Tag Archives: meetings

Introducing the Meeting Focus canvas – the first step to a successful meeting

I’ve been to a lot of meetings and workshops where my biggest question is: Why are we here? Many times the person calling for the meeting has not taken the time to clarify what they want out from it nor why it is important to do this now. They either expect people to understand it by themselves, or don’t realise it is important.

Most people usually take the time to write a short headline or an agenda. But neither of those answers the real questions that are on people’s minds:

  • What is the problem we are solving by this meeting?
  • Why is it important?
  • What do you expect from this meeting?
  • What do you expect from me?

I have developed the Meeting Focus Canvas to help people think about these questions and remember to communicate them. It is a visual tool to help you co-create what a meeting is all about. The questions in the canvas have helped many teams improve their meetings, and clarify to one another why they meet and what their focus is.

You can work on the canvas in any order but I have often found it helpful to start by first defining the Problem and the Goal. After this I define the Outputs, and with this in mind I start thinking about who to invite: If we have this problem today and if we bring these People into a room then we will create the outputs and reach the long-term goal or strategy.

Meeting Focus Canvas

Problem

  • What problem are you trying to solve? Try to describe the problem in a few sentences or use sticky notes if you draw the template on a white board. If you end up with a lot of problems to be covered then try to prioritize so the scope does not get too big.
  • How can you explain it to the participants? Are all participants aware of the problem and its context? Are there some parts that everyone needs a deeper understanding of? How can you visualize the problem in a good way?
  • What will you send before the meeting? What information should be sent out before the meeting so that people can prepare.

Goal

  • What is the long-term goal? Why is the problem important to solve and what organizational strategies or goals are we supporting by solving it? We need to make sure we solve the problem in a way that benefit the rest of the organization and not just solve the short-term problem.

Outputs

  • What do you want from this meeting? What concrete outputs do you want from this meeting. The more outputs you have or the more abstract they are, the longer the meeting will have to be. It is often better to define a few concrete outputs and have a first shorter meeting, instead of trying to solve everything at once.

People

First think about what competencies, perspectives, and decision-making power you want in the room. And then think about the people who can fulfill these:

  • Competencies What knowledge or expertise do we need? Any special skills that would help the meeting forward?
  • Perspectives What perspectives, experience, or roles do we need in the meeting to make sure we look at the problem from all relevant directions?
  • Decision-making power Who needs to be in the meeting to make the necessary decisions? If we don’t have those people in the room, then the outputs of the meeting will have to be crafted as suggestions to someone who can make the decision.

Try to limit the number of people in the meeting, the more people you have in the meeting the harder it will be to facilitate and the longer it will take. If you go above six people in the room, the meeting will be harder to facilitate. Read more about this in the chapter People in the book or in this short blog post.

In an upcoming posts I will share examples and more ways you can work with it.

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You can download the Meeting Focus Canvas and other tools here.

To keep up to date with what is happening you can follow my facebook page here.

Create better visualizations to make it easier to solve problems

One challenge when solving problems together is to create good visualizations of the ideas or data that you need to discuss. Scott Berinato shows a simple model and some useful tips in his article Visualizations that really work. He has two questions that I think are really good to answer before you try to design a graph or image:

  • Am I declaring or exploring something? There is a big difference between telling people how things are (e.g. our productivity is decreasing) or if you are not sure and want to discover something together with the participants (e.g. what is the reason behind our decrease in productivity)?
  • Is it data-driven or conceptual? Are you using quantitative data (e.g. revenue, productivity, lead time, …) or are you showing something qualitative (organizational structure, processes, and ideas)?

These two questions help you figure out what you want to achieve and focus how you work, and in the article, he creates a useful model and gives lots of examples for how to make simple and effective visualizations.

I think the most important thing to think about when creating a visualization is that the purpose is to simplify ideas, data, and concepts. They are there to help people solve problems together.

 

 

 

Where is the problem?

This weekend we met a friend who is a freelance musician. We talked about a lot of things but especially about practice and developing yourself and your skills. When she is practicing for a new piece she will usually find one or more places that are hard to play, that she will need to practice over and over again to get right. Some of them, though, takes a lot longer to learn, and it is usually not because that part of the piece is difficult. But that the part right before or right after makes it difficult. By focusing on the piece she never gets it right, it is by expanding her focus and practicing what comes before or after that she solves the problem.

I loved this analogy because it is a reflection of the problems we face at work as well.

  • If you are having problems now in a project, it is often due to what happened before or because of decisions made outside the project.
  • When you are trying to solve problems in a process, it is often caused by what is happening before or after the step.
  • All problems within a team can not be solved just by focusing on the team; you also need to look at the team’s context.

When you want to solve problems together, you need to give people

  • Information about the context of the problem and not just the problem itself.
  • Time to prepare, so they can process all the information before meeting.

 

A quick overview of the book

I needed to remind myself about the different parts in the book and created this mindmap. It contains the parts I will focus on when creating more concrete tools in the upcoming months. The next step is to make this overview a bit better looking and make sure it contains enough information to be useful, while not becoming bloated.