Effective Meetings

It is interesting when you move home or office how it bunps your mind and habits out of their comfortable patterns and suddenly you consider things from a very different perspective.  In the last while, we have been exploring the concept of the Six Thinking Hats, and upon reflection maybe it is time to explore what habits and ruts we fall into in having meetings.  What old patterns do we follow and which of these are not effective or productive?  How can the Six Thinking Hats help change some of our less productive habits, improve the focus and outcomes of meetings and reduce the time they take?

Let's explore further what happens in meetings.  Work with a colleague or your team to answer some questions:

• Do meetings seem to take too much of your time?
• Do you leave meetings thinking that you have not achieved what the meeting was meant to achieve?
• What makes some meetings ineffective?
• Do meetings run overtime?
• Do meetings effectively assist with problem solving and decision making?
• Is the conversation production or do some people dominate the conversation?
• Where this is a big issue to discuss, what happens in the meetings?

With meetings that fail to achieve the best outcomes or results, the issue could be the organisation's thinking system.  Meetings are a reflection of the ability of an organisation to think collaboratively.  We spend very little time improving this ability and almost no effort in measuring it.

Collaborative thinking is the process that drives positive and productive results.  Thus it is one of the most important components for teams and the organisation.  It leads to a focused problem solving, planning and decision making.  It makes and brings about productive and effective outcomes.  It enables new opportunities, strategies and ideas to be formed.

However, collaborative thinking doesn't just happen.  People need structure and an understood process for thinking together, productively.  Meetings should have a clearly defined focus, a common process, and a predictable flow, so people know when and how to participate.  Collective time needs to be orchestrated so that people know the purpose of the meeting and how they can contribute their skills, thinking and creativity.  This structure needs to support listening as well as sharing.  The Six Thinking Hats is a structure and process that successfully facilitates collaborative thinking.

A process and structure, like the Six Thinking Hats, does not limit, it liberates.  The people most liberated are the introverts who may never be heard from a typical meeting managed by an extrovert who assumes that everyone will freely jump into the conversation.  In order to be truly effective, meetings need to be designed in a way that engages all the different thinking and communication styles present.

In meetings, we want people to think together, not just listen to reports or information that could have been distributed in other ways.  The importance of meetings is that we can gain the collective wisdom of the group.  Getting people together is expensive, too expensive not to engage their best thinking around important issues.  One of the most fundamental aspects of a collaborative and meaningful meeting is making sure that there is an absolutely clear focus and purpose for the meeting.  The Six Thinking Hats keeps us on track, maintaining the discipline of the thinking process and the focus of the meeting.

How we think together is a reflection of our culture and until we are ready to look at this entire process; meeting and strategic decision making inefficiency will continue to be symptoms.

In the next part of this discussion, we will explore some hints and tips that could help to make meetings more productive.  We would love to hear your feedback about what does happen in meetings and any ideas or experiences you have to improve meetings.  Please post a comment or email us.

Comments

[Frank Connolly]

The first time I used the Hats in a formal setting was in a meeting where we had blocked out three hours for six people to solve what was a wicked process related problem. I approached the meeting with some trepidation as this was my colleagues first exposure to the Hats. We ended up with three potential solutions and a meeting closure inside 35 minutes and wondering just where we went right !

The initial focus, the alignment in thinking and the idea generation the Hats engendered worked perfectly.