One of the first steps when planning your meeting is to help people realize what they should accomplish at the meeting. If you can clarify this in a way that you and the people who will attend can understand then you will have a good start for your meeting, and people will know how to prepare.
The four things, in my opinion, that people need to know to solve problems creatively.
- Problem is a description of the problem you are trying to solve.
- Goal is the long term goal that you want to achieve. You will probably not reach it during this meeting, but the outputs you create will be the first step towards it.
- Outputs are the concrete things you want from the meeting that you think will help you reach the goal.
- Roles are a list of the people you have invited and what you expect from them. I will talk more about this in a later post where the canvas will be expanded.
I have created a template to help you define the first three parts in a visual way. You can use it as a preparation tool to define your meeting. Or you can use it as a discussion tool during a meeting to co-creaye the purpose of that meeting or another one.
I hope the information on the canvas is enough to get started using it. There is more information in chapter 3 in the book (Prepare to reach your goal). The boxes when printed on an A4 should fit a normal-sized post-it to help you move things around and quickly change.
As with everything I create, this is the first version, and it will need improving. Try out the template and send me any questions or feedback you might have. I would love to hear from you, even if the feedback is just positive.
You can download a pdf-version of the canvas here.
Marcus Degerman 