MEETING SPECIAL... Engineering a breakthrough at meetings

Engineering a breakthrough at meetings

Tired of endless meetings that go nowhere? Follow these steps to give your productivity a boost

Ever been in a strategy meeting that lacked clarity or focus? Or a brainstorming session where the conversation kept circling around the same point only to hit a mental dead-end? Unproductive meetings that don’t end in a clear action plan are often not only a waste of time but also a drain on your energy.

Some people will tell you that creative collaboration is by nature, unruly and meandering. But if you want to guide your team from terrible meetings to ones that are actually productive, there is a creative process you can use to cut through complexity and bias and arrive at great solutions. It’s called making ideas visible. According to science, teams that take the time to visualise their ideas are better able to perceive challenges and tend to explore more creative options before settling on one.

Try this process to break down complex problems and fix meetings that seem to stall:

Set a scene

The best way to get untangled is to create a physical representation of the ideas or thoughts on the table so that everyone’s point of view is made visible to the team at large. This could be written out on a set of sticky notes, large charts of paper or even a brainstorming wall. The key is to adopt a method that allows everybody to contribute. Once written out, ideas can be easily moved or regrouped as the conversation develops.

Don’t fret about the complexity of the problem. By populating a physical space with everyone’s thoughts, you can take intangible mental information that each team member may have and convert it into tangible data objects. This allows you to create a shared visual memory of useful data that you can use to boost creative collaborations.

Form patterns

Once you have the data laid out that everyone can see, start arranging the data into meaningful patterns. It could be according to cost estimates, risk factors or any other variable. While there are a multitude of ways to organise information, choosing the right pattern can help you paint a clearer picture of the problem.

This step may take a while as you burrow down to the central problem but once you have completed this step, you should have a diagram that is an accurate reflection of the problem at hand.

Moving forward

Once you have arranged the data, try to identify a definite way forward. Are there any patterns or correlations that emerge naturally? Do you observe something that was not immediately apparent at the start of the meeting? Use this to narrow your team’s focus to a couple of visible choices. When they can physically see the shift from ‘what is’ to ‘what could be’, your team is more likely to commit to a way forward. Once you have identified it, outline an action plan for your team in the fewest possible steps and write it out alongside the earlier data. This forces you to keep your execution plan as visually simple as possible, making accountability and next steps much simpler.

This process is a great tool for meetings because when ideas are tangible, employees can clearly see the challenge and apply tools to work through it.

This leads to better creative collaboration, better problemsolving and more effective meetings.

shannon.tellis@timesgroup.com