Positive meeting experience by Yuchen

I've had a very impressive and positive meeting last semester when the three of us met together in order to prepare our book presentation. Before the meeting, we had completed our slides and speech for the presentation individually, but we haven’t integrated our parts yet. So the goal of the meeting was very clear: we need to combine our parts and see if the book presentation can take shape. To explain in details the positive sides as well as some drawbacks of the meeting , I would like to conduct the 5Ps of Effective Meetings.

Purpose: I believe that we've done a good job with the first P. The meeting was called because we needed to share information. Since we prepared our parts separately and each one of us must had some information that others wouldn't know, it was important to meet together and see if we could combine the fragmented parts into a complete presentation. Much to our surprises, through the brainstorming process, we achieved our original goals successfully, and apart from that we also managed to change our platform for the presentation as well (from Powerpoint to Prezi).

Participants: In regard of Task–Process dimension of meeting composition, our meeting was balanced well between task and process. Indeed, it would be easier as our previous meetings normally started with some irrelevant small talks in order to create a comfort environment, but this time we decided to push ourselves to the task instead. However, changing our default styles brought us some confusion at the beginning because we didn't know to what degree we can accept the conflicts during the meeting. We all felt a little bit embarrassed when we had to “criticize” people, but by avoiding giving evaluative feedback, we had a good ambiance after all. Another lesson I learnt from this meeting is that we gave each other constructive advises and most importantly we recognized each other's work. Having experienced an unpleasant team, I realize that when you have to correct someone's wrong, it's better to start with the recognition of  his work otherwise he would probably be very defensive on your opinion. It'll only fuel the conflict.

Planning: The third P was the one we didn't put too many efforts into. We didn't have a concrete agenda for the meeting. Perhaps it was more time-consuming (it took us nearly 3 hours) but on the other hand, since we didn't have a fixed agenda, we were able to be more creative on our task which I think is more important than just focusing on the agenda.

Participation: There was no doubt that we expected all of us to participate as much as possible, and as explained above, we were very tolerate to propositions that seemed to be off-topic as long as it would be constructive to the presentation. Our meeting was largely succeeded although there was a vital mistake due to our decision making process that we made the decision with everyone’s agreement. One teammate gave up her idea on which chapter was more important simply because the rest of us disagreed with her and therefore we didn't go deeper in this topic, so it’s not hard to imagine that we felt regret when it turned out that we missed some important aspects in the book. To make it worse, we didn't summarize our meeting at the end because we were too optimistic with our “master piece”.

Perceptive: Since the meeting was so fruitful, we didn't stop and think what was potentially missing in our meeting, leaving the bomb unsolved in the following meetings until it exploded in the presentation.