When training new facilitators, a concept I want them to “get” early on is the difference between content and process. Folks who are drawn to become facilitators and mediators tend to be interested in the underlying dynamics of group process. It’s easy, when learning a new facilitation technique or meeting structure, to want to use […]
Tag Archives: Meetings
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When I am asked to help an organization improve its meeting culture, one of the “symptoms” often cited is a lack of participation – according to the meeting planners, not enough people are showing up. In another client organization, one of the stated problems is too MANY people showing up to meetings in which their […]
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My last post looked at a variety of methods for closing a meeting. Now let’s take a look at openings. As meeting participants arrive, they bring with them the remnants of whatever they were doing or thinking about before they walked in the room. Each person needs to make a shift in focus, and how […]
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Research indicates that our memory of an event or transaction tends to be colored by our experience of its ending. If the event was challenging, difficult, or boring, but wrapped up with a satisfying conclusion, we will come away with a more positive memory than if it was good in the beginning but ended poorly. […]
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As a facilitator, I am always pushing my clients to put announcements and reports into a memo and reserve their F2F meeting time for the things that people in groups do best: generate ideas, make decisions, solve problems, plan strategy. So I am always interested in new methods for ideation and problem-solving. Daniel Pink’s blog […]
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>Just as visual artists know that white space is a key element in a good design, good facilitators know that break time is a key element in good meeting design. When there is a lot of work to be done or information to be conveyed, it is tempting to schedule every minute, but this will […]
My workshop “Meetings That Don’t Suck” offers tips, tools, and tricks for planning and facilitating better meetings. Most folks who take the course are in some kind of leadership position in which they have responsibility for meetings. But what can you do if you are low on the office food chain, and are stuck as […]
A recent blog post by Daniel Pink alerted me to a hilarious Wall Street Journal piece by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. Adams suggests that one of the best ways to generate good new ideas is to generate a bunch of really bad ones. He gives some pretty silly and/or outrageous examples of ways […]
> For years, office workers have chortled over Scott Adams’ cartoon depictions of incompetent bosses, slacking co-workers, and evil HR directors. He’s now been joined in the Twitterverse by Meeting Boy, an anonymous worker who tweets funny observations regarding the useless meetings his boss requires him to attend. Could Meeting Boy’s workplace experience be improved […]
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