#02: What is your meeting shape?

Here are three (3) distinct meeting shapes and the essential prerequisites to maximize their effectiveness, tailored to your specific objectives.

Ever found yourself in a meeting where one person believes a decision is finalized, while another is still in the brainstorming phase?

It can be frustrating.

For facilitators, clarity regarding the meeting shape is key. It not only establishes clear expectations for participants but also ensures a focused drive toward your intended goal. 

Most facilitators don’t have the prerequisite prompts, data and criteria to drive the working session.

Unfortunately, many facilitators fail to drive toward the meeting outcome because they:

1. assume that meeting participants have done the ‘pre-read’
2. haven’t set expectations if the meeting is evaluative or generative
3. don’t have the right prompts, data, and criteria as input to drive the working sessionPOV

Here are the 3 meeting shapes, inspired by the Design Double Diamond you can use to design an effective working session, overcome these pitfalls, and drive your working session outcome.

 3 Meeting Shapes

Shape 1: Flare

When to use: You want your team to be generative on new ideas.

Prerequisite: Prompts.

When we ask our team to come up with new ideas, we need generative prompts to allow the flow of ideas. An old boss of mine used to say: "If you want a really good idea, you need lots of them. Your first ones will probably be shit."

I am not alone in this thinking.

Jeremy Utley, former Director of Executive Education at Stanford's dSchool, argues in his latest book, IdeaFlow, that the creation and movement of ideas is the only business metric that matters.

To activate your team to ‘flare’ and be generative, bring generative prompts.

Here is one example:

• How Might We (HMW) prompts: These are generative questions that guide your team to different solution spaces. Example: HMW use artificial intelligence to solve [my team’s challenge]? Here is how the Stanford dSchool frames HMW questions.

Shape 2: Explore

When to use: You have existing data and need to wrestle with it as a team.

Prerequisites: Data.

When you have existing data, this is a great place to send to your audience in advance. The key here is this is not a “pre-read” that rarely gets completed. This is an activity that you ask folks to complete.

Examples:

• Comment on these 10 ideas. What works and what is missing?
• We have 3 vendors to choose from. Read through each proposal and budget and fill out the Pros/Cons list.

Unfortunately, you have to be prepared for the reality that only 50% do the work beforehand and you still need to carve out the quiet time during the working session for participants to explore and process.

After you give your team a chance to Explore, this is a great place to flex your discussion moderation skills.

It is also a great segway to Focusing.

Shape 3: Focus

When to use: You want to make a decision

Prerequisites: Criteria.

How are you going to narrow down the options? You flared with prompts. You explored the data. Now, it is time to focus on a decision.

Two questions to ask yourself:

1. What are the criteria for making the decision? Is it based on customer needs? Is it based on a budget? Based on an Objective or Key Result?
2. Who is making the decision? Is it the team’s job to narrow the results? Who breaks ties?

Bring these criteria to the Focus part of the meeting or you risk the unintended consequence of ending the session with a Flare or Explore.

Examples

• 2x2: Plot your data on two axes. Business/Customer needs. Impact/Feasibility. Important/Urgency
• Dot Voting: Give participants 3 votes based on superlatives like "Most likely to drive Q1 revenue" or "Most likely to meet a customer need" or "Easiest to implement"

What are you trying this week?

"An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching." - Mahatma Gandhi