Positive meeting experiences, DDemers

The meetings that I have seen that go the best are those where the meeting leader (and other participants) do a lot of preparatory work.  I find that informal meetings with fewer attendees that already know each other do not need extensive preparation.  However, once the number of attendees gets to be ten or more, then it is very easy for the meeting to get “derailed”.  Most of the meetings that I have seen go well are more information sharing than decision making.  It is very difficult to have a decision making meeting with a large number of participants.  There are frequently divergent views and only participants that feel comfortable “laying it on the line” speak up.  In my experience, for decision-making meetings, with more than about five or six people, either “group-think” will set in or the conversation tends to degenerate into “side-bars” where a common understanding of the issues is lacking due to several parallel conversations.

Some of the best meeting experiences for me were during brain-storming sessions.  Ground rules must be set (no criticizing, building on other’s ideas is encouraged), and it works well to have attendees first do some “alone” work in preparation.  After the initial burst of ideas, it is important that the leader keep the momentum going.  The initial burst of ideas can be quite draining for some participants, and stopping for a break allows some people to think up new ideas or build on existing ones, information that is shared when the meeting resumes.

For information-sharing meetings, it is important that attendees receive advance copies of presentations.  That permits the attendees to be better prepared during the presentations, and having the copy means that the attendees do not need to waste time writing out slide contents.  Also, the participants may have to concentrate on taking notes and miss other important points that the presenter was making.  One of the best run information sharing meetings that I experienced was our annual R&D program reviews.  Each project to be presented had to use a standard format (quad-chart) plus one or two more informational slides, five to ten minutes per project.  This was a very economical means (time wise) for the management team to become aware of what research was being done throughout the organization (about 400 staff).  For the upper management, there were fewer “surprises”, finding out about R&D at their home centre from military clients.  For middle management, it gave an overview of what was happening throughout the centre.  The shared knowledge of what R&D axes were being investigated facilitated focusing R&D on operational challenges and also aided in the creation of intra and inter research centre R&D collaborations.