Meetings: Focus on Doing

My time spent in meetings has been increasing the last couple of weeks. I’m no fan of meetings. One of the reasons I don’t like meetings is that most of the time they are not as productive as they could be.

So last week I had an idea, or rather two, I thought I’d share.

1. Some meetings you can almost instantly spot that the participants have different views about what the meeting is about. So start of the meeting by having the participants what they hope the outcome of the meeting would be. This could probably be done as an intervention if you identify this problem.
2. A good meeting organizer will summaries at the end of the meeting. A good summary will contain what each participant takes with him or her as action items, to-dos, as a consequence of the meeting. If none of the participants have any action items with them after the meeting, the meeting was most probably waste.

Naturally there are meeting techniques to increase the formality of the meeting, but these shouldn’t be necessary unless you need a formal protocol from the meeting.