your planning and time management will enable you to reach decision in a single meeting.

For details on good planning tactics, see the article, “Improve Your Focus and Improve Your Teams Performance in Meetings.” 

One of the most frustrating things in any business environment is to see good ideas die on the vine.  When everyone is busy and there are tough topics left unresolved, people feel weighed down and a natural response to “embrace the status quo”.  

In simple language, “embracing the status quo” is just failing to put enough energy into following up on the tough topics.  In reality it doesn’t require supreme amounts of energy to conduct a follow-up meeting, but the emotional resistance is high.  

When I’m heading for bed and I know I’ll be getting up early the next day to take a run in freezing cold weather I can prime myself for success by putting out my running clothes and running shoes on the floor of my bathroom.  Somehow this routine removes some of the friction of getting up early and taking a run.  

Use this priming strategy to overcome the “OPEN LOOP” ambiguity by making the next meeting plan during the current meeting.  

BTW, if you want to learn lots about how to deal with open loops in your personal and work life, read Getting Things Done by David Allen. His productivity strategy will help eradicate ambiguity in all corners of your world.

I’d like to know if you have applied any of these techniques.  Or perhaps you have some of your own.

Please write a comment about your best tools for overcoming meeting ambiguity.  

Or get in touch with me on my Contact page to talk about your latest meeting success.

http://www.steveteske.com

Change Your Meetings and Change Your Life with Meeting Facilitation (aka Meeting Magic)

This article talks about tools to improve productivity every day at your job.  How do I know it works? I've seen change for the better in relationships and in the output of my teams and colleagues.

In 1994 I graduated with a computer science degree and started working at a large telecom company which specialized in wireless telephone networks. From day one I learned that knowledge is power and expressing your well-informed opinions loudly and with passion can move you up the power curve in an organization.

As I navigated my way from “Member of Scientific Staff” (that was my title, no kidding) to “Senior Member of Scientific Staff” then “Individual Contributor/Architecture” and finally to “Software Development Manager” I found that my voice was heard more often if I used it loudly and forcefully.  The downside of an outgoing and dominant personality is that you get your way often, but you don’t always get the best from other people and you create friction along the way.

In 2005 I took a role at another company as a “Team Lead/Scrum Master” and used the same skills that I’d learned in the first decade of my career.  I noticed that other individuals also used the be-loud-and-dominate technique.  Now, when there were two leaders saying different things in the organization, two parties would form and the differing opinions would create a small turf war.

In 2008, after participating for 14 years in the party system of technical decision making, I took the role of department manager and I WAS SCARED SPITLESS because I was taking over leadership of an organization where I had participated in a system that rewarded loud and overbearing people; some of which I had offended by using my techniques of domination instead of collaboration.

WAKE UP CALL.

Faced with a department divided against itself, I realized I needed to drastically alter course.  So I studied hard to change my mindset and my behaviors. I read book after book and listened to people in the organization that showed management skills coincident with what I was learning in books.  

What I learned in these books and in my interactions with leaders in the organization is, I really need to behave with humility and try to draw out other people’s knowledge and skills.  And at the same time firmly demand discipline from myself and others to focus on solving problems and never drag the rhetoric of workplace or personal history into a arena where creativity and action are needed.

In 2011 I took a course called Agile Team Facilitation as part of my career development and also an Agile development initiative at my workplace. Read more about how a got involved in that course here. The material in the course not only reinforced all the learning in my post WAKE-UP CALL years, but also provided specific skills for applying collaboration and action into every interaction with teams of any size.  Instead of Facilitation, I call it Better Meeting Magic. Better Meeting Magic embodies the spirit of collaboration, inclusiveness and focus that can and will change the culture and productivity of a team, department, division or company. The results that I’ve seen in my current company reiterate the bold statement of change offered in this article.

Better Meeting Magic is pretty simple and includes the following meeting flow:

The description of the individual activities in Better Meeting Magic are as follows:

Planning	Know what you want out of a meeting before you go into a meeting
Opening	Introduce the overall meeting goals and agenda
Bias Check (optional)	Allow people to express themselves with specific activities to safely capture bias
Brainstorming	Collaborate and generate ideas
Narrowing	Remove duplicate thoughts, reduced decision set to a manageable number
Deciding	Decide what action(s) to take
Retrospective (optional)	Get feedback on how the meeting went or how comfortable people are with the outcome.
Closing	Summarize the meeting results and capture follow-up activities
Follow-up	Make sure minutes and actions captured during the meeting are addressed

You and your teams spend a lot of time in meetings. You need relief from unfocused discussion. You need a better way to increase output from your meetings by 2 to 4 times.  Better Meeting Magic can deliver all those things.

I will be posting a number of follow-ups to cover each specific activity.  Please stay tuned as I talk in depth about each component of Better Meeting Magic.

Please leave comments and tell me about the most frequently propagated meeting sin in your company.

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