Let's Stop Meeting Like This : Tools to Save Time and Get More Done [1 ed.] 1626560811, 9781626560819

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Preface
1 How to Get Your Work Done in Meetings
2 The Meeting Canoe
3 Welcome People
4 Connect People to Each Other and the Task
5 Discover the Way Things Are
6 Elicit People’s Dreams
7 Decide
8 Attend to the End
9 First Aid for Meetings
10 Meeting Basics: Five Steps to Meeting Success
11 Leaders: Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness
12 Contributors: Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness
13 Facilitators: Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness
14 Our Handoff to You
A Pocket Guide to Let’s Stop Meeting Like This and More
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
Y
Meet the Authors
The Axelrod Group: The Story Behind the Story

Citation preview

More Praise for Let’s Stop Meeting Like This “It’s the most practical and instantly applicable resource available for not only revolutionizing meetings but providing effective and tangible ways people can work together productively and creatively.” —Angeles Arrien, PhD, cultural anthropologist and President, Foundation for Cross-Cultural Education and Research

“The time we spend in the conference room is increasing, and this book maps out a reliable process to maximize our return on investment in meetings.” —Eric Lindblad, Vice President and General Manager, 747 Program, Boeing Commercial Airplanes

“As the world becomes more interdependent, meetings will become more frequent and a more necessary part of work. Rather than waste time in and get mad at meetings, read this book and learn how to make them more productive.” —Edgar H. Schein, Professor Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of Humble Inquiry

“This book will change your feelings about meetings and give them the importance they deserve. These ideas are the means to create communities of committed and powerful people.” —Peter Block, author of Stewardship and Community

“Whether we are facilitators, leaders, or meeting contributors, we’re welcomed into a well-designed meeting and are left with much more confidence in our ability to carry out meetings well.” —Jean Bartunek, Robert A. and Evelyn J. Ferris Chair and Professor of Management and Organization, Boston College

“This book provides a way to turn a negative into a positive—more productive meetings and increased levels of employee engagement.” —Kevin Limbach, Vice President, US Operations, TaylorMade-adidas Golf Company

“Let’s Stop Meeting Like This has tangible advice and tools to get more commitment and better outcomes from meetings.” —Terri Hill, President, Fortune 100 insurance company

“By applying a fresh four-step process rooted in their benchmark research on engagement, the Axelrods offer a way to move meetings from

something to be dreaded to a valuable and essential business tool.” —Tom Jasinski, Vice President of Human Resources and Global Head of Design and Change Management, MetLife, Inc.

“The authors have created a perfect blend of lessons resulting in the most engaging, no-nonsense, helpful guide I’ve ever read on this topic. Read it quick—before your next meeting!” —Sharon Jordan-Evans, coauthor of Love ’Em or Lose ’Em

“Whether you are an OD practitioner, leader, or frequent meeting participant, the tools and approaches shared by Dick and Emily Axelrod can be quickly put into practice to achieve dramatic results.” —Kim Gallagher Johnson, Director of Organizational Effectiveness, Fortune 100 company

“Well-run meetings have a critical impact on the change process, so if you are responsible for significant transformational efforts, do yourself a favor and read Let’s Stop Meeting Like This.” —Daryl Conner, Chairman, Conner Partners, and author of Managing at the Speed of Change

“This clearly written book will be helpful to leaders wishing to shift the workplace culture to be more effective and more relational.” —Rabbi Deborah Prinz, Director of Program and Member Services, Central Conference of American Rabbis

“I certainly learned a great deal about a subject I have taken for granted. This is a must-read for anyone who seeks to make meetings more valuable and rewarding.” —Thomas C. Homburger, former Chairman, Real Estate Division, K&L Gates

“The spirit of the book alone can transform the quality of meetings, but the memorable model it offers ensures a group can improve its meeting experience.” —Ira Chaleff, author of The Courageous Follower

“The Axelrods’ book will make you smile in recognition and raise your eyebrows in appreciation of some new ideas.” —Beverly Kaye, founder and Chairwoman of the Board, Career Systems International, and coauthor of Love ’Em or Lose ’Em and Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go

let ’s stop me e ting like this

other books by the authors

Terms of Engagement: New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done

let ’s stop mee ting like this ◆

tools to save time and get more done

dick and emily axelrod

Let’s Stop Meeting Like This Copyright © 2014 by Richard H. Axelrod and Emily M. Axelrod All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650 San Francisco, California 94104-2916 Tel: (415) 288-0260, Fax: (415) 362-2512 www.bkconnection.com Ordering information for print editions Quantity sales. Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the “Special Sales Department” at the Berrett-Koehler address above. Individual sales. Berrett-Koehler publications are available through most bookstores. They can also be ordered directly from Berrett-Koehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626; www.bkconnection.com Orders for college textbook/course adoption use. Please contact BerrettKoehler: Tel: (800) 929-2929; Fax: (802) 864-7626. Orders by U.S. trade bookstores and wholesalers. Please contact Ingram Publisher Services, Tel: (800) 509-4887; Fax: (800) 838-1149; E-mail: [email protected]; or visit www.ingram publisherservices.com/Ordering for details about electronic ordering. Berrett-Koehler and the BK logo are registered trademarks of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. First Edition Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-081-9 PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-082-6 IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-085-7 2014-1 Cover design by Ian B. Koviak Interior Illustrations by Robert Adrian Hillman/shutterstock and Richard Sheppard Book design and production by Dianne Platner and Beverly Butterfield Copyediting by PeopleSpeak Indexing by Rachel Rice

to our sisters judy and susan

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contents Preface

ix 1 How to Get Your Work Done in Meetings 1 2 The Meeting Canoe 21 3 Welcome People 43 4 Connect People to Each Other and the Task 55 5 Discover the Way Things Are 67 6 Elicit People’s Dreams 79 7 Decide 89 8 Attend to the End 101 9 First Aid for Meetings 107 10 Meeting Basics: Five Steps to Meeting Success 119 11 Leaders: Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness 125 12 Contributors: Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness 129 13 Facilitators: Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness 133 14 Our Handoff to You 139 A Pocket Guide to Let’s Stop Meeting Like This   and More Works Cited Acknowledgments Index Meet the Authors The Axelrod Group: The Story Behind the Story

145 149 153 157 167 171

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preface This book has been a long time coming because we didn’t want to contribute to the noise about meetings. On the other hand, we knew we had new things to say. We know for sure that meetings can be places where you can do productive work—right in the meeting. Achieving that goal requires moving beyond meeting mechanics. We are offering you a seismic shift (not a set of tweaks) in the way you view, use, and participate in meetings. Let’s Stop Meeting Like This gives you a logical system you can use productively, even as you read the book. Using the same work design principles that transformed the factory floor and made video games en­ gaging, the book captures a flexible, repeatable process used to design thousands of meetings, making it accessible to all. With adaptations for routine, smaller meetings and large, direction-changing ones, you will learn to restructure your meetings so that

•  •  •  • 

Work gets done Everyone is engaged and respected The meeting is energizing, not energy sapping Time is valued, not wasted

Whom this book is for Conventional wisdom says there can be only one audience for a book. This book defies conventional wisdom by saying there are three audiences for Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: meeting leaders, contributors, and facilitators. Leaders are people with the formal authority to convene and run a meeting. Contributors are people who attend a meeting ix

preface

because their involvement makes a difference. Facilitators are people whose role is to offer guidance so that the meeting is successful. They may be professionally trained, or they may be group members who take on this role. They may be external or internal to the organization. What makes all of this so tricky is that during the course of a day, you might find yourself in each of these roles. We strongly believe that everyone is responsible for what happens in a meeting. That is why we didn’t write a book on how to be a better meeting leader or a better meeting participant or a better meeting facilitator. However, if you take to heart the ideas we present, you will become a better meeting leader, contributor, and facilitator.

How to use this book We’d love it if you read our book cover to cover. After all, it is our work. We know that some of you will dip in and out to find answers to current issues you may be facing. To help you figure out where to go, here is a brief guide. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the conceptual frameworks for the book. Chapters 3 through 8 take you step by step through our Meeting Canoe approach. Chapter 9 offers a guide for what to do when things go wrong. Chapters 10 through 13 provide a set of meeting basics and next steps for leaders, contributors, and facilitators. Chapter 14 is our handoff to you. To close the book we offer you a pocket guide to Let’s Stop Meeting Like This and more.

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Introducing the meeting canoe—a core concept—and Clockman, a character The Meeting Canoe (fig. P.1) is our blueprint for conducting ef­­ fective meetings. It evolved from our work with Peter Block and Kathy Dannemiller in the School for Managing and Leading Change. One rule in the school was to teach line managers the skills needed to effectively design and lead the gatherings that are part and parcel of any change process. We needed a simple model that worked in organizations large and small as well as in factories, offices, and boardrooms. The Meeting Canoe made its public debut when we coauthored You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done (Axelrod et al. 2004) with Robert Jacobs and Julie Beedon. Ron Thomas (director of the Northern Illinois Planning Commission at the time) said in his Amazon.com review of You Don’t Have to Do It Alone that the Meeting Canoe deserved to be a book by itself. So now it is.

Figure P.1  The Meeting Canoe

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 nough already—it looks like you are never going to get around E to introducing me. I’m Clockman, protector of the precious minute. Do you really think people care about why you wrote this book or whom the book is for? What people really care about is how to stop wasting time in meetings. When are you going to get on with it? Now that you have met Clockman, a brief word about him. Clockman is a full-fledged crew member. He is an annoying and valuable character—just like some people in your meetings. Despite his shortcomings, we cherish him for the interesting things he has to say. He’ll be joining us in chapter 3. We invite you to climb aboard for what we promise will be a challenging, exciting trip. Success will require us to pull to­­ gether as we examine how to make meetings productive work experiences. Our journey has already begun. Join us on the next page.

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chapter 1

how to get your work done in meetings If you look at the way we meet in organizations and communities across the country, you see a lot of presenters, a lot of podiums, and a lot of passive audiences. This reflects our naiveté in how to bring people together. peter block

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let ’s stop meeting like this

Have you ever fallen asleep on an airplane? Think about it. You are sleeping in a chair bolted to an aluminum frame, a few inches separating you from sixty-five-degree-below-zero (Fahrenheit) air, six miles up in the sky, going more than five hundred miles an hour. The information people share and the decisions engineers make in meetings at Boeing make this death-defying feat commonplace. Eric Lindblad, vice president and general manager of Boeing’s 747 program, runs many of those meetings that allow you to sleep on planes. He has strong opinions about meetings. For one, he finds spending hour upon hour in crowded conference rooms a nightmare. He hates to see conference rooms full of “wall-hangers,” people who attend a meeting with no real purpose in mind. He really gets upset when he looks around the room and sees people whose body language indicates they would rather be anywhere else in the world. “Empty inside” is how Eric describes his experience in these meetings. Eric believes the best way to lead change is to be out on the factory floor, working with production to implement needed changes, not in a stuffy conference room. Eric’s factory floor has fuselages, wings, tails, miles of cable, and seats. These parts come together in Renton, Washington, to make the finished product: a Boeing airplane. Eric’s frustration with meetings started when he was working on the Boeing 737. That is when he came to his belief about how to lead change. He also realized his task required building teams, sharing information, and making decisions. Eric had to find a way to both be out on the floor and hold meetings.

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how to get your work done in meetings

Eric started by doing some simple math. He multiplied the number of people in his meetings by their average hourly rate and quickly realized that meetings are a very expensive form of communication. He also concluded that habits were behind a lot of meetings—for example, “We meet every Monday morning, no matter what.”

Eric dared to rethink his meetings completely Eric sought to change these meeting habits by developing two criteria for determining whether to hold a meeting:   1.  Is there a need to share information?  2. Does the information that needs to be shared require dialogue? The answers would determine whether or not to hold a meeting. Making sure the “right” people attended was next. He sought to eliminate all wall-hangers from his meetings. His attendance criteria limited attendance to people who • Had information or knowledge to share • Had decision-making authority • Were vital to the issue at hand

Next he set about changing the culture of meetings Eric sought to eliminate arriving late and leaving early. In consultation with his leadership team, he required all meetings within his organization to be scheduled to start five minutes before the hour and end five minutes after, no matter the

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let ’s stop meeting like this

length. Why? Because he found that people were scheduling meetings back-to-back with no time for transition. This made it impossible for attendees to get from one side of a cavernous assembly building to the other and be on time for the next meeting. We suspect the same holds true even in smaller office buildings.

Then Eric completely updated his approach to meetings What Eric did next was extraordinary. He made all his meetings voluntary. There were no mandatory meetings on Eric’s watch. He wanted people to be there not because of threat or politics but because they wanted to be there. He actually gave people permission to leave meetings that were not valuable. When he noticed people who looked like they would rather be somewhere else, he would ask them, “Would your time be better spent doing something else?” If the answer was yes or they didn’t have a good answer to the question, Eric would excuse them from the meeting—no repercussions. Making meetings voluntary was Eric’s way of getting meeting feedback. If people stopped showing up to a particular meeting and Eric believed there was a need to meet, he then asked what people needed to make the meeting more ef­­fective. Eric has been using his approach to meeting effectiveness for more than ten years, starting when he was a senior manager of structures engineering for the 737 airplane. Whenever Eric takes a new assignment, he says it usually takes a month for people to believe that he is serious about his approach to meetings. 4

how to get your work done in meetings

What would happen if you made all of your meetings voluntary? You may be like Eric, feeling that too many of the meetings you lead are time-wasting, energy-sapping affairs. Most may seem like useless gatherings endured at the expense of your “real work”—meetings that sabotage your organization’s goals and product while wasting human capital. You may be ready to imitate Eric and make your meetings voluntary. Are you shuddering? It could work, but only if you take a fresh look at meetings and update your approach. If you are ready to take the plunge, then you are reading the right book. Even if you are not ready to make your meetings voluntary, you are still reading the right book. People always decide the extent to which they will be present in a meeting. If they don’t feel like they can leave, they leave in place; their bodies are present, but their minds are absent. No matter whether you make your meetings voluntary, people will still make choices about how much of themselves they bring to a meeting and how much of themselves they leave behind. You can influence that choice. We’ll show you how.

Getting your work done in meetings Meetings can be places where people do meaningful work, make plans, reach decisions, make commitments, and grow and develop and where everyone decides to get behind a task. Meetings can be gatherings in which people look forward to participating, even though they don’t have the time, even though the e-mails keep coming, even though no one can pick up the slack while they attend. 5

let ’s stop meeting like this

Changing meetings from time wasting to time valued from energy sapping to energy producing, requires a different ap­­ proach to designing, leading, and contributing in meetings. It means a change in direction. It means making new choices. We invite you to learn how to • Transform meetings into productive work experiences using the same work design principles that transformed factory work and made video games engaging • Identify the habits that work for and against energy producing, time-valued meetings • Identify the critical choices that meeting designers, leaders, and contributors make that transform meetings into productive work experiences • Create a meeting environment where everyone puts their paddle in the water

A better way to paddle this stream Prior to the 1970s, leaders viewed factory workers as extensions of the assembly line: interchangeable parts that required little training. These workers were expected to show up and do their job—no more, no less (Terkel 1972). This mind-set created an unprecedented level of dissatisfaction that resulted in autoworkers purposely sabotaging their product’s quality by placing defects into cars. That all changed when companies such as Ford and GM introduced Quality of Work Life initiatives that featured quality circles, joint union-management improvement activities, and self-directed work teams. For the first time, systems went into place that supported employee participation in making workplace improvements. Factory workers found new freedom 6

how to get your work done in meetings

when, for the first time, any worker on the line could stop the line. The result: productivity soared, quality improved, and frequent sabotage of the work virtually disappeared. People learned new skills through cross training; they learned how to work together in ways they had never worked before. In some plants, employee groups scheduled production, handled their own discipline, created their own work schedules, and often worked without direct supervision. Today’s popular work improvement processes, such as Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma, stand on the shoulders of these earlier efforts. Now we take for granted that workers can contribute to the organization and, as a result, generate improvement ideas that benefit everyone. Leaders did not always think that way. What we have learned is that given the opportunity, people can make significant contributions to improving their organization’s productivity.

What do the factory and meetings have in common? As workers did on those old factory floors, people often show up at meetings with low expectations. They don’t anticipate much will happen, they participate in decisions where the outcome has been predefined, they leave feeling that their time was wasted, and then at Starbucks and in the halls they complain about their energy-sapping, time-wasting meeting experience. Because most meetings provide the mind-numbing experience of the assembly line, most people seek to reduce the pain by eliminating the number of meetings they attend and the time they spend in them. This is a human response. However, 7

let ’s stop meeting like this

when you seek to eliminate meetings, you also eliminate the possibility of producing the innovative thinking, quality decisions, and collaboration and cooperation that can occur only when we meet. The choice, then, is to either • Remove the pain by eliminating meetings • Create more productive meetings

Why meetings are so energy draining Emily is fond of telling about her experience with the PTA. She recalls a meeting to decide on the color of the cafeteria trays. The meeting dragged on for hours. In the end, the group did decide on a color: yellow. Fifteen skilled people spent hours on an inconsequential decision. Emily, frustrated by her ex­‑ perience, decided never to return. You might ask why Emily, being the good consultant that she is, didn’t help the group reach a decision more effectively. Why didn’t she step in to end such mind-numbing discussion? The reason: she didn’t care. A meeting has meaning when you know that what you are doing is important, that the outcome will make a difference to you, to others, to the organization as a whole. What difference was the color of cafeteria trays likely to make? You spend a lot of time in meetings: informal chats and huddles with your coworkers, as well as staff meetings, town halls, and major change initiatives. Some meetings take a few minutes; others are multiday affairs. Sometimes you meet with one other person; other times you meet with hundreds. Studies show that the amount of time spent in meetings varies by organization level, ranging from 20 percent to 70 percent of a day.

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how to get your work done in meetings

In the United States alone, there are 11 million meetings daily (Koehn 2013). All of us are spending more time in meetings than we did five years ago, and this trend is expected to continue (Lee 2010). As shown in table 1.1, meetings range from informal chats involving two people to large-group, multistakeholder meetings. The larger the meeting, the greater the need for structure. (We are using “structure” here to mean the systems that guide the meeting process so that people can do their work effectively.) As you add more and different people to the conversation, variety increases, which allows learning and innovation to occur. The degree of preparation also increases as you move from informal to more formal gatherings. You put a lot of time and effort into meetings. The problem is that the effort is often misplaced. Any meeting includes three basic roles: leader, contributor, and facilitator. In some cases, a person with a formal organizational role may have the same role in the meeting. For example, the formal organization leader may be the discussion leader, or an HR person may be the facilitator. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Any meeting participant can lead the discussion, contribute, or facilitate the discussion. Table 1.2 identifies how these roles contribute to getting work done in meetings. They comprise an integrated whole, working to assure the meeting’s success. Having one of these roles is not the same as effectively performing that role. Some leaders, contributors, and facilitators can actually work against the success of a meeting, as outlined in table 1.3.

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Table 1.1  Where you spend your time Informal chats

Huddles

Weekly meetings

Town halls

Work sessions

Size

2–10

2-10

2-10

>20

>50

Length

5–20 minutes

5–20 minutes

1–2 hours

1–2 hours

Team members

Frequency

Ad hoc

Purpose/focus

Shop talk

Daily updates

Major change initiatives Strategy development/ deployment Process / work flow improvement

Membership

Anyone

Degree of structure

Low

Virtual or face-to-face

Either

Usually faceto-face, can be virtual

Stakeholders of the issue

Table 1.2  Meeting roles and responsibilities Role

Responsibilities

Leader

Convenes the meeting; assures that the purpose for meeting is clear and compelling and that the right people are present Leads the meeting, making sure the group stays on task

Contributor

Offers the ideas and participates in the discussion Brings needed information to the meeting or acts in a way that facilitates the group’s working effectively

Facilitator

Assists the group in achieving its purpose Takes responsibility for timekeeping or posting information on smart boards Facilitates discussion by making sure the participants’ voices count and helping to resolve conflicts that may occur

Table 1.3 How leaders, contributors, and facilitators work against success Leaders

Contributors

Facilitators

Do for the group Build the agenda with Sit idly by as the what it can do for little or no input from meeting goes downitself hill, expecting the others meeting leaders to make everything right Lack the courage to invite differing opinions

Show up unprepared to participate and pay more attention to their smartphones than to what is happening in the room

Believe their “magic” can cure everything that is wrong with the meeting

Manipulate the discussion through false participation

Put self-interest before the common good

Orchestrate false participation

how to get your work done in meetings

Are you a meeting investor, beneficiary, or bystander? No matter what role you play in a meeting, how you show up in that role is critical to the meeting’s success. Here are two examples. Our colleague Barbara Bunker is one of the most sought-after committee members at the University at Buffalo because in every meeting she attends, she invests in the meeting by asking herself what she can do to ensure the meeting’s success. If note taking is required, Barbara takes notes. If helping to resolve a conflict is required, she helps resolve the conflict. If the task is making sure everyone has a voice in the discussion, then that is what she does. Barbara’s investment helps ensure the meeting’s success. Our editor, Steve Piersanti, takes a different approach. Prior to a meeting, he works to become a beneficiary by reviewing the agenda and asking himself two questions: “What can I contribute?” and “What can I gain?” His answers to these questions prepare him to be an active meeting participant. He answers the question, “Who am I here for?” by saying, “I’m here for myself and I’m here for others.” By contributing to the success of the meeting, Steve makes sure he is there for the larger group. By figuring out what he can gain, he makes sure that he meets his own needs. In both cases, Barbara and Steve plan not just for the meeting but how they will show up in the meeting. They take responsibility for ensuring that the meeting is worthwhile, not just for themselves, but also for everyone present. Barbara and Steve provide great examples of how you can invest in and benefit from a meeting. Being an investor in the

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meeting’s success means choosing to work for the good of the whole. Being a beneficiary requires you to work toward creating value for yourself. Together they are a powerful combination. You can also choose to be a bystander. Bystanders don’t invest in the meeting’s success, nor do they work to achieve benefit from the meeting. They stand on the sidelines like the wall-hangers at Boeing, hoping something useful will happen. By making this decision they ensure the meeting goes nowhere. The choice to invest in or benefit from the meeting is a decision to work toward the meeting’s success. The choice to be a bystander is a decision to work for the meeting’s failure. What choice will you make in your next meeting?

Toward a more productive meeting Everyone knows that effective meetings have a purpose and an agenda, and everyone knows you need more than these. Too much of the advice about improving meetings only offers boxes of Band-Aids. Instead, in the coming chapters, we will describe a seismic shift in the way to think about, plan, and execute meetings—no Band-Aids. We will show you how to change the meeting experience from dread to engagement, from something you suffer through to something you find appealing. Whether you are a leader, contributor, or facilitator, success will require you to change the way you perceive, plan, and participate in meetings. Success starts with conceiving of meetings as places where everyone does productive work. It means creating meetings where everyone feels responsible for the outcomes. These meetings carry five electrical charges (Csikszentmihalyi 1997; Emery and Trist 1960; Hackman and Oldham 1976) 14

how to get your work done in meetings

• Autonomy • Meaning • Challenge • Learning • Feedback You can imagine our surprise when Colin Anderson, CEO of Denki, the company that created the award-winning video game Quarrel, approached us at a workshop we conducted and excitedly told us that these principles are similar to the principles his design team employs. We soon learned that the extent to which autonomy, meaning, challenge, learning, and feedback are present determines whether a player becomes engaged in playing a game. If you are thinking these are outdated principles that apply only to the factory floor, you are mistaken. Now imagine how easily the elements of video games could transfer to meetings (table 1.4). Judy Weber-Lucas, a senior organization development consultant, shared with us how she went from dreading meetings to actually looking forward to them. Here is her story in her own words: I once had a client, Ken Aruda at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland, who invited me to his weekly staff meetings. At first I dreaded them, but after experiencing his facilitation style, I actually looked forward to being a part of meetings where things got done.   Here’s how it worked:

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Table 1.4  How elements of video games can transfer to meetings Elements of How game builders video games achieve each element

How meeting designers could build each element

Autonomy

Build in autonomy by ensuring that how well players do is based on the choices they make.

Build in autonomy by ensuring that participants can influence the meeting’s direction.

Meaning

Create the feeling that the game is worth playing by capturing players’ interest at the beginning of the game.

Create the feeling that the meeting is worth its time by engaging participants fully at the beginning of the meeting.

Challenge

Produce the right amount of challenge by making the game familiar and different at the same time, giving players the belief that they can play this game.

Produce the right amount of challenge by making the meeting familiar and different at the same time, giving participants the belief that this meeting will be time well spent.

Learning and feedback

Support learning by providing immediate feedback through sight, sound, and touch and by assuming that players are smart, clever people who respond to positive feedback. (Anderson 2013)

Support learning by giving immediate feedback from leaders, facilitators, and other participants and by assuming that participants are smart, clever people who respond to positive feedback.

 

how to get your work done in meetings

1.  Leader agenda items. The leader would arrive ten minutes early and record his items for the agenda on a whiteboard. 2. Team member agenda items. As team members arrived, they would add their agenda items to the whiteboard list. They arrived a couple of minutes early, knowing the meeting would start on time. 3.  Time estimates. Once the meeting began, the leader would review the list and ask the agenda item owners to predict the number of minutes it would take to cover their topic. He wrote the number of minutes to the left of each agenda item. 4.  Priority order. To assure the most important items got full coverage, he asked the team to prioritize the list of items from the most important to the least im­ portant. He recorded the priority order to the right of each agenda item. 5.  Timekeeper and recorder. The leader asked for a volunteer to keep the team on task, according to the times allotted. The leader also asked for a volunteer to record conclusions and decisions made on each topic. Each topic needed only one or two sentences. 6.  Items that run out of time. If an item warranted more than the predicted number of minutes, the leader would ask how much more time might be needed to complete the topic. Based on this prediction, he asked the group members if they were willing to allow more

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time immediately, at the end of the meeting, or at the next staff meeting. The team decision determined the next step for this   particular topic. 7.  Closing. The leader asked the recorder to review the conclusions and decisions made for each topic to en­­ sure team members knew their commitments. Despite the time it took to set up the process at the beginning of the meeting, it ended up being a good use of team members’ time because they were “getting things done.” (Weber-Lucas 2013) Autonomy was present in this meeting because people had control over what the group discussed and the discussion’s length. Meaning occurred when people discussed issues that were important to them. Challenge was present in the topics they addressed as well as an agenda that worked for all. Learning occurred as people addressed the topics. And feedback was provided as they reviewed the outcomes of the meeting. As a re­­ sult of investing in the meeting, everyone benefited. While her client did not have the benefit of knowing these principles or the Meeting Canoe system, Judy believes he came up with an approach that intuitively incorporated both. Meeting success requires incorporating these concepts as we take a ride in the Meeting Canoe, our system for creating meetings where productive work happens. In the next chapter we’ll show you how. Before we do, we’d like you to ponder the following question.

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how to get your work done in meetings

Are meetings keystone habits? Charles Duhigg has identified what he calls keystone habits: habits so powerful that if you change them, the whole organization changes. When Paul O’Neill became Alcoa’s CEO, he decided his number-one priority was to change safety habits throughout the organization. He modeled this when he began his first speech as CEO by informing people where the exit doors were and what they should do in case of an emergency. To everyone’s surprise, he never once talked about his profitability or productivity goals. Throughout his presidency he focused on changing safety habits because he believed they were the keystone to productivity improvement. In doing so, he changed Alcoa into both a profit machine and a safety exemplar (Duhigg 2012). We invite you to consider meetings keystone habits. What might happen if you changed the way you meet? What ripple effects might occur throughout your organization? What difference would changing your meeting habits make? Could it be that focusing on meetings is similar to focusing on safety? Starting with Eric Lindblad and throughout this book, we will show you how to change the way you meet and the dramatic changes that can occur as a result. Our journey continues in the following chapter.

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key points • Making meetings voluntary and treating meeting participants as volunteers will make you rethink your approach to meetings. • Meetings range in size from two-person chats to large-scale • Leader, contributor, and facilitator are roles critical to any meeting’s success. • Meeting investors and beneficiaries work for the meeting’s success, while bystanders contribute to its failure. • Effective meetings carry the electrical charges of autonomy, meaning, challenge, learning, and feedback. • Meetings can be considered keystone habits.

make it your own • Try making meetings in your organization voluntary. • Treat meeting participants as if they were volunteers. • Identify the role you play in a meeting as leader, contri­butor, or facilitator. Ask yourself how well your role contributes to the meeting’s success. • Decide how you will show up at your next meeting. Will you be a meeting investor, beneficiary, or bystander? • Build autonomy, meaning, challenge, learning, and feedback into your next meeting.

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chapter 2

the meeting canoe We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done. We meet because the knowledge and experience needed in a specific situation are not available in one head, but have to be pieced together out of the knowledge and experience of several people. peter drucker

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You’ve already seen us refer to the Meeting Canoe as a system. This is a great time for us to tell you why we use that language. The Meeting Canoe (Axelrod et al. 2004) is a complete rethinking of the meeting design, execution, and follow-up; it frames meetings as the factory floor for knowledge workers. Can you imagine getting substantial work done during meetings? It can and does happen in organizations that use the Meeting Canoe. Let’s unpack that “system” claim. The Meeting Canoe is a system because • The Meeting Canoe’s parts influence each other. How connected people feel directly impacts how they understand the way things are, their ability to dream about the future, and the decisions they make. • The Meeting Canoe interacts with its environment as the crew adapts to changing conditions. • No single part is effective without the other parts. • How well the Meeting Canoe functions depends on how well the parts work together. Compare the Meeting Canoe with another water vehicle: a wooden raft. As a young Girl Scout, Emily and her fellow scouts made wooden rafts by lashing logs together and then climbed aboard for a lazy drift down the Cape Fear River. Drifting along without a care in the world on a hot, steamy day, Emily and her friends found that scouting for water moccasins, alligators, and the occasional dragonfly made for a great summer. A wooden raft is fine for drifting along when you don’t care where you are going and time is no object. Contrast this with a canoe, where you care where you are going, time matters, and your crew 22

the meeting canoe

controls the direction. We think too many meetings are rafts when they could be canoes. Using the Meeting Canoe system, you can truly transform meetings, not just tweak them. It is one thing to opine that everyone in the room has responsibility for the outcome, but it’s something else completely to structure and run a meeting entirely on that basis and give participants specific instructions about their role in meetings. The Meeting Canoe (fig. 2.1) gives order, shape, and flow to your meetings. It represents a conversation that opens and closes. It starts at its narrowest part by welcoming people into the meeting and then connects people to each other and the task. As the conversation widens, so does the Meeting Canoe. It helps people discover the way things are and elicits their dreams for the future. At this point, you are at the widest part of the canoe. When you know the way things are and the future you want to create, the most possibilities exist. The approach supports effective decision making. As you make decisions, you abandon some alternatives, narrowing the conversation and at the same time allowing new possibilities to emerge for how to implement your decisions. The Meeting Canoe narrows further as you attend to the end so that everyone is clear about what you have all decided and learned from the meeting experience.

Figure 2.1  Parts of the Meeting Canoe

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The Meeting Canoe consists of six parts. They are • Welcome people. In this part, you greet people and begin to create an atmosphere that is conducive to doing the meeting’s work. • Connect people to each other and the task. The goal here is to create two levels of connection. The first level is building relationships between meeting participants. The second level is connecting meeting participants to the task at hand. • Discover the way things are. In this part, you engage people in learning for themselves about the current situation. • Elicit people’s dreams. The goal here is to have partici­pants imagine their preferred future unencumbered by current reality. • Decide. In this part, people make decisions about what they want to do based on the way things are and their dreams, in accordance with the decision-making process identified prior to the meeting. • Attend to the end. The goal here is to bring closure to the meeting by reviewing the decisions made, identifying the next steps, and reflecting on the meeting process.

The Meeting Canoe brought to you by hundreds of learners, a smart ski instructor, and Fortune 100 companies Imagine this: you’ve just paid $525 for a private ski lesson and you are standing at the base of the mountain with your instructor, ready to go. It’s ten degrees Fahrenheit, the wind is howling, and the clock is ticking. In front of you stands a big guy 24

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with a scraggly beard who looks more like a river raft guide (which he is as well) than a ski instructor. Dave starts the lesson by welcoming you to the Breckenridge Ski School and asking you how long you’ve been skiing, where you are from, and how long you will be in Breckenridge. Next he seamlessly shifts the conversation to your current abilities, what you do well, and what you’d like to be able to do better. Soon the conversation moves to what you hope to accomplish, not just in today’s lesson. Dave is soon formulating a plan for your development. Do you feel that your time is being wasted? No, you feel that you are no longer just another skier going through the lesson mill. You are the recipient of a custom-designed ski lesson. Soon you are off, gliding down the slopes, learning gems that take your skiing to a whole new level, and having the time of your life. Three hours later, Dave takes the time to review with you what you have learned and provides you with a plan for applying today’s lesson. By applying the Meeting Canoe approach, our ski instructor, Dave, went from being a frequently requested ski instructor to being the number-one-ranked ski instructor at Breckenridge. Seeing Dave’s success, his envious buddies asked what his secret was. Dave, being the kind soul that he is, taught them the Meeting Canoe approach, which allowed his buddies to rise in the rankings as well. This is important because ski instructors’ pay increases when people specifically request them. In this case, Dave wins because he gets more pay plus satisfied clients who not only come back but also refer him to their friends. The company wins because it gets more revenue and more satisfied customers. Most importantly, the clients win because they become better skiers. 25

let ’s stop meeting like this

Prior to using the Meeting Canoe, Dave would have a cursory chat with a student prior to embarking on a lesson. Once he started using the Meeting Canoe system, he would spend time welcoming the student and connecting with the student prior to the start of the lesson. He would help the student discover the way things are by doing a skill assessment and talk with the student about what he or she hoped to accomplish— the student’s dreams. Together they would decide on a plan for the lesson. Following the lesson, instead of saying a quick thank-you, Dave would attend to the end by reviewing the lesson and offering further suggestions for cementing the lesson. An unintended consequence of our teaching the Meeting Canoe approach for large-scale change was that people picked it up and began to use it to frame ordinary meetings. The most surprising learning came from the guy you just met, our son Dave. At the time, Dave was a professional ski instructor in Breckenridge, Colorado. One day Emily was talking with him and he said, “You know that Meeting Canoe that you and Dad developed? Well, I’ve been using it as a system for conducting my ski lessons.” And now you know the rest of the story.

The Meeting Canoe guides your conversations The Meeting Canoe template represents a conversation a group has during the course of a meeting, no matter the length. The conversation starts with the welcome. A good welcome helps people make the transition from the world outside the meeting to the world inside the meeting. It’s similar to the entryway in your house or apartment that helps people make the transition

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the meeting canoe

from the outside world into your home. We spend time creating a welcoming environment because productive meetings are rooted in safety. Creating a safe-enough environment to do the meeting’s work begins with a good welcome. Having created a welcoming environment, you next connect people to each other and the task. This is important on two levels. Personal connection builds the trust necessary to do the work, and connection to the task unleashes energy. These first two sections of the Meeting Canoe—welcome and connect people to each other and the task—build the foundation for effective work during the meeting (Lieberman 2013). Next you discover the way things are. This is the first action step. Meeting participants come to the meeting with varying understandings of the reality they are addressing. In this step, they build a shared understanding of the reality they are facing. When you elicit people’s dreams, you ask meeting participants to imagine their preferred future. In this step, you conceive of a future worth having. Opportunities emerge that were not present before. These two parts of the conversation, discover the way things are and elicit people’s dreams, contain great power. That is why they represent the widest part of the Meeting Canoe. At the widest point, the most options are present. When you are clear about the way things are and you are clear about the future you want to create, you literally see things you didn’t see before (Fritz 1999). Have you ever noticed that when you are about to purchase a new car, you see the car you would like to purchase everywhere? Those cars have always been out there. However, when you are clear about the way things are—your car no longer

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works or you are tired of your current car, and you know that you want a new car—your brain lets in new information. That is why you see the car you want to purchase everywhere. Spending time discovering the way things are and eliciting people’s dreams provides a rich menu of choices for the group. Rushing these two steps shortchanges the group. Spending too much time wears the group down. If you focus only on discovering the way things are, the group loses energy because the task seems overwhelming. If you focus only on your dreams, it is easy to become Pollyannaish. Energy builds toward completion when you are clear about the way things are and you know the future you want to create. Having created a rich menu of possibilities, you must now decide. There are many ways to make decisions in groups. We’ll talk more about this in chapter 7. The most important point about this part of the conversation is to be clear about the decision-making method you will use. Nothing is worse in a meeting than to think you were participating in a group decision-making process and then find out that the decision was predetermined. When the group makes a decision, it reaches a fork in the road. The act of deciding eliminates some options and opens up other options for how you will implement the decision you have reached. The last stage of the conversation is to attend to the end. Many meetings rush or overlook this part. A good ending is a new beginning. It builds energy for future actions. Attending to the end gives people a clear understanding of the decisions reached and identifies next steps, thus serving as a springboard for the future.

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Working your way from the front to the back of the Meeting Canoe As you work your way from welcome to attend to the end in the Meeting Canoe, it is important to realize that what you do in one section of the Meeting Canoe impacts the others. For example, when people enter the meeting and experience your welcome, that experience becomes the input for the next section. What happens when you connect people to each other and the task becomes the input for discovering the way things are. In each section, you are working with content issues and emotional issues. So what you discuss and your experience discussing it directly impact what happens in the next section of the canoe. Figure 2.2 gives you a visual of the process, which is summarized below. • Inputs are the state in which people arrive at a section of the Meeting Canoe. • Conversations are interactions that take place during the meeting. • Outputs are the results. • Purpose is your intent for this section of the canoe.

conversations

Inputs

purpose

Outputs

Figure 2.2  Inputs/outputs

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The Meeting Canoe works in very different situations In chapter 1, we identified the different ways people meet— everything from informal chats to formal work sessions. Tables 2.1 through 2.5 show you how these different meetings might look when you apply the Meeting Canoe system. Chats and Huddles Chats and huddles (tables 2.1 and 2.2) are informal. In these cases, the Meeting Canoe runs as background in your mind as you participate in these conversations. Table 2.1  Chat Welcome

Offer a simple greeting.

Connect people to each other and the task

Share what’s on your mind.

Discover the way Listen to the other person. things are Elicit people’s dreams

Talk about what you would like to have happen. Ask the other person what he or she would like to have happen.

Decide

Agree on further actions.

Attend to the end

Say good-bye and thank the other person for listening.

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Table 2.2  Huddle Welcome

Greet newcomers and explain how the huddle works.

Connect people to each other and the task

Share the huddle’s purpose.

Discover the way things are

Ask each person two questions: What do you plan to work on this week? What help or support do you need?

Elicit people’s dreams

Share what you would like to have happen.

Decide

Agree on actions to take based on the discussion.

Attend to the end

Review the agreements and commitments made.

Staff Meetings Regular staff meetings benefit from the Meeting Canoe system because it provides a meeting structure (table 2.3). When you meet regularly, it’s easy to get sloppy because you know people and you know the work. In these cases, many people forget about welcoming, connecting to each other and the task, and attending to the end. In our desire to get to work, we overlook our need to connect and provide closure. Using the Meeting Canoe to create your agenda helps you avoid these pitfalls. As you will learn later, it’s also possible to devote individual meetings to single Meeting Canoe elements so that, over time, you cover the whole system.

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Table 2.3  Staff meeting Welcome

Prior to the meeting, solicit input to the meeting design and agenda from contributors. Be a good host and welcome people as they enter the room. Prepare materials and the room to support the work. Work at a round table wherever possible.

Connect people to each other and the task

Ask participants to discuss, When it comes to this meeting’s purpose, what do you care about and why? Or what will success at this meeting require of you?

Discover the way things are

Depending on the agenda item and/or participant, share information or engage in dialogue to under­s tand the current state. Ask contributors to do research prior to the meet­­ing and share their results during the meeting.

Elicit people’s dreams

Discuss what you would like to create as a result of participating in this meeting or what you would like to create as a result of discussing a particular agenda item.

Decide

Agree on actions to take based on the issues and decision-making process identified prior to the start of the meeting.

Attend to the end

Review the decisions and commitments made. Review everyone’s roles going forward. Create your road map for going forward. Discuss whether this meeting was time well spent: How can we strengthen those things that contributed to making this meeting time well spent? What do we need to do differently?

the meeting canoe

Town Halls Many organizations use town hall meetings as a way for leaders to interact with organization members and share information and dialogue about current issues. While well intended, many town halls become one-way conversations by the leader with little time left for dialogue. Table 2.4 shows what a town hall meeting looks like when you apply the Meeting Canoe system. Work Sessions Increasingly, organizations bring important stakeholders to­gether from within and outside the organization to address critical business issues. In these sessions, people from all levels of the organization work together to improve processes and design new products and services. For-profit and not-for-profit organizations use work sessions to create their preferred future. Standard work sessions go by the names of Future Search, Open Space, Whole-Scale Change, the Appreciative Inquiry Summit, and Lift-Off. The Meeting Canoe system works with them all, giving you a way to custom design your work session without holding you prisoner of a specific methodology. How a Fortune 100 Company Uses the Meeting Canoe to Integrate Different Methodologies John Bader, the leader of a customer enterprise services organization, had a problem. He was determined to deeply involve his six thousand people in redesigning the organization to im­­ prove efficiency and customer service. He also wanted to use what on the surface seemed like two competing concepts: Jay Galbraith’s Star Model and Judith Katz and Fred Miller’s 33

Table 2.4  Town hall Welcome

Form a design team made up of a microcosm of the participants to help you design the town hall. Be a good host and welcome people as they enter the room. Prepare materials, technology, and the room to support the work. Make microphones available so that everyone can be heard. Work at round tables wherever possible.

Connect people to each other and the task

Ask participants to discuss, What question or concern do you bring to this meeting that needs to be addressed? Clarify the meeting’s purpose and identify key topics you will discuss.

Discover the way things are

Present information to the group.

Elicit people’s dreams

Discuss what you would like to create as a result of participating in this meeting.

Decide

Agree on actions to take based on the issues and decision-making process identified prior to the start of the meeting.

Attend to the end

Review key points from the meeting.

Ask participants, What did you hear? What do you want to know more about?

Identify the road map for going forward. Discuss whether this meeting was time well spent: How can we strengthen those things that contributed to making this meeting time well spent? What do we need to do differently?

the meeting canoe

Inclusion Model (Galbraith 2005; Miller and Katz 2002). His consultants were telling him he needed a two-and-a-halfday process to do the design work. That was unacceptable to John. John asked his design team to create a one-day process that would accomplish his goals. Using the Meeting Canoe as their template, John’s design team was able to create a one-day process that was delivered in eighteen different locations. The result: John estimates his return on investment for this work to be in excess of fifteen times, and his organization is providing superior customer service (Bader 2009). John’s group did not have the benefit of this book, nor were the members formally trained in the Meeting Canoe. They had just heard about the model. How the Meeting Canoe Accelerates Change When you walk into the organizational effectiveness (OE) group offices at this same company, what stands out are the meeting rooms. Floor-to-ceiling whiteboards are covered with work in progress. Writing from red, black, blue, and green dry erase markers covers the walls, and in some rooms you will find a hand-drawn Meeting Canoe sketch. “Having the Meeting Canoe graphic on the wall helps keep us on track during meetings. The shape lets us know where we are in the meeting and how much time we should be spending in each part of the canoe. The Meeting Canoe gives us a common language when we are working with each other,” reports Angie Keister, organizational effectiveness consultant. We are used to driving communications from top to bottom and expecting people to get it. Recently, a senior

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leadership team asked us to design a day-and-a-half meeting for the top leaders of the organization. Frontline leaders were to attend a similar session one week later. In all, four hundred people were to attend the first two sessions, and fifteen hundred people needed to receive this important information. When Kim Gallagher Johnson [OE group director] and I met to plan this work, the Meeting Canoe was top of mind. It didn’t matter if we were conducting a planning meeting with senior executives or a workshop with frontline leaders. We even taught the walkthru design team the Meeting Canoe approach. In turn, they used it to design their local sessions.   Our leaders readily take to the Meeting Canoe be­ cause it is so easy to understand. We were able to transform a top-down process into a high-engagement set of activities. Along the way, our leaders learned a new way to design and conduct productive meetings.” (Keister 2013) Just think what you might be able to accomplish. Work sessions are longer workshop-like sessions designed to address a specific issue. Table 2.5 applies the Meeting Canoe to work sessions.

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Table 2.5  Work session Welcome

Form a design team made up of a microcosm of the participants to help you design the work session. Be a good host and welcome people as they enter the room. If there is assigned seating, help people find their seats. Prepare materials, technology, and the room to support the work. Make microphones available so that everyone can be heard. Work at round tables wherever possible. Create a welcoming environment by working in a room with natural light and providing healthy snacks.

Connect people to each other and the task

Identify the meeting’s purpose. Ask participants to discuss any of these questions: • Why did you say yes to attending this meeting? • What strength or gift do you bring to this meeting? • What are your hopes or fears about this meeting? • What will success require of you in this meeting? • W hat is important to you about the topic being discussed and why?

Discover the way things are

Ask participants to teach each other about what their function does and how it works. Use panel discussions. Ask participants to conduct interviews prior to the session and share results during the session.

Table 2.5 continues on next page

Table 2.5  Work session, continued Elicit people’s Discuss what is important to you about the topic dreams at hand. Talk about the future as if it were the present. Use the arts to engage the right side of the brain. Build in breaks and times for reflection so that insights can emerge. Decide

Agree on actions to take based on the issues and decision-making process identified prior to the start of the work session. Identify who will make the decisions, and what you will be deciding.

Attend to the end

Review the decisions and commitments made. Review participants’ respective roles going forward. Create your road map for going forward. Ask for simple commitments: What can you do to move the process forward during the next thirty days? Discuss whether this meeting was time well spent: How can we strengthen those things that contributed to making this meeting time well spent? What do we need to do differently?

the meeting canoe

Why, how, and when a global media conglomerate uses the Meeting Canoe “The more you use the Meeting Canoe, the more you understand its power,” says Chuck Mallue, an organization development consultant for a global media giant. “We started out by using the Meeting Canoe as a design template for work sessions, meetings that can run anywhere from two hours to several days. Now the approach even influences everyday meetings.” Here are four reasons why, in Chuck’s own words: 1. Our leaders recognize a good meeting when they see it. People approach meeting effectiveness thinking about agendas, time management, norms, and ground rules. These are all meeting elements, but they’re all very tactical and short-term. The Meeting Canoe gives you a set of meeting design principles that provide a holistic system. Meeting planners design agendas. When you work with the Meeting Canoe, you design a complete experience. 2. Innovation and creativity are hallmarks of our organization. We try to be creative, we try to be innovative, we tell stories; we use the Meeting Canoe because it fits our culture. The Meeting Canoe image, its simplicity and smooth flow, make sense to us. People get it. They can apply it immediately. 3. The Meeting Canoe has changed the way we design virtual meetings so they’re more like face-to-face meetings. The problem with virtual meetings is you’re missing the personal, authentic, visceral experience that happens

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when you meet with somebody using all your senses. It’s so much more difficult to understand what is going on with people when you meet virtually. The Meeting Canoe forces you to make sure you’re paying proper attention to each stage of the meeting. 4. These virtual or in-person gatherings connect people around the globe and are an expensive proposition. Periodically, we need to bring people together to think about what is going on today and what is happening in the world. Whether we meet virtually or in person, for two hours or several days, there is work to do and people need to feel productive doing it. You have to get the design right. That happens when we use the Meeting Canoe. (Mallue 2013) How does Chuck use it? Some work sessions are local and some are global. We use the Meeting Canoe to design work sessions for creating new organizations and to address a variety of business issues.   When I’m working with an HR partner to design a work session, we talk explicitly about each element of the Meeting Canoe as we go through the design process. If I’m working with line clients, it’s fifty-fifty as to whether we talk explicitly about the canoe. If they like metaphors, are creative, and are visually oriented, it’s easy to talk them through the canoe and even draw it for them. I’ll say, “Hey, this is how we’re thinking about the major elements of this work and how the sequence might be.”

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  If they’re a little less oriented toward metaphors and graphics, then the Meeting Canoe becomes a conversation checklist that identifies the things we want to consider to make sure everybody’s comfortable and engaged in the work. Some of our internal clients never know we are using the Meeting Canoe. What they do know is that their meetings are better when they work with us. (Mallue 2013) When does he use it? The funny thing is that once you get this model in your head, you begin to apply it to everyday meetings as well. You may not apply all the elements in every meeting. You might spend a meeting connecting people to each other and the task or discovering the way things are. But over time, you cover the whole canoe. (Mallue 2013) Just put your canoe in the water and start paddling. That’s Chuck’s advice. In the coming pages, you will learn how the Meeting Canoe’s components work as we devote a chapter to each canoe element. See you there.

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key points • The Meeting Canoe is a system, a complete rethinking of the design, execution, and follow-up of meetings. • By using the Meeting Canoe, leaders, contributors, and facilitators can truly transform meetings, not just tweak them. • The Meeting Canoe provides an easy-to-understand structure for running meetings where everyone feels responsible for the outcomes.

make it your own • Using the Meeting Canoe system, analyze the really good and really bad meetings you attend. • Identify how the Meeting Canoe supports meeting effectiveness. • Identify how the absence of the Meeting Canoe hinders meeting effectiveness. • Use the Meeting Canoe system to design an upcoming meeting. • Use the Meeting Canoe system as you prepare for an important conversation or meeting presentation.

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chapter 3

welcome people I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. harriet tubman

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Greetings. Whether you’ve picked this chapter as the place to start reading Let’s Stop Meeting Like This or have been with us all along, we’re glad you are here. This is the first of six chapters devoted to the elements of the Meeting Canoe, our framework for creating meetings that work. Each chapter is devoted to one section of the Meeting Canoe. In this chapter you will take a deep dive into the how and why of making people feel welcome. Productive meetings are rooted in safety. The first task of any meeting is to create an environment that is safe enough in which to do the work. It all starts with creating a welcoming environment. What a bunch of psychobabble! Excuse me. Who are you? I’m Clockman, protector of the precious minute. This talk about welcoming people is wasting time. But, how welcome people feel determines how they participate in meetings. When people don’t feel safe, they can’t bring their best selves to a meeting. They are like tortoises, pulling their heads inside and waiting for the danger to pass. S afety, schmafety—these people are adults. Why should they need to feel welcome? They’ve got a job to do. Adults don’t need to feel welcome to do their work. If people need to feel safe, then maybe you’ve got the wrong people and what you need to do is fire them. 44

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Then you’d have to fire the whole company. Clockman. It is Clockman, isn’t it? Yes, Clockman is my name; time is my game. Did you ever think that your focus on time actually gets in the way of saving time? No one wants to waste time. Creating a safe environment is time well spent because it allows the rest of the meeting to go faster. I’m all for not wasting time. This banter between us isn’t getting us anywhere. Would you be willing to take your eye off the clock for a few minutes while we explain why scientists think safety is so important? Well, okay. Just be brief and keep the psychobabble to a min­­ imum.

Neuroscience proves that welcoming matters Folks called neuroscientists study how our brains work. Their findings take welcoming from “something nice to do” to “something we must do.” For years, those of us who lead, design, and facilitate meetings knew from experience that meetings go better when people feel welcome (Lieberman 2013). What we didn’t know was why. It turns out that our brains are always scanning the environment for threats and rewards (Rock 2009). We are seeking to avoid danger and move toward rewards. However, we don’t 45

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look for these things equally. It turns out we are always on the lookout for danger. In fact, we are ten times more likely to scan for threats than we are for rewards. Are you with us so far? Yes. So far, so good. You’re not making this stuff up, are you? No. There is a lot of research behind what we are saying. Scanning for threats is as natural as breathing. It’s so natural, we don’t even know we are doing it. Do you mean it’s kind of like a built-in radar system, constantly scanning for danger? Exactly. When you spot danger, your first response is fight or flight. In a meeting, you may feel threatened because you don’t feel welcome, because you think the meeting is a waste of time, or because the meeting’s purpose is threatening. You eliminate the threat by defeating it or by leaving the scene. Most people don’t feel comfortable getting up and leaving a meeting when they don’t feel welcome. So what they do is leave in place. They fight by finding ways to disrupt the work at hand. For example, they raise false objections and engage in discussions that take the group down bunny trails, thus cleverly avoiding the perceived threat in doing the work at hand.

We are on our way Clockman, did you feel that?

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Feel what? Our canoe has slipped into the water. Our trip has already started. Huh? This discussion we are having about the importance of welcoming has begun the process of rethinking meetings. Our trip has started. If you say so.

Welcoming creates a transition The first task of any meeting is to minimize the threat people may experience by creating a welcoming environment. This helps people relax while the innovative, collaborative part of the brain becomes available to do the work of the meeting. You wouldn’t think of not welcoming someone into your home. You greet people at the door, you take their coats, and you offer them a drink of water. These simple acts help people make the transition from the outside world into your home. The same holds true for meetings. Creating a welcoming environment helps people make the transition from the work they’ve been doing to the meeting they are joining as they learn with whom they’ll be working and how they’ll be working together. Unfortunately, in their desire to make the meeting productive, most meeting leaders, contributors, and facilitators give

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the welcome short shift. While most people know it’s important to welcome others, they end up welcoming in a perfunctory manner or leaving out this step altogether. Here are some of the ways people are made to feel unwelcome in meetings: • No welcoming smile greets them. They find themselves sitting in a row of chairs that surround the meeting table. It is clear to them that some people get to sit at the table, while others don’t. • They have no idea what the purpose of the meeting or their role in it is. • The meeting room reeks of power and privilege. They immediately understand that they have neither power nor privilege in this meeting. • No one asks for their opinion, and if they do speak up, it is clear that they shouldn’t have spoken. • If they happen to come late, everyone ignores them. • They are asked to discuss in five minutes a topic they know requires at least thirty minutes of discussion. What is so great about creating a welcoming environment is that you already know how to do it. It’s not as if you don’t have the skill.

How to make small meetings welcoming Here are some ways you can help people feel welcome in small meetings. Offer a personal invitation.  If some people are new to your meeting, a simple phone call welcoming them to the meeting, 48

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explaining the meeting’s purpose, and stating why you are inviting them to join you goes a long way toward reducing the threat that is present when people enter a new situation. Yes, you can use e-mail, but it doesn’t have the same power as a personal invitation. ngage in small talk prior to the start of the meeting. Use this E time to build connections so that you know people in the room and they know you. This will help the conversation flow later in the meeting. onduct a two-minute clean-slate drill. The purpose of this C drill is to help people become fully present at your meeting by clearing their minds prior to the start of the meeting. In today’s world, people are juggling so many tasks, it helps to take a few minutes to clear their brains of the chatter that may prevent them from being fully present in your meeting. This helps reduce the threats that people may bring with them to the meeting and creates a welcoming environment.   Here is how the drill works. Each person responds to the question, What do you need to do or say so that you can be fully present in this meeting? Here are some typical responses: •  “I need to let go of the rotten meeting I just came from.” • “I’ve got to make sure I’m out of this meeting on time so I can pick up my son from day care.” • “I need to forget about all the e-mails piling up in my in-box while I’m at this meeting.”

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At the end of two minutes, all participants have wiped their mental slates clean and are ready to do the work at hand. A a sense of relief occurs when people are able to name what is on their minds that then allows them to do the work at hand. es, you can adjust the time up or down, depending on the Y number of people attending your meeting. The idea is to quickly clean the slate by making explicit the things that prevent people from being present in your meeting. This simple act of making distractions explicit clears people’s minds and allows them to proceed. repare the room. When you receive guests in your home, P you like to make sure your home is ready. Be it a party or having someone over for tea, you put effort into making sure that everything is ready for the task at hand. e same goes for meetings. A well-prepared room gives the Th impression that the meeting organizers care about the work. It provides a sense of security for participants and lets them focus on the task at hand, rather than be distracted by missing information or equipment. Just as you created a clean slate in everyone’s mind to do the work, the physical environment must support the work. Hold your meeting in a room that has natural light. Sit at round tables because the circle is the best form for supporting meaningful dialogue. Ensure that the tools necessary to do the work (e.g., flip charts, whiteboards, and computers) are available. e a good host. Treat meeting participants as valued guests. B Help them feel comfortable in their surroundings. You want

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them to bring their best selves to the meeting, so bring your best self to greeting them and making sure they know that you want them to be there. rovide advance materials so that people can be prepared to P contribute. These may include the agenda, a list of participants, and background material.

How to make large meetings welcoming Large meetings require more work to create a welcoming environment. Here are some additional steps you can take to make sure people feel welcome: Put leaders in charge of the welcome. At a major hospital, the senior leadership team welcomed people as they entered the meeting venue and also staffed the registration table. You can imagine everyone’s surprise as the CEO shook people’s hands and handed out name badges and meeting ma­­terials. This group of leaders wanted to make a statement about how they saw their role, and they did so from the very beginning of the meeting. S tart with a meal. Breaking bread is one of the oldest forms of helping people feel welcome. Beginning your meeting with a meal gives folks a chance to connect with each other prior to the start of the work. rovide topnotch logistics—first impressions count. When P the meeting looks organized and when all the materials are ready and waiting so that participants can do their work,

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people begin to relax. The fact that people cared enough to prepare the meeting so that productive work can occur helps people feel welcome. I f you are conducting a large-group meeting where people will be in a variety of discussion groups, a simple guide that helps people know their seating assignment for each discussion goes a long way to helping them feel comfortable. ccommodate different languages. We were working with a A manufacturing plant where people spoke many languages. The leaders wanted to include everyone in the process to improve productivity but were concerned that non-English speakers would be unable to contribute. We weren’t sure how to handle this problem, so we asked people who were not native speakers what to do. ey came up with a unique solution: have the employees Th invite a family member or friend with good English skills to be a translator during the process and provide the translators with the meeting materials ahead of time so they could prepare for the workshop. The result was that everyone felt welcome and was able to contribute to improving the organization.

Decide that welcoming people is important There is certainly more to welcoming than meets the eye. Yes, there is, and that is why people often overlook the im­ portance of welcoming people.

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 nough already—I get it. I’m willing to spend some time E welcoming people as long as I don’t spend the whole meeting doing it. While it’s important not to allow welcoming to take over your meeting, it is equally important to make sure people feel welcome throughout your meeting. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to connect people to each other and the task, which builds on the welcome and creates connections between people that allow the work to flow. The decision to spend time creating an environment where people feel welcome is one only you can make. How much time you allot and how you welcome people is up to you. The important thing is to decide to do this. Once you have decided that creating a welcoming environment is important, you open up possibilities for creating that environment. Until you decide welcoming is important, nothing can happen.

Start by building on what works You can ask people to think of meetings where they felt particularly welcome. What happened there? What did the leaders do to help everyone feel welcome? What did others do? How can you build on and incorporate those ideas into your meeting? When leaders, contributors, and facilitators decide to take re­­sponsibility for making sure people feel welcome in the meetings they attend, participants can bring their best selves to the work at hand.

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key points •  Effective meetings create a welcoming environment. • The first task of any meeting is to create a safe-enough environment so that work can be done. • People scan for threats ten times more often than they scan for rewards. • When people feel threatened, the innovative, collaborative part of the brain shuts down. • A heartfelt welcome helps reduce perceived threats and dampens the fight or flight response. • Spending time welcoming people and creating a welcoming environment is time well spent because it helps the work go smoothly.

make it your own • For one week, pay attention to the meetings you attend. Ask yourself, • Which meetings were ones where I felt welcome? • Which meetings were ones where I did not feel welcome? • What was my level of participation in each meeting? • What did I do to help others feel welcome? What was the result?

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chapter 4

connect people to each other and the task In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it. johann wolfgang von goethe

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In the previous chapter, you learned how creating a welcoming environment lays the groundwork for a productive meeting. In this chapter, you will learn how personal connection builds trust. Connection to the task unleashes energy. I’m back! We’re so glad you’re here. Really? To tell the truth, you’re a pain.  y patience is running thin. I went along with the welcoming M business in the last chapter, but enough already. Now you are into this connecting nonsense. You are wasting more of my time. When do I get to do the real work? This is real work. The real work rests on the base of the first two sections of the Meeting Canoe, welcome and connect people to each other and the task. If you rush through building the meeting’s foundation, the meeting will crumble. Building a solid foundation for your meeting allows the meeting to carry a heavy load. What’s your point? As we said, personal connection builds trust; connection to the task unleashes energy. As connection increases, you begin 56

connect people to each other and the task

to learn about others’ capabilities and character and how comfortable you are sharing information with them. Capabilities, character, and disclosure are trust’s core components (Reina and Reina 2006). When people trust each other, the meeting is more efficient. Trust lets you quickly complete the work. Connection to the task unleashes energy because everyone is pulling in the same direction. A canoe in which you don’t trust people to pull their weight or everyone paddles in a different direction goes nowhere. I’m for anything that speeds things up. But creating trust takes time. Right you are. But how much time do you waste because you don’t trust people? You need to spend enough time building trust so that the meeting works. This feels fluffy to me. I hope you’re not suggesting “trust walks” prior to each meeting. No trust walks today! Connecting with others is something you do naturally. Whenever you meet someone new, you search for connections. You try to find out what you have in common. It could be the place where you grew up, mutual acquaintances, or schools you attended. You stop being wary when you learn that you have something in common. You tend to trust people who are similar and distrust those who aren’t. When you know that others are committed to the task, you pull harder because you know everyone is pulling in the same direction. 57

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 ou are starting to make sense. But all of this takes time and you Y know where I stand regarding time. Connection can occur in less than four minutes. Take, for ex­­ ample, what we call the care conversation. In the care conversation, you share what is important to you at work and why. In less than four minutes, people learn what matters to you. The result is that you feel more connected and engaged with them, and they feel more connected and engaged with you. I’m all for that. Unfortunately, many people make perfunctory attempts to connect people that reinforce the belief that connecting is a waste of time.

The trouble with icebreakers Here’s an example. A Lean Manufacturing workshop begins with an exercise called Two Truths and a Lie. In this activity, each person makes three statements about himself or herself. Two of the statements are true. The other statement is a lie. The group then guesses which statements are true and which is a lie. People have a lot of fun with this activity as they try to guess when people are lying.  is is exactly the kind of time-wasting activity I run into all the Th time. What does any of this have to do with getting work done in meetings?

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Very little, though knowing who in the group is a good liar may be helpful. However, when you ask participants to identify when a person is lying, you reinforce the belief that people can’t be trusted. Two Truths and a Lie does not build the kind of connections necessary to do good work. While you may have fun doing the activity, when it’s over, you end up thinking, “What was that all about?”

Name, rank, and serial number Token connection is almost as bad as no connection at all. What passes for connection in many meetings is a quick go round the table where you tell everyone your name and where you work. One minute later, most people can’t re­­member anyone’s name or where people work. That is because you got the facts about the people without any emotional connection to them.  kay, I get it. If activities like Two Truths and a Lie and tellO ing everyone your name and where you work don’t cut it, what works? Good connections occur when you create links that are strong enough to get the work done. People don’t have to be­come bosom buddies, but they do need to develop enough connection so they can work together.

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Dialogues build strong links when they are about things that matter Ask people to discuss their answers to the following questions: • W hy did you say yes to attending this meeting? • W hat strength or gift do you bring to this meeting? • W hat are your hopes or fears about this meeting? • W hat will success require of you in this meeting? • W hat question or concern do you bring to the meeting that needs to be addressed? • W hen it comes to the meeting’s purpose, what do you care about and why? It’s easy to see that answering these questions creates a different level of depth from simply stating your name and where you work. When you dialogue about these questions, you connect with the other person. When you connect with someone, you remember his or her name. Even people who have worked together for a long time, who know each other’s names, deepen their connection to each other as a result of these dialogues.

Four questions: A surefire way to connect people to each other and the task You can use this activity to start a longer meeting or work session. It requires a little preparation, but the results are worth it. Participants universally say the time is well spent and preferable to silly connection games. Here are the steps:

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connect people to each other and the task Table 4.1  Four questions Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

1. Each person creates an easel sheet that is divided into four quadrants (table 4.1) and puts his or her name at the top of the easel sheet. 2. Participants pair up with each other, for example, Joe and Sally. 3. Joe gets four minutes to interview Sally using question 1 as the basis of the interview.  Joe captures Sally’s responses on her easel sheet. 4. At the end of four minutes, the partners switch roles and Sally interviews Joe. 5. W hen Joe and Sally have completed their interviews, they each find a new partner and the process repeats, with question 2 as the basis of the interview. 6. The process continues until everyone has answered all four questions, each time with a different partner. 7. W hen everyone has completed his or her interviews, everyone’s easel sheet is posted on the wall. 8. Next, the total group is divided into four groups. Each group then analyzes the responses to one of the questions: group 1 analyzes the responses to question 1,

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group 2 analyzes the responses to question 2, and so on. Each group’s job is to identify the common themes in the repsonses and to determine what the responses say about the group. It usually takes about ten minutes for a group to analyze the responses. 9. After completing the analysis, each group shares its results with the total group. You may be wondering what questions to ask. There are four categories of questions (Koestenbaum 2002). Question 1 deals with reality, either personal or organizational. Here are some reality questions you can ask: • W hat brought you here today? • W hat do you know for sure about the situation we are facing? • W hat are you currently seeing or hearing that pertains to the situation? Question 2 deals with the future. Here are some futureoriented questions you can ask: • W hat will success look like? • W hat do you want to create for yourself and others as a result of our work together? • W hat future possibility gives you energy? Question 3 is about relationships. Here are some relationship questions: • W hat kind of working relationships do you want to have with people in this room?

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• Given the task at hand, what is the right thing to do? • How will our work impact others? Question 4 is about courage. Here are some ideas: • W hat will success require of you? • W hat crossroads have you reached? • W hat choices are you facing?

Do your own investigative reporting Here is a fun way to connect people to each other and the task. Divide your group into two- or four-person teams. Using Skype, smartphones, or video cameras, each team conducts video interviews of people in your organization about an issue before your group. Their job is to create a four-minute video that captures different viewpoints about the issue and then present it at your next meeting. These are not professional videos but YouTube-type videos. The beauty of this activity is that as team members create their video, they develop connections to each other and the task.

These connections last When you connect to each other and the task, you form connections that last. At a paper mill in North Carolina, people had worked for the company for twenty years but did not know each other. They worked in organizational silos and rarely connected. As a result of working on a project where people came together from across the organization to improve productivity, people got to know each other, they formed relationships, and they learned that everyone wanted the plant to be successful. 63

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Previously, when Bill, who worked in the chip department, needed help from Marty, who worked in the cooking process de­­partment, his requests for help went unanswered. Now when Bill calls, Marty is happy to help. The connections they forged with each other make the work go smoothly. Here are some more examples of connection’s long-term benefits: • As a result of a community-based strategic planning effort for a local school district, parents formed a nonprofit to address the problem of teen suicides. • Doctors from across various specialties came together and designed one form that they could all use for referrals, greatly speeding up the referral process. • Salespeople from a chemical company began to include research and development scientists when they made sales calls. This speeded up the process of creating new customer products and eliminated the problem of sales staff promising to create products for customers that were impossible to make.  kay already, I get it. Let’s just say, for a moment, I was willing O to spend some more time connecting people to each other and the task. How do I know the best way to do this? Creating good connections takes into account • The organization’s culture. People in high-relationship cultures will want to spend more time connecting with each other; people in low-relationship cultures will want to spend less time connecting to each other.

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• The overall length of the meeting. Simple dialogues can take ten to fifteen minutes. The four-question process can take up to forty-five minutes. • The level of connection already present. • The amount of connection needed to do the work. Complex tasks require more connection than simple tasks. Low-trust environments will require more time than high-trust environments. Having built a foundation for a productive meeting by welcoming people and connecting people to each other and the task, we will move to discover the way things are in the next chapter.

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key points • Personal connection builds trust; connection to the task unleashes energy. • The goal is to build connections that speed the work. • Connection occurs through conversation. • The context and the organization’s culture will help you determine how to connect people to each other. What works in one setting does not necessarily work in another.

make it your own • Observe your behavior in the meetings you attend in the coming week. Ask yourself, • How connected do I feel to other meeting participants? • How connected do I feel to the work of the meeting? • To what extent does how connected I feel to other meeting participants affect my behavior in this meeting? • What did I do that helped establish connections to meeting participants or to the work of the meeting?

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chapter 5

discover the ways things are We cannot teach people anything: we can only help them discover it within themselves. galileo galilei

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This chapter transitions from building the foundation for productive work in your meeting to addressing the issue at hand. When you discover the way things are, you create a springboard for action. Look, I don’t need a springboard. I want results. I know what we need to do. I just want to get on with it. I know you want to get on with it. But if you are the only one who knows what to do and is ready to take action, you are going to waste a lot of time circling back to get everyone on board and ready to act. You get two kinds of results when you discover the way things are. First, you get a group of people who have a shared understanding of the situation. Second, once they understand the situation, they have ideas about what to do and want to join you in taking action. Your investment of time saves time because you no longer have to worry about getting others on board. They are there with you, ready to act. I get it. I’ll get a return on my time invested in discovering the way things are because everyone in the room will have a clear understanding of what we need to do. Not only that, they will be ready to do something about it. The operative word in this chapter is “discover.” When you discover things for yourself, you are ready to face your reality head-on. In this Meeting Canoe section, your task is to create a learning environment where you

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1. Create a shared view of the reality you are facing 2.  Make sense of that reality 3. Neither flee from reality as you understand it nor prematurely try to fix that reality In chapter 1, you learned how the desire to learn and grow is a core work design principle. That is why discovering the way things are is important. The learning that occurs when you discover something for yourself stays with you longer than when you are spoon-fed information.  ou may be right, but it’s a lot easier to send someone a report. Y Is spending all this time having people discover things really worth it? It is a lot easier to send a report or do a PowerPoint presentation. These are efficient one-way communication channels for telling people the way things are. Rarely do they build the shared understanding necessary to create sustained action.

In their desire to make their point, presenters miss the point Presenters continue to make the mistake Galileo warns us about at the opening of this chapter. They believe they can teach people about the current state through one-way presentations. In meeting after meeting, PowerPoint presentations end with the presenter asking, “Are there any questions?” followed by deafening silence.

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This silence doesn’t mean people don’t have questions. It means they need time to make sense of what they heard. The information presented is old hat to the presenter. It is news to the meeting participants. When you engage people in dialogue while they are trying to absorb what they just heard, the result is deafening silence. Instead, try this the next time you make a presentation during a meeting. Limit your presentation to no more than twenty minutes. Following the presentation, ask people to discuss two questions: • W hat did you hear? • W hat do you want to know more about? In this way, meeting participants move from being passive to active in their own learning. You’ll find the discussion that follows well worth the effort.

The cost of not discovering the way things are: The Columbia disaster Take, for example, what happened in meetings as the space shuttle Columbia disaster unfolded in 2003. Shortly after takeoff, foam dislodged from the external tank, hitting the underside of the wing and causing damage to the spacecraft. Upon discovering this problem, some scientists and engineers said there was no harm to the shuttle. Others insisted that foam hitting the wing’s underside was a problem with catastrophic consequences, and they wanted to continue the discovery process. However, those who said there wasn’t a problem shut down the process. We now know that the

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scientists and engineers who saw catastrophic consequences were right. Upon reentry, Columbia exploded, killing all the as­­ tronauts on board. Those who wanted to keep the discovery process open later described their experience as similar to calling 911 to report an accident and having the dispatcher ask them to prove there was an accident. During the disaster investigation, engineers came to grips with the consequences of not continuing the discovery process. The investigation team set up an experiment that simulated foam hitting the underside of the wing. As they watched the simulation, there was no longer any doubt that the foam was the culprit in the shuttle’s destruction. Engineers wept upon seeing the results. We will never know what would have happened had NASA rejected the theory that no damage could occur and kept on asking questions to discover the way things are. One of the investigating team members put it this way: “We have a lot of smart people here. We might have figured something out.” As it was, everyone on board perished (“Space Shuttle Disaster” 2011).

How to build a shared view of reality When you rely solely on reports and PowerPoint presentations in the discovery section of the Meeting Canoe, you essentially see the task as telling rather than learning. It is not as if people don’t learn something when they hear information this way, but it’s not the kind of learning that stays with them. It’s like when you crammed for a test, got an A, and couldn’t remember anything about the material a few days later.

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We know that adults learn best through experience. When you move to building a shared view of reality, making sense of that reality, and neither fleeing from that reality nor prematurely trying to fix it, you transform your meeting from passive information sharing to interactive learning.

A call center discovers how the new system will fail Consider the issue facing a new call center. Instead of receiving a briefing about the new call system, meeting participants had discussions to identify where the new system would fail. To identify how the system would fail, meeting participants had to discover how the system worked and thus deepened their learning. In doing so, they followed the three steps outlined at the beginning of this chapter: 1. They built a shared picture of the reality they were facing by identifying where the system might fail. 2. Finding failure points, they deepened their understanding of how the system worked, thus “making sense” of it. 3. Finally, they faced the reality that there were problems in the system and that resolving these issues was critical to the project’s success.

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calgary health authority discovers what happens to patients when they need to see specialists Leaders at the Calgary Health Authority used several innovative ways to help people discover the way things are. • They created a video featuring physicians, patients, and staff talking about their frustrations with the specialists referral system. This five-minute video kicked off a large-group workshop. Following the video, workshop participants discussed their reactions to the video. • Patients and their families shared their experiences in panel discussions. Following the panel discussions, medical staff discussed what they heard and interacted with panel members. • Patients, families, hospital staff, physicians, and nurses simulated the patients’ experience in the system from diagnosis to treatment and uncovered all the duplications and disconnects that occurred.

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IDEO reinvents the classroom chair IDEO is one of the most influential design companies in the world. Among its many achievements is designing Apple’s first mouse and the stand-up toothpaste tube. When Steelcase wanted to develop a new classroom chair, the company went to IDEO. One of the first steps in this IDEO design process was to discover the way things are by observing how students and teachers use the classroom chair. These were among the discoveries IDEO made:

• Students don’t sit still. • They need a place to put their backpacks. • Their chairs are not easy to get into and exit. • Fixed seating is no longer the norm in today’s classroom. These findings led to the development of the Node (fig. 5.1), Steelcase’s new classroom chair (IDEO 2013).

Figure 5.1  Node chair

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This chair has the following features: • Casters lend mobility for quick, easy transitions between teaching modes. • A swivel seat keeps open sightlines between the student and instructor, whiteboard, and other students. • A personal work surface swivels in tandem with the seat and is adjustable for users of all sizes. It accommodates left- and right-handed students and is large enough to support students’ digital and analog resources. • A tripod base keeps backpacks and valuable personal belongings out of the aisle. • A five-star base provides seat-height adjustability. • An optional cup holder and tablet stand free up the work surface area for books and other technology. • A flexible seat, without pneumatic adjustments to worry about, keeps students comfortable in a variety of postures. • An open seat design offers easy access, while arms serve as backpack hooks. • Comfort without upholstery means easy maintenance. Whether you are designing a classroom chair, improving patient care, or helping a call center achieve its potential, building a shared reality by discovering the way things are provides a solid foundation for your work.

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How to make sense of your reality Now that you have built a shared view of reality, the next step is to make sense of that reality. This requires reflection and dialogue. There are three components to making sense of the reality you face: • The facts: objective, verifiable data • Your thoughts: how you interpret the facts • Your feelings: how you feel about the facts Here is an example: Members of a Girl Scout council were meeting to discuss how to make the Girl Scouts relevant to twentieth-century girls. During the meeting, participants left the meeting room in groups of three and walked through the building to learn what they could discover about the Girl Scouts’ culture. Here is what they reported: • Most of the displays in the building featured girls in dated Girl Scout uniforms. • Donors were listed on the door as you walked in, signaling their importance to everyone. • There were no pictures or exhibits of girls doing modern-day activities, such as playing soccer or working with computers. While all the participants agreed on the facts—what they saw—they had different thoughts and feelings about what they saw. Some people thought the displays portrayed an accurate historical picture; others felt the displays were not

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relevant to the issues girls face today. For some, the displays stirred up the positive feelings they had about being a Girl Scout. For others, the displays’ historical nature made them worry about the Girl Scouts’ future. Making sense of the reality you face requires dialogue, re­ flection, and sharing of insights. It means recognizing that people can have very different thoughts and feelings about the same set of facts. Only a dialogue lets you build a shared view of your reality and make sense of your situation. Neither fleeing from reality nor moving prematurely to fixing the problem is the final step in discovering the way things are. When you get a clear picture of the issues you are facing, a common reaction is to avoid reality’s pain by making the pain go away. You do this by either avoiding dealing with the reality or prematurely jumping to solutions to fix the issue you are facing. If you are a meeting leader or contributor or facilitator, the trick here is to keep everyone focused on the reality you face. In the following chapter, we will explore the Meeting Canoe’s next section: elicit people’s dreams.

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key points • Create a shared view of the reality you are facing. • Provide the opportunity for people to make sense of that reality. • Keep the discovery process open; don’t ignore reality or prematurely try to fix it.

make it your own • In your next meeting, discover the way things are by asking yourself,   • W hat would I like to know more about?   • How do other people understand the situation? What are their viewpoints?   • What do I see when I take a bird’s-eye view?   • What do I see from the ground?

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chapter 6

elicit people’s dreams Make no little plans: they have no magic to stir men’s blood. daniel burnham

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Congratulations! Having welcomed people, connected them to each other and the task, and discovered the way things are, you have built the first half of your Meeting Canoe. You are now ready to tackle the rest and begin to finish the job. I’m ready. I really loved the last chapter, “Discover the Way Things Are,” because I learned how to explore the current state, which is crucial to taking action. But my time alarm is about to go off. I already know what needs to happen. What’s this dreaming stuff got to do with it? Besides I’m not here to elicit people’s dreams; I’m here to get things done. In the last chapter, we said that discovering the way things are is the springboard to taking action. Do you remember that?  f course. I jumped on the springboard and I’m ready to make O something happen. This dreaming stuff doesn’t seem very practical to me. That is the whole idea. Dreaming is about the future, not what works now. Discovering the way things are and eliciting people’s dreams are opposites that need each other. If you spend all your time discovering the current state, you end up feeling overwhelmed. There is no future, no way out. If you spend all your time dreaming about the future, you end up being Pollyannaish. It’s one thing to dream of going to the moon without the means to get there. It’s another thing to dream of going to the moon while recognizing what it’s going to take to get there. 80

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Dreams are grounded in reality The Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is a powerful vision’s exemplar. Careful examination of the speech reveals that during the speech, Dr. King alternates between describing the reality of race relations in the United States and describing his dream for the future. Here is just one example: We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. (King 1963) In this part and throughout the speech, Dr. King lets you know that he is not an idle dreamer. He is well aware of the reality that people face. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (King 1963)

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In this part of the speech, Dr. King paints a vivid picture of the future, a future born out of the present and way beyond what many people thought was possible. Imagine for a moment what the speech would have been like if Dr. King had talked only about the reality of race relations in the United States. Imagine for a moment what the speech would have been like if he had talked only about his vision. While each picture is powerful, it cannot stand alone. Together they create a tension that recognizes the present and creates a desire to achieve the future.

big dreams at virgin atlantic Richard Branson does not want to spend his life doing something he is not proud of. Out of this clarity Virgin Atlantic was born. Today Virgin Atlantic consistently ranks among the world’s leading airlines.

World-class athletes have a dream: to be the very best in the world at their sport. They dream of being the first to cross the finish line, scoring the winning goal, standing on the podium with a gold medal draped around their neck. Listen to an interview with any athlete who has achieved his or her lifelong goal and the athlete will say something like “I’ve dreamed about this moment ever since I was a child.” These are not idle dreams. World-class athletes continually assess their current skill level in relation to their dream. Then they put in the long, hard hours necessary to achieve their dream. They would never

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achieve greatness without their dream and their clear assessment of where they are in relation to their dream. They discover the way things are and they elicit—and pursue—their dreams.

What do speeches, world-class athletes, and people who want new cars have in common? Remember the “seeing new cars everywhere” example in chapter 2—how when you are clear about your reality (your car no longer works) and you are clear about your vision (you would like to purchase a new car), you begin to see new cars everywhere? The same thing is happening in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and in the world-class athlete’s desire for greatness. There is a clear picture of reality and a compelling future. Robert Fritz calls this tension between reality and vision structural tension. He also says that when you face reality and you are clear about the future you want to create, you are able to see opportunities you never saw before (Fritz 1999). Acting on these possibilities enables you to make your vision a reality. That is why discovering the way things are is the springboard and eliciting people’s dreams completes the process.  nough already! I’m willing to spend some time on this dream E stuff as long as we don’t overdo it. But I’d rather call it imagining what’s possible or something more practical. What I want to know is, how do you do this dreaming stuff? Does everyone have to take a nap together? Napping together is not exactly what we had in mind.

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How to elicit people’s dreams: Four techniques Here are some techniques that do work. Find Out What People Care About In most organizations, leaders put a lot of energy into engaging people in what they care about, be it the latest strategic plan or a new change initiative. Kevin Limbach, vice president of US operations for TaylorMade-adidas Golf, had a different idea: if everyone could have a really good day at work, everyone would benefit. In a series of workshops, employees from all levels and de­­ partments discussed what they cared about at work and why and how to bring more of what they cared about into the workplace. These workshops unleashed the organization’s talent to address hard and soft issues. Because these workshops involved people from all levels and functions, they had the added benefit of improving communication throughout the organization. If you put these ideas into practice, you might be able to say what Kevin recently told us, “We have found a way to tap into the talents of our people in a way we never thought possible” (K. Limbach, 2013, interview by Dick Axelrod). Do you remember how ski instructor Dave used the Meeting Canoe as a framework for his skiing lesson? At the beginning of the lesson, he would talk to his clients about their dreams. Did they want to be able to ski a triple black diamond run or ski down the bunny hill? No matter what their dreams were, Dave worked with his clients to achieve them. Some dreams were not achieved in a single lesson, but the dreams were what motivated people to keep learning. 84

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Talk about the Future as If It Were the Present For the next technique, you and your meeting partners transport yourselves into the future and have a discussion in the present tense about how you are working together and what you are doing. The key to this discussion is not to talk about what you would be doing in the future but to talk in “future present” about what you are doing and how you are working together. This leap into the future helps you see what life might be like in your preferred future. By doing so, you create energy to make the future you just experienced a reality. This may sound weird. But give it a try—you’ll like the results. Use the Arts to Engage the Creative Right Side of Your Brain You can draw a mural, write a newspaper headline, write about the future using a stream-of-consciousness technique, create a collage, or write and perform a skit. Then share your work with others. Talk about the work and find out what dreams you have in common with others. Do anything that engages the creative part of your brain. Working with the arts will add energy and new insights to your meeting. A group was meeting to discuss the future of a national bank. The group members had the usual discussions about customer service and market share. However, when they presented their skits about the future, a new feature emerged that was not present in any of the previous discussions about the future; the new CEO was female. No one in the room had talked about this vision until the group members engaged the creative side of their brains and shared this consistent vision of the future. 85

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Take a Break and Stop Eliciting People’s Dreams When we ask people where they get their best ideas, they usually say in the shower or while taking a walk or while not working directly on an issue. So while we believe it is important to provide space in your meetings to elicit people’s dreams, it is equally important to take a break and do something different. The insights that occur when you are in the shower or taking a walk start when you first become aware of an issue, when you discover the way things are. Then you usually need time to actively reflect on the issue in a group discussion or when you have some time to yourself. There is wisdom in the old adage “sleep on it.” It’s hard to predict when these moments of insight will occur, but when they occur, we see the light. We envision how to address the issue in ways we never imagined. This leap into the future energizes and moves you to action. Not everyone in the meeting will have these insights, but all you need is one or two people to have insights about what is possible to energize the group. What is important, however, is to allow the time and space for the insights to emerge.

Decide to dream a little The vehicle you use to elicit people’s dreams is less important than the decision to spend time hanging out in this section of the Meeting Canoe. You can spend as little as fifteen minutes or devote several meetings to elicit people’s dreams. How long you spend here depends on what you are trying to create. Your understanding of your group and the way it works will inform you about what to do and how long to do it.

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The trick here is not to make the process too comfortable and not to make the process too uncomfortable. You want to do something that moves people slightly out of their comfort zone. This will produce the challenge necessary to elicit dreams that are hidden below the surface and not available through ordinary discussion. I think I need to take a break and go for a walk. Good idea. When you come back, we’ll move on to the next section of the canoe.

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key points • Powerful dreams are grounded in reality. • Great leaders, world-class athletes, and people who want a new car are driven by their dreams. • Powerful dreams emerge when we enlist the arts. • Insights emerge when we are not working directly on the issue.

make it your own • In your next meeting, spend a few minutes discussing why this meeting or a particular topic in the meeting is important to those present. • Build in breaks during your meeting so insights can emerge. • At the beginning of your next meeting, ask everyone what it would be like if this meeting were the best meeting your group ever had. • At the beginning of your next meeting, ask everyone what he or she expects to be saying about the meeting in the halls after the meeting.

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decide The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity. amelia earhart

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I can’t believe it. We are going to decide something. That is, un­­ less you have a trick up your sleeve. No trick—the chapter title is the message. Let’s get on with it. Having discovered the way things are and elicited people’s dreams, you are at the widest point in the Meeting Canoe. You understand reality and you have dreams for the future. You have many options. You know that choosing will close some options and open others and that you must choose.

Who, how, and what When you lack clarity about decision making’s who, how, and what, you get faulty decisions. To successfully navigate the de­ cision process, you must be clear about • W ho is making the decision • How they will go about deciding • W hat they are deciding In the classic story “The Abilene Paradox,” family members take a four-hour car ride to Abilene, Texas, for dinner. They make the trip in sweltering 104-degree heat in a car without air-conditioning. To top things off, they end up eating in a lousy cafeteria. Only upon returning does our happy band find out that no one wanted to go to Abilene in the first place! Each based the decision to go on what he or she thought everyone else wanted to do without discussing it (Harvey 1988). No doubt you have taken your own trip to Abilene when you didn’t know what the decision was and how it was made.

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Who Decides In a tradition handed down from the era of the divine right of kings, leaders have the power to set the decision-making rules. They can decide to • Make the decision • Seek advice from the group but maintain the final say • Work as an equal with the group • Delegate the decision to the group and let the group decide Each decision-making approach has its own advantages and disadvantages. Leader-directed decisions bring speed and a sense of control for the leader, while group-centered decision making creates innovative thinking and ownership by the group. Whatever you choose, be absolutely explicit about who will make the decision. The worst possible outcome is for people to think that they will have an equal voice in deciding, only to find out that the leader has already decided. Avoid This Mistake at All Costs Because It Will Cost You We have seen many leaders who imply to meeting participants that everyone has an equal voice in making the decision when in fact they already have a solution in mind. If the group’s decision is in line with that of the leader’s, then the leader is home free. If the group looks like it is going to decide something that is not in line with the leader’s solution, the leader has a big problem. Either the leader can go along with a decision he or she does not support or the leader can tell the group members that they really don’t have a voice. Neither outcome is good. 91

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If you are the leader, you must state out loud the decisionmaking process you are using. If you are a meeting participant and unclear about the decision-making process in use, ask who is going to make the decision. Without an explicit understanding of who will make the decision, you make your own assumptions, which may be right or wrong. If you are wrong, you may find yourself on the way to Abilene. Explicitly stating who will make the decision provides certainty for everyone involved and prevents the betrayal you ex­­ perience when you think you are part of the decision-making process when in fact you are not. You bring differing attention levels to a discussion when you know you are responsible for making the decision than when you know you are offering up ideas. A senior leadership group wanted to get advice about a new organizational structure from the next level of management. As the members of the senior leadership group started the meeting, they stated that the role of the next-level management group was to offer suggestions for improvement. The senior leadership group would be making the final decision about the organizational design. Being clear about who was going to make the decision helped participants focus their energy during the discussion. Victor Vroom is a noted leadership authority and the Bearing­­Point Professor of Management and a professor of psychology at the Yale School of Management. Along with Phillip Yetonn he provides some guidance if you are un­­ clear about whether you should take a leader-directed or group-centered approach to decision making. They say that if there is only one right answer and you are reasonably sure

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that people will accept your choice, you are safe in making the decision yourself. If, however, you need a high-quality decision and you need everyone on board with the decision, then you should shift toward a group decision-making process (Vroom and Yetton 1973). How You Decide You use two different parts of your brain when you make a decision: the logical part and the emotional part (Rock 2009). You engage the logical part of your brain to interpret facts, figures, and data. For example, your brain’s logic function conducts a cost-benefit analysis. It analyzes the options and tells you what to do. If only it were that simple. Our brain is more than a logic-based computer. When you examine different alternatives, they evoke different emotional responses. You have a gut feeling about the choice you have to make. This gut feeling may be supported by the facts or may be completely independent of the facts. When you decide, you resolve the quarrel in your brain be­­ tween your logical conclusions and your gut reaction. This is all well and good when you are the only one making the decision. However, when a group is trying to make a decision, the whole process becomes extremely complex. Four Antidotes to Group Grope Everyone has experienced the frustration of “group grope,” the struggle that occurs when you are part of a group charged with making a decision and the group is unable to make that

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decision. Endless conversations, rehashing of old arguments, and aimless wandering try everyone’s patience. In the end, worn down and frustrated, you are ready to agree to anything as long as it ends this painful experience. It doesn’t have to be this way. Thumbs-Up/Thumbs-Down

A simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down can help a group determine whether it has spent enough time discussing an issue: thumbs-up when you have spent enough time and thumbsdown when you have not spent enough time. Implicit in thumbs-up/thumbs-down is that majority rule will determine the direction you take. Voting Works

The simplest way for a group to decide is to vote. People understand how voting works, particularly in democratic societies. It is simple and efficient. The key to a successful outcome is to make sure enough high-quality discussion occurs prior to the vote. A high-quality discussion involves listening and working to understand differing points of view. It is not electioneering to make sure your viewpoint prevails. A group we worked with was meeting to determine a new organizational structure for a printing company. This group had agreed on a rule that to adopt a new structure, two-thirds of those present must agree to the structure. Several votes failed, and the structure was reworked after each vote. No matter what the group did, it failed to obtain a two-thirds majority. Finally, one of the members suggested using majority rule to 94

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make the decision. He went on to say, “The proposals on the table are very similar, we’ve all had our say, and if we go with a simple majority, we will be able to move on.” The group agreed. They then voted on, adopted, and implemented a proposal that passed with a simple majority. What allowed the group to proceed in this case was agreement on two points: • The new decision rule was a simple majority. • Enough discussion had occurred so that all group members felt their points of view were represented. Put On Your Thinking Hat to Answer These Questions

Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hat process can be used to help a group make a decision (de Bono 1985). His six questions provide a structured way for you to consider a proposal and make a decision: • W hat are the facts that surround this proposal? • W hat is your gut reaction to the proposal? • W hat are your pessimistic thoughts about this proposal? Why won’t it work? • W hat are your optimistic thoughts about this proposal? Why do you think it will work? • How could you build on this proposal and make it even better? • W hat conclusions can you draw from this discussion? The advantage of using this six-question structure is that it guides you systematically through the decision process. It

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prevents the whipsawing between criticism and optimism and be­­tween logic and emotion that often occurs during group discussions. This structure creates a sense of certainty by offering a guide for considering all perspectives. You know there will be times to be optimistic and to be pessimistic and times to share your logical thoughts and your gut reactions. Don’t Try to Eat the Meal in One Bite: Decide What You Can Agree to Right Now

Sometimes an issue is too complex or too big for a group to gain agreement. In this case, you can decide what you can and cannot agree to right now. This will allow the group to move ahead on some parts of a proposal while creating time for further analysis and discussion. In this way, the group gets unstuck and is able to move forward. This forward movement creates the time and space for further discussion, and the experience of implementing an agreed-upon decision builds trust within the group. This increased trust allows the group to tackle more difficult decisions down the road. What You Decide No matter the type of meeting, what you decide flows from discovering the way things are and eliciting people’s dreams. Table 7.1 shows some examples of how the type of meeting may impact what you decide.

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decide Table 7.1  Decision making in different meeting types Meeting type

Decision

Informal chats

To decide to act on a problem you are facing

Huddles

To offer help or take action on tactical issues, such as scheduling or daily work

Staff meetings

To decide how to resolve work issues facing the group, such as adjusting priorities, allocating resources, or changing schedules

Town halls

To give or get information

Work session

To develop or implement a major strategy or process improvement

Having made your decision, you are ready to finish the job by identifying next steps and who will be responsible for each step. This may seem like a blinding flash of the obvious. However, you would be surprised how often groups neglect this step or complete this step in a way that leaves people unsure about what will happen next and who is going to do the heavy lifting. Your options for completing this step are similar to the ones used in making the decision: • The leader can appoint people to finish the job. • The leader can ask for volunteers. • The leader can appoint a task leader and ask for volunteers to join the group. All these options work.

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Decide to decide No matter what decision-making process you decide to use, the most important point is to be explicit before the meeting’s start about • W ho will make the decision • How the decision will be made • W hat will be decided Certainty lets people know what to expect and how to focus their energy during the meeting. The leader may choose the decision-making process or may involve the group in determining the decision-making process. You may end up with a leader-directed process or a group-centered process. Using the Vroom-Yetton criteria, you can avoid the frustration of using a leader-centered approach when a group-centered approach is more appropriate, and you can avoid wasting group members’ time when you involve them in decisions that do not benefit from group input. If you are not the leader and want to invest in or benefit from the meeting’s success, you can work to clarify an unclear decision process. If you think the group would benefit from either a leader-directed or group-centered approach, you can offer your ideas to the meeting organizers prior to the start of the meeting or during the meeting itself. If you are content to be a bystander, then you will experience your decision’s consequences. In the next chapter, we will conclude the Meeting Canoe approach as we learn the importance of attending to the end.

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key points • Being clear about who will decide is as important as who makes the decision. • Being clear about how you will decide is as important as how you decide. • What you are able to decide depends on the meeting type. • Once you have made your decision, make sure you address who is going to do what.

make it your own • Before your next meeting, ask yourself, • Who will make the decision? • How will the decision be made? • What will be decided?

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chapter 8

attend to the end How you enter a space and how you leave a space is as important as what happens in the space. anonymous architect

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Here we are at the Meeting Canoe’s last section. You started with welcome, you connected people to each other and the task, you discovered the way things are, you elicited people’s dreams, and you decided. Now it’s time to attend to the end. I don’t get why we have to attend to the end. We made our decision; the only thing left is to implement it. Settle down, my friend. We are almost finished. You have invested time and energy to get this meeting right. Don’t blow it at the end. To paraphrase the architect at this chapter’s beginning, how you start and how you finish is as important as what happens in between. Okay, I’ve come this far with you. I’ll listen to what you have to say. But please be brief. A good ending has three parts: • Part 1: Summarize the discussion and review the decisions you reached. • Part 2: Provide a road map of next steps. • Part 3: Take time to reflect on the meeting experience.

Make sure you know what you are doing before you start to do it Here is what we observe over and over at meetings, no matter the type. People put enormous energy into discovering the

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way things are, eliciting people’s dreams, and deciding and ne­­ glect attending to the end. People neglect the end for many reasons, which include be­­ ing tired and needing to get to other meetings. In your rush to move on to other tasks, you fail to finish the job at hand. Participants leave the meeting with differing ideas of what the group decided and who is responsible for what. These hidden rocks can sink your canoe. To prevent this misalignment, you need to review the key decisions the group made and who has responsibility for im­­ plementing them prior to leaving the meeting. When people have different understandings of the decisions they reached and different expectations of what should happen next, they inevitably waste time. You know me. I’m for anything that prevents wasting time.

Create your road map before you leave the room Once you have reviewed your decisions, you are ready to create your road map. Having clear next steps prior to leaving the room is essential. If you don’t know where you are headed, any destination will do. You may have created your next steps during the decision phase. If you did, review them one last time before ending your meeting. If you haven’t created your next steps, this is a good time. Your next steps don’t have to be a detailed Google Maps set of directions. However, you do need the important milestones going forward. This clarity provides a sense of direction and creates energy for implementing the decisions you 103

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reached. Spending time dealing with an important subject and then not knowing what is going to happen next leads to frustration. You end up not trusting the future and wondering if the meeting was a waste of time.

Take time to reflect I know, Clockman, you don’t even have to say it. Why do we need to reflect? You just read my mind. Reflection is a continuous improvement step. These five questions lead the way: 1. Did we do the work we needed to get done in this meeting? 2. If the meeting was time well spent, what contributed to making it time well spent and what worked against making it time well spent? 3. What do we need to do to make sure that our next meeting is time well spent? 4. Whom would you like to recognize for their contributions during this meeting? 5. What accomplishments would you like to celebrate? Attending to the end follows a natural cycle that Gestalt psy­­chologists call the cycle of experience (Stevenson 2013). This cycle explains what happens when people interact with an issue. In short, the cycle begins with becoming aware of the issue. Energy builds when you interact with the issue and ends with a satisfaction and resolution phase when you complete the work. The cycle starts again with a new awareness when 104

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you are ready to take on the next phase of the work (fig. 8.1). Failure to attend to the end interrupts this natural cycle, making future work more difficult than it needs to be. Resolution

Awareness

Satisfaction

Interaction

Energy Figure 8.1  Gestalt cycle applied to meetings

Attending to the end requires time, but not a lot of time. Do you remember Dave’s ski lessons? Attending to the end took no more than five minutes as he reviewed the lesson’s important points and explained how to practice. You can probably cover these points in ten minutes at a regular staff meeting. Naturally, you will want to spend more time in a work session. How you end your meeting determines whether you leave energized by knowing you completed your task, or frustrated because the work is unfinished. The mood, sense of accomplishment, and pulse at the end become the input for your next meeting. Ending well makes the Welcome that much easier next time you meet. The following chapters provide guidance that will help meeting leaders, contributors, and facilitators put the finishing touches on their Meeting Canoe. Please join us in the next chapter, “First Aid for Meetings.” 105

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key points • How you end a meeting creates the platform for your work’s next stage. • Make sure you know what you are doing before you do it. • Take time to reflect on your meeting. • Create a road map before you leave the room.

make it your own • Consider how you will structure attending to the end in your next meeting. • Before your next meeting, determine how much time you will devote to this section of the Meeting Canoe and treat it like a regular agenda item.

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first aid for meetings There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth. charles dickens

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Despite all your hard work, things can and will go wrong when you meet. This chapter shows you how to prevent your canoe from sinking. I ’m so glad you included this chapter. In the previous chapters, you were making it seem as if nothing could go wrong. People do the craziest things. If we didn’t have people in meetings, there wouldn’t be any problems. Until you figure out a way to meet without people, you will have to deal with their unpredictability. That is the bad news. The good news is that because you are dealing with people, they have the ability to make things right. What drives me crazy are people who talk too much or go off on tangents. Are you saying you can fix that? We have some good ideas about what you can do. We call it First Aid for Meetings. I’m all ears. Let’s get on with it. Sometimes, immediate action is required to save your canoe and its crew. When someone goes overboard in a physical canoe, you throw a paddle or toss a life preserver. You don’t stop to talk about who should throw the paddle or how. The same is true in meetings. Failure to act threatens your canoe and everyone in it. Your job, whether you are a leader or a crew member, is to stop the current pattern of behavior and offer a more productive way to handle the situation. 108

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Summoning your courage can lead to a large, worthwhile, dramatic change that keeps your canoe from capsizing. Some­­ times you must face issues you wished you never had to face, but face them you must. Other times it’s as easy as providing a Band-Aid. Table 9.1 includes examples of common problems that can sink your boat and what you can do about them.

Complicated problems require immediate attention In other situations, it is not clear what to do, yet doing nothing will only make matters worse. In these situations, we recommend this three-step process: Step 1: Say the unspoken. Step 2: Ask, “Do you see what I see?” Step 3: Ask, “What do you want to do about it?” Step 1: Say the Unspoken First aid starts when you make obvious what is going on by naming the troublesome behavior. This is sometimes called naming the elephant in the room. Making a behavior or pattern of behavior obvious to everyone in the group allows the group to do something about it. For example, during your meetings, participants appear to agree about the actions they will take prior to the next meeting. However, no one takes action. If you were to say the unspoken, you would say, I’ve noticed that during our meetings, we make agreements about what to do between meetings. Yet when we reconvene, no action has been taken. 109

Table 9.1  Common problems that require immediate attention Problem

What to say or do

Benefit

One person constantly talks.

Paraphrase your under­ standing of what you heard the person say.

Breaks the pattern.

Ask the person if he or she believes you understand his or her point. If the person believes you understand, say, “I’d like to hear what others think about this issue.”

Makes sure the person is understood. Provides an opportunity for others to join the conversation.

If the person says that you did not understand, continue to paraphrase until you get it right. If the person continues to make the same points after saying that you understand correctly, ask, “What else do I need to understand?” Two people argue and the rest of the group watches in silence.

Say, “I think everyone knows your positions on this issue. I’d like to hear what others have to say.”

Breaks the conflict cycle.

Poll the group, giving everyone a chance to share his or her viewpoint.

Gives the combatants time to think and hear other viewpoints.

Allows others to provide input.

Table 9.1 Common problems, continued Problem

What to say or do

Benefit

Two people are locked in conflict.

Say, “It seems like you are talking past each other.” Ask each person in the conflict to state his or her understanding of the other person’s viewpoint.

Forces each participant in the conflict to work toward understanding rather than winning the argument.

Say, “Is this the work we are supposed to be doing now?”

Calls attention to the group that it is off on a tangent.

Ask everyone in the group his or her opinion.

Provides an oppor ­tunity for the group to correct the situation.

The group is hopelessly deadlocked and unable to make a decision.

Say, “What would you like to do about the deadlock we are facing?”

Helps to resolve the deadlock by naming the issue.

Poll each group member, asking what he or she thinks should be done.

Puts the group solely in charge of what is happening.

You have an unclear understanding of decisions reached or next steps.

Say, “I’m not clear what we just decided” or “I don’t know what the next steps are.”

Prevents the group from reaching unclear agreements.

The group is off on a tangent.

Review the decisions reached or next steps. Rework them as necessary.

let ’s stop meeting like this

When you state what is going on in a group, you make the behavior public. When the behavior is public, the group can decide how it will handle the situation. If the behavior remains unspoken, the group cannot change it. When you say the unspoken, it is important to state what you see and what your thoughts or feelings are about the issue. For example, when people don’t follow through, you could say, At our last meeting, we agreed to have our budgets ready for review. It appears that no one has a budget ready for review. It appears to me that this happens with other agreements we make as well. Remember our agreement to notify each other if we make changes in our department that might impact other departments? Step 2: Ask, “Do You See What I See?” Once you have called attention to the behavior, ask others in the group if they see what you see. Continuing with our example, you might say, Have you noticed this pattern? Asking, “Do you see what I see?” is an important step. Here you are asking those present to verify your observation. You do not assume that others are with you. This step also begins to place responsibility on the group for what is occurring in the group.

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Step 3: Ask, “What Do You Want to Do About It?” Assuming that people in the group agree with your observation, the next step is to ask the group, What do you think we should do about the follow-through issue? This question places a decision in front of the group. The choice is whether or not to handle the follow-through issue. This puts the group solely in charge of the behavior of its members and how it would like to function going forward. What if people don’t agree with your observations? The first step is to listen to understand their viewpoint. Next, seek to identify areas of commonality. They may not see everything you see, but they may see some of what you see. This common ground provides a zone of agreement that allows you to move forward. Later you can return to the areas of disagreement. If all else fails, take a break. Taking a break allows you and other group members to reflect on your discussion. In longer meetings and where weather permits, you may suggest that group participants take a walk and discuss the issue while walking side by side. Walking side by side defuses the conflict because you are no longer facing each other. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether the group agrees with your observation or not. What is important is that the group decides what it wants to do about it. When you say the unspoken, you prevent a situation from getting worse because you interrupt the group’s current

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pattern of behavior. By saying the unspoken, you stop action and provide the opportunity for the group to address a problem behavior. By asking “Do you see what I see?” you make sure that other group members share your observations before you address the issue. By asking the group what it wants to do about the behavior, you put the responsibility for what happens in the group solely on the group members.

Crew problems Sometimes you have the wrong crew for your journey. Even though you have made successful trips in the past with this crew, this time they will not get you where you want to go. You may need to add or remove crew members. Once you have come to this realization, do not wait to take action. Your canoe and crew are in danger. The sooner you change crew members the better. Some crew members actively work to sabotage the trip. They may not support your trip’s purpose, they may be playing office politics, or they may have their own hidden agenda. In this case, we are not talking about people whose opposition makes the work better; we are talking about people who actively work to sink your canoe. They have no place in your canoe. The sooner you remove them, the better it is for everyone involved.

What to do in case of a storm You can have the best crew with the best plans, but things can and will happen that are out of your control. Outside events, such as mergers, organizational structure changes, or the introduction or departure of crew members, can threaten your meeting. 114

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When this happens, you may want to pull over to shore and discuss the following questions: • Is this meeting still necessary? • Do we have the right people? • Is our purpose still relevant?

Sometimes you need to portage On some trips, you’ll find that the water has taken you as far as you can go, and unless you change something, the group’s progress will stop. When this happens, you need to take your canoe out of the water and move it to a new place. You can do this by • Changing where you meet • Lengthening or shortening the time you meet • Breaking up into pairs, trios, or subgroups • Conducting your meeting while standing up • Holding your meeting while walking outside

When the leader is the problem The toughest problem of all is when the leader is the problem. If you are dealing with a tyrannical leader, like Mutiny on the Bounty’s Captain Bligh, your only option may be mutiny. We are not recommending the mutiny option, just stating it as a possibility. Fortunately, most leaders are not like Captain Bligh, and there are alternatives to mutiny. Here are some suggestions: • Your leader may be unaware of how his or her behavior is negatively impacting the group and may be open to discussing it with you. In this case, the group members 115

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may ask to meet with the leader, state what they see happening, ask the leader if he or she experiences what they experience, and then determine if he or she is open to exploring new ways of making meetings more effective. • If the leader is unaware of his or her behavior and you are unsure of his or her openness to discussing how this behavior is impacting the group, you may want to identify someone whom the leader trusts and respects and have this person discuss the issue with the leader. • In some cases, crew members might meet without their leader, face the reality that their leader will not change his or her behavior, and identify how they can work together to accomplish the meeting’s purpose despite the leader’s behavior.

What to do when meeting habits are the problem We often think about habits as being bad when in fact habits are neither good nor bad in themselves. “Good” and “bad” are labels we put on these behaviors. Habits are efficient patterns of behavior that we acquire over time. Take driving to work. If you drove to work today and took your regular route, you probably didn’t have to think about all the decisions you made automatically. Your brain was on automatic pilot and got you efficiently from your home to work. What your getting-towork habit did for you was to free up brainpower so that you could pay attention to other matters, like what you had to do when you got to work. When it comes to meeting habits, individual and collective habits work for and against meeting effectiveness. Because they 116

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are habits, we don’t think about them; we just let the automatic pilot take over. As a result, we come to view meetings as being the way they are, with not much we can do about them. The awful truth about habits is that you can’t change them. You can only create new wiring in the brain that is stronger than the old habit (Duhigg 2012; Rock 2009). How do you go about doing that? The answer is quite simple. Either you reinforce the current positive habits that are working for meeting effectiveness or you create and reinforce new patterns. People will adopt these new patterns if they experience a reward for doing so. Rewards can range from feeling valued as a group member to feeling productive because the meeting was so effective. Leaders, contributors, and facilitators can identify and support new meeting patterns. As you reflect on your reading throughout Let’s Stop Meeting Like This, what new patterns are you ready to adopt in your next meeting?

Sometimes you need professional help First aid is important and it saves lives or, in our case, the ability of your group to effectively meet. However, sometimes first aid is not enough; you’ve done what you can and you need professional help. Professional help provides you with skilled, neutral resources to prevent your canoe from sinking. They have seen your problem before and know how to assist. These re­­sources may be available within your organization, or you may need outside assistance. First aid requires decisive action. You may provide first aid or support other crew members who are providing first aid. The decisions you make enable the crew to not only finish this trip successfully but make future trips as well. 117

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You may decide not to offer first aid or support other crew members who are providing first aid. This is a decision to be a bystander and watch the crew destroy itself or watch your canoe sink. If you make this decision, you are colluding in the ultimate destruction of your meeting and its crew. In the next chapter we will discuss meeting basics: important foundational elements for your meeting. We invite you to join us there.

key points • It is important to provide first aid as soon as you notice a problem. •  Problems with the crew need to be addressed immediately. • When storms arise, you may want to attend to meeting basics.

make it your own • When you are in a meeting that requires first aid, notice what your first reaction is? Do you run for cover? Do you provide first aid? • Build your skills. Practice using one of the first aid tips in this chapter in a situation that requires attention but is not a crisis. • Watch people who are skilled at providing first aid. Observe what they say and do. Spend time talking with them about their actions, and learn from them.

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chapter 10

meeting basics

Five Steps to Meeting Success Good order is the foundation of all things. edmund burke

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In this and the following three chapters, we of­fer suggestions to help your canoe cut swiftly through the water. This chapter is devoted to meeting basics. The following three chapters are devoted to the key meeting roles: leader, contributor, and facilitator. Just because the Meeting Canoe goes beyond meeting basics does not mean the basics are unnecessary. Ignore the basics and your canoe will sink. This chapter includes five questions that you must address prior to embarking on your journey: 1. Why are we meeting? Whether your meetings take the form of huddles, staff meetings, town halls, or work sessions, the answers to this question determine if you need to meet. You may need to



•  •  •  • 

Share information Coordinate actions Make decisions Develop plans and strategies

As you answer this question, you may want to employ Eric Lindblad’s criteria for determining if a meeting is necessary (chapter 1): there is information to share, and that information requires dialogue. 2. What do we want to be different because this group of people meets? For example, if the purpose of your meeting is to talk about people issues in your organization, then anything from benefits to training is fair game. If the purpose of your meeting is to engage people in creating an 120

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organization that provides memorable customer experiences, your purpose is at once narrower and deeper. It’s narrower because your purpose is to focus on creating superior customer experiences. It’s deeper because you can now focus on what it takes to create superior customer service without other distractions. Purpose is your meeting’s North Star, defining your meeting’s direction. Continually focusing on it will prevent you from getting lost. 3. Who needs to be in our crew? Nothing will sink your canoe faster than having the wrong crew. When the right people aren’t present, groups make poor decisions, if they are able to make decisions at all. Here is a brief checklist to help you decide whom to include. Include people who have



•  •  •  •  • 

Information Authority Responsibility Different thinking styles A likelihood of opposing

4. How do we get people to take ownership for the meeting? In­­ volve meeting participants in your meeting’s design. This involvement may include everything from suggesting agenda items to the actual meeting design. Form your de­­ sign team with a representative sample of meeting participants, and make them responsible for creating the meeting structure and flow. The design team ensures that the meeting fits the culture and the participants’ needs. Be­­ cause it is the team members’ design, they work hard to en­­sure the meeting’s effectiveness. The leader is no longer solely responsible for the meeting’s success or failure. 121

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While this step may seem to add time to your meeting preparation, it saves time in the long run. People support what they help create. 5. Where and how long will we meet? The room’s shape and feel should facilitate work getting done. We recommend round tables, plenty of wall space, whiteboards, and natural light. Constructing the physical space in a way that supports the work to be done sends the message that what you are about to do is important. If you are serving food, be sure to provide healthy food and snacks that give energy rather than drain it.   The best way to determine a meeting’s length is to es timate how long it will take to achieve your meeting’s purpose. We also recognize that sometimes meetings are constrained by time limits. In that case, figure out how much time it will take to achieve your meeting’s purpose and divide that time into one- or two-hour chunks, depending on how much time you can devote at each meeting. Our next chapter will look at the leaders’ role in meetings. We’ll see you there.

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key points • The first step is to determine if your meeting is really necessary. • Having a clear purpose prevents you from getting lost. • Having the right people in the room ensures quality decisions. • Involving participants in designing the meeting results in meeting participants taking ownership for the outcome. • The room’s shape and feel impact participation in the meeting. • The length of a meeting should be consistent with its purpose.

make it your own • Analyze a current meeting by using the key points as a checklist. • Use the key points as a guide to preparing for your next meeting.

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chapter 11

leaders

Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader. john quincy adams

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Leaders carry a special responsibility when it comes to meetings. Because they have formal or­­ ganizational power, what they do or don’t do in a meeting has a commanding influence on the meeting’s outcome. Here are three tips for leaders to keep in mind when leading meetings using the Meeting Canoe approach: 1. Use your power wisely. Eric Lindblad (chapter 1) used his formal organizational authority to make meetings op­ tional, trusting people in his organization to make good decisions about where they should spend their time. Rather than punishing people for not attending his meetings, he used the meeting attendance as a feedback device to help him determine a meeting’s effectiveness.   Kevin Limbach (chapter 6) used his authority to iden tify the meeting’s purpose and to convene a group of people when he brought people together to identify what it would take to have a great day at work. Kevin believed that if everyone had a great day at work, employees and the company would prosper. You may remember that his be­­­­liefs were well-founded.   Ken Aruda (chapter 1) created a mechanism that al­­­­­­­­ lowed everyone at a meeting to determine the meeting’s agenda, the order in which items would be discussed, and how long they would be discussed. This created a sense of ownership for the meeting because it gave people the autonomy to influence the meeting’s purpose and direction.

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2. Invite criticism. You may worry that people at a meeting are saying yes only because you are the leader. A way to counteract this tendency is to invite criticism. When presenting an idea, ask people why this proposal won’t work. Now comes the hard part. Sit quietly and listen to their re­­ sponses. Put on your researcher’s hat and ask people what else would get in the way of your idea working or what they think is missing. If your team is silent, say something like “If I were in your shoes, I would be thinking, ‘How did he ever come up with this harebrained scheme?’ ” A US Air Force base commander once asked, “If you were going to sabotage the installation of our new computer system, what would you do?” The ensuing responses identified system glitches that would have made the start-up a disaster.   When you invite criticism, the most important thing you can do is listen, listen, listen, and when you can’t stand it, then listen some more. In doing so, you create a safe environment for everyone’s opinion. 3. Make sure the decision-making rules are clear. Clear decision rules make for a well-run meeting. They provide a sense of certainty that lets people know where they should focus their energy. If I’m asked to provide feedback and know the leader will be making the ultimate decision, I put a different kind of energy into the discussion than when I know the group will be making the ultimate decision. In our work in organizations, we find that nothing makes people angrier than to think they were involved in a participatory decision-making process only to find out in the

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end that only one decision could ever be reached: the boss’s decision. You treat people with dignity and respect when you make the decision-making process clear, even if the process you are using is authoritarian. On the following pages we explore what contributors can do to increase meeting effectiveness.

key points • Leaders have enormous power to shape a meeting; it is important to use your power wisely. • When you invite criticism, you make it safe for others to comment. • Having clear decision rules saves heartburn later.

make it your own • Consider how you can use your power to support meeting effectiveness. • Think of ways you might invite others to criticize your ideas. • Ask yourself what you are willing to do when it comes to identifying the meeting’s decision-making process.

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chapter 12

contributors

Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings. margaret mead

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Meeting contributors are present because their knowledge can help the Meeting Canoe reach its destination. How they show up often determines whether a meeting achieves its purpose. Will they sit in the canoe and allow others to do the heavy paddling? Will they do their part? Will they put extra effort into their paddling? Here are three steps you can take as a meeting contributor to help your next meeting achieve its purpose: 1. Take responsibility for the outcomes. You can be like Steve Piersanti (chapter 1) and prepare for the meeting by making sure you determine what you can learn or how you can benefit from each agenda item. You can be like Barbara Bunker (chapter 1) by doing whatever is necessary to ensure the meeting’s effectiveness. If the meeting needs someone to take notes, take notes. If the people are not listening to each other, step in and help facilitate their listening. When you take responsibility for the outcome, you don’t sit idly by and wait for the leader or facilitator to act to improve the meeting. Sometimes saying something as simple as “I don’t know where this discussion is going” or “Are we talking about what we need to talk about at this meeting?” is enough to get a drifting meeting back on track. 2. Speak your truth. Here is a simple formula for how to speak your truth during a meeting (Miller and Katz 2002): • Describe the facts of the situation: what are you seeing or hearing?

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• Describe your thoughts: what is your interpretation of the facts? • Describe your feelings: what emotions are you experiencing? • Describe your wants: what would you like to have happen for you or the group or the organization?   When you are finished, ask questions such as, “Who else is having a similar experience?” or “What are your thoughts about what I just said?”   When you speak your truth, it’s a safe bet that someone else in the group feels the same way you do. In speaking your truth, you put something on the table for the group to discuss and give the group a way to address issues that might be lingering below the surface. Whether others agree with your point of view is unimportant. What is important is that you have given the group the opportunity to address an issue that might be hindering the group’s progress. 3. Be open to others’ viewpoints. While it is important to speak your truth, it is also important to put yourself in other people’s shoes. Your truth may not be the truth. Try to see the world from others’ perspectives. You do not have to give up your truth, but standing in different shoes will open your eyes to new insights and understanding. When you open yourself to new insights, you also increase the possibility that the other person might be open to your viewpoint. Is being open to someone else’s viewpoint hard to do? Yes. Is it important to do? Yes.

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In the next chapter we will identify actions facilitators can take that make meetings more productive.

key points • Taking responsibility for the meeting’s outcome helps ensure the meeting’s success. • When you speak your truth, others will join you. • W hen you are open to others’ viewpoints, you create productive dialogue.

make it your own • Consider what you are willing to do to ensure a meeting’s success. • Consider what you are willing to say that you haven’t said previously. • Ask yourself what you are willing to do to understand viewpoints different from your own.

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chapter 13

facilitators

Three Steps to Meeting Effectiveness Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. phil jackson

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Facilitators are guides. They make trips in the Meeting Canoe go smoothly. Great guides put as much effort into planning the trip as they do guiding the trip. Here are our suggestions that make facilitators effective meeting guides: 1. Think like a designer. Remember IDEO, the internationally recognized design studio we mentioned in chapter 5? Tim Brown, IDEO’s founder, developed what he calls design thinking, the thought process that designers use when they create a product or service (Brown 2009). Here are important design-thinking concepts you can apply when building your own canoe: • Focus on the user. When IDEO developed the Node, the new student chair, designers studied how students used the chair in the classroom. Similarly, user-focused meeting design looks at how meeting participants will use the meeting and then designs the meeting with the participants in mind. • Try rapid prototyping. The Marshmallow Challenge is a fun activity where groups get eighteen sticks of spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, string, and one marshmallow. The groups have twenty minutes to build the tallest freestanding structure possible with the marshmallow placed on top.    Two patterns emerge when people do this activity.  Some groups spend all their time designing and never test their design. Other groups rapidly prototype their designs by testing their structures along the way. The

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groups that use rapid prototyping usually win. Ex­­ per­i­­ence has shown that kindergartners consistently outperform business school graduates. A key to the kinder­gartners’ success is the use of rapid prototyping. • Keep iterating. Your first design will not be your final design, whether you are competing in the Marshmallow Challenge, designing the Node chair, or building your Meeting Canoe. Your first design is the starting place, not the ending place. Good designs need time to sit. You need time to reflect on what you learned from rapid prototyping and apply those lessons to your design. • Involve the user in your design process. We were members of a design team charged with designing a work session for the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. The design process we used blended rapid prototyping and collaboration with potential work session participants.   The design team, which included potential users, de­ signed a component of the work session in the morning and then tested it with potential participants in the afternoon. When we finished testing and refining all the components, we ran a prototype work session. Col­­ laborating not only improved the work session de­sign, it engaged potential participants and developed a desire within them to see the process succeed. This collaborative process took place within a week. If you want to improve meeting quality and develop high ownership of your meeting, always include a representative sample of meeting participants in the design process.

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• Decide not to fall in love with your design. It’s easy to fall in love with your design. Your great work has produced something to behold. You stand back and admire the flow, the great thinking behind each part of your agenda. Your meeting is a thing of beauty. Anyone who does not recognize the merit in what you built is crazy. When you start thinking this way, you are in trouble.    Your meeting design may be only something a  mother could love! Take in what others are saying, and re­­spond to their feedback. Look objectively at what you have created, and be prepared to make necessary changes. 2. When the group is stuck, describe what you see and hear, and ask the group members what they want to do about it. We first learned about this intervention from Marvin Weisbord (Weisbord and Janoff 2007) and have always loved this way of helping a group get unstuck. This technique’s beauty is that it places sole responsibility for what is happening and what will happen next on the group. The facilitator, having done his or her job by stating what he or she sees happening, then asks the group member what they want to do. This helps facilitators keep what we call the first rule of facilitation: don’t do for the group what it can do for itself. When you apply this rule, you increase autonomy and responsibility for the outcome.

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3. Work to make sure everyone’s voice counts. Facilitators can balance power in a meeting by making sure everyone’s voice counts. • An effective technique for doing this is to go around the table and ask all those present what they are thinking right now. • You can also make sure everyone’s voice counts when you invite people who are quiet into the conversation and ask those who are dominating the conversation to take a time out and listen. • Electronic polling provides the safety of anonymity and prevents people from being influenced by others’ opinions. • Finally, you can make sure that everyone’s voice counts by paraphrasing a comment when you think someone is misunderstood or the group is ignoring what he or she just said. In the next chapter we begin our handoff to you, providing additional tools for improving your meetings.

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key points •  Meetings improve when you apply design thinking. • When a group gets stuck, involve the group members in deciding what they want to do about their “stuckness.” • People engage in a meeting when they know their voice counts.

make it your own • Ask yourself, which elements of design thinking intrigue you. How might you apply them? • Think of ways you might invite group members to address their “stuckness” when the group is stuck. • Consider what you can do to ensure that everyone’s voice counts.

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our handoff to you We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. t. s. eliot

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Our journey is now complete. We have given you what we know works to create productive, engaging meetings. It’s now up to you to make the ideas, tools, and tips your own. We offer you two questionnaires to start you on your way. These questionnaires will help you discover the way things are. You can use the first questionnaire to assess your own behavior in meetings. You can distribute the second questionnaire to meeting participants to assess their experience in a meeting. PDF versions of these questionnaires are available under “Free Stuff ” at our website. Here are four steps to changing your meeting behavior: 1. Pick a meeting to analyze—a meeting that occurs with some frequency, be it weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. 2. Complete “Your Meeting Experience Questionnaire.” 3. Review the results and identify one area where you would like to behave differently. 4. Develop and implement a plan for changing your behavior. We suggest you pick only one area for improvement at a time because when one group member does something differently, it breaks the group’s behavior pattern. Very often this is enough to shift the behavior in the group.

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your meeting experience questionnaire 1. Of the total amount of time you spend in this meeting, what percent of the time are you totally engaged in the meeting?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 2. How much effort do you invest in making this meeting successful?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 3. Of the total amount of time you spend in this meeting, what percent of the time do you derive benefit from attending the meeting?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 4. Of the total time you spend in this meeting, what percent of the time are you a bystander, neither investing in nor deriving benefit from the meeting?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 5. When situations arise in this meeting that prevent it from being productive, how often do you work to address these situations?  Very often    Often    Rarely    Never 6. When decisions are made in this meeting, what percent of the time do you work to influence the decisions made in the meeting?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 7. How important is this meeting to you?   Very important    Important    Neither important nor unimportant    Unimportant   Very unimportant Questionnaire continues on next page

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  8. This meeting:   Challenges me to do my best   Provides an opportunity to learn   Provides feedback on my contributions   9. What am I willing to do to get more of myself engaged in this meeting? 10. What am I willing to do to improve the quality of this meeting?

Here are four steps to engaging meeting participants in im­­ proving their meeting: 1.  Invite meeting participants to engage in improving their meeting. 2.  Have meeting participants complete the “Meeting Analysis Questionnaire.” 3.   Compile the results and discuss the results with the group. 4.  Determine as a group how to strengthen what you are al­­ready doing well and how to improve areas that need attention. We suggest changing only one thing at a time, rather than addressing all the potential areas for improvement at once. You already know enough to improve the next meeting you walk into. What will you do to make that meeting more productive and energizing?

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meeting analysis questionnaire 1. Everyone present at this meeting understands the meeting’s purpose.  Agree    Neither agree nor disagree    Disagree 2. Of all the times this meeting is held, what percent of the time does the meeting advance the work of your organization?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 3. Of all the times this meeting is held, what percent of the time are the right people included in the meeting?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 4. What percent of this meeting’s total time addresses issues that pique your interest?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 5. Of all the times this meeting is held, how often does valuable learning occur?  Very often    Often    Rarely    Never 6. Do you feel welcome in this meeting?  Always    Sometimes    Rarely    Never 7. Do you feel connected to this meeting’s task?  Always    Sometimes    Rarely    Never 8. Does the time spent in this meeting discovering the way things are fit our task?  Always    Sometimes    Rarely    Never 9. Does the time spent in this meeting eliciting people’s dreams fit our task?  Always    Sometimes    Rarely    Never

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10. Of all the times decisions occur in this meeting, what percent of the time is the decision-making process clear to everyone present?  100%    75%    50%    25%    Less than 10% 11. When issues arise in the meeting that prevent the group from achieving its purpose, how often does the group work to resolve these issues?  Always    Sometimes    Rarely    Never 12. Of all the times this meeting takes place, how often does the group discuss whether this meeting is time well spent?  Always    Sometimes    Rarely    Never

We’d love to hear about your experiences and encourage you to share them with others. To this end, we invite you to connect with us and share your stories at our website. If you would like to contact us more directly, we are an e-mail away or as close as your phone. You can reach us at: Dick @axelrodgroup.com [email protected] 847.251.7361 Thanks so much for taking the time to read Let’s Stop Meeting Like This. As much as I hate to admit it, reading this book was really time well spent.

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a pocket guide to let’s stop meeting like this and more Early readers of Let’s Stop Meeting Like This requested a pocket guide to the book. They wanted an easily accessible, quick summary of the book’s major points that they could put on their desks or their electronic devices and take with them to meetings as a reminder. So here it is. We have also created a PDF version of the pocket guide, which you can download at our website (http://www.axelrodgroup.com).

The big idea You can transform mind-numbing, energy-sapping meetings into productive work experiences. If you don’t do anything else, do this:

• Determine whether your meeting is really necessary. • Identify your meeting’s purpose. • Decide whom to include. • Involve meeting participants in designing the meeting. • Make sure your decision-making process is transparent and understood.

Seven other ideas worth remembering Tools don’t care how they are used. You will get the maximum benefit from the tools in this book by using them in conjunction with the following principles: • Treat all participants as if they were volunteers. • Be sure the meeting involves work worth doing. • Help people learn something new. 145

a pocket guide and more

• Remember that everyone is responsible for his or her own experience during the meeting. • Create challenges in the meeting that require people to leave their comfort zone. • Be prepared to provide first aid. Because meetings involve people, things can and will go wrong. • Create structural tension. When meeting participants discover the way things are and dream about the future, they experience a rubber-band-like tension that propels them toward the future. You, too, can have the same success as thousands of learners, Fortune 100 companies, and a very smart ski instructor by using the Meeting Canoe approach and its supporting principles. In case you are wondering where to find things, we have created table PG.1. How you show up as a leader, contributor, or facilitator determines the meeting’s outcome. Table PG.2 presents im­ portant points to remember.

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Table PG.1  Where you can find information Meeting Canoe segment Sample practices Welcome

•  Prepare the room. •  Be a good host. •  Start with a meal / food. •  Provide topnotch logistics. •  Accommodate different languages.

• Encourage dialogues that build Connect strong links. people to •  Do the “four questions” activity. each other and the task •  Do your own investigative reporting.

More details (page nos.) 50 50–51 51 51–52 52 60 60–63 63

Discover the way things are

•  Spur discussion following a presentation. •  Build a shared view of reality. •  Make sense of your reality.

69–70 71–72 76

Elicit people’s dreams

•  Find out what people really care about. • Talk about the future as if it were the present. •  Use the arts. •  Take a break.

84 85

Decide

•  Use thumbs-up/thumbs-down. •  Vote on the issue. •  Put on your Thinking Hat. • Decide on what you can agree to right now.

94 94–95 95–96 96

Attend to the end

• Summarize the discussion and review the decisions reached. •  Provide a road map of next steps. • Take time to reflect on the meeting experience.

102–103

85 86

103–104 104

Table PG.2  Tips for leaders, contributors, and facilitators Leader

Contributor

Facilitator

Use your power wisely.

Take responsibility for the outcomes.

Think like a designer.

Invite criticism.

Speak your truth.

Make sure the decision-making rules are clear.

Be open to others’ viewpoints.

When the group is stuck, describe what you see and hear and ask the group members what they want to do about it. Work to make sure everyone’s voice counts.

works cited Anderson, Colin. 2013. Interview by Dick Axelrod, August 20. Axelrod, Richard H. 2010. Terms of Engagement: New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Axelrod, Richard H., Emily Axelrod, Julie Beedon, and Robert W. Jacobs. 2004. You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Bader, John. 2009. Interview by Dick Axelrod, August 4. BrainyQuote. 2013. “Richard Branson Quotes.” Accessed October 21. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/richard _branson_2.html. Brown, Tim. 2009. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation. New York: HarperCollins. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1997. Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York: HarperCollins. de Bono, Edward. 1985. Six Thinking Hats. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Duhigg, Charles. 2012. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. New York: Random House. Emery, F. E., and E. L. Trist. 1960. “Socio-technical systems.” In Management Sciences, Models, and Techniques. Edited by C. W. Churchman and Michael Verhulst. New York: Pergamon. Fritz, Robert. 1999. The Path of Least Resistance for Managers. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Galbraith, Jay. 2005. Designing the Customer-Centric Organization: A Guide to Strategy, Structure, and Process. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Hackman, J. R., and G. R. Oldham. 1976. “Motivation through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory.” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16: 250–279. Harvey, Jerry B. 1988. The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 149

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Keister, Angie. 2013. Interview by Dick Axelrod and Emily Axelrod, December 17. King, Martin Luther, Jr. 1963. “I Have a Dream.” August 28. Koehn, Nancy. 2013. “Half of All Meetings Are Unproductive. Is There a Fix?” Marketplace. Accessed September 24. http://www .marketplace.org/topics/business/half-all-meetings-are -unproductive-there-fix. Koestenbaum, Peter. 2002. The Philosophic Consultant: Revolutionizing Organizations with Ideas. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer. Lee, Shirley. 2010. “Management Statistics: Meetings.” yaM: Yet Another Meeting. August 9. http://www.yamlabs.com/blog /management_statistics_meetings/ (accessed December 4, 2013). Lieberman, Matthew D. 2013. Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. New York: Crown. Mallue, Chuck. 2013. Interview by Dick Axelrod and Emily Axelrod, November 13. Miller, Frederick A., and Judith H. Katz. 2002. The Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Reina, Dennis S., and Michelle L. Reina. 2006. Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace: Building Effective Relationships in Your Organization. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler. Rock, David. 2009. Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. New York: HarperCollins. “Space Shuttle Disaster.” 2011. NOVA. PBS, June 22. Steelcase. 2013. “Node Chair for Steelcase.” www.steelcase.com /en/products/Category/educational/seating/node/pages /node.aspx. Stevenson, Herb. 2013. “Emergence: The Gestalt Approach to Change.” Cleveland Consulting Group, Inc. Accessed August 5. http://www.clevelandconsultinggroup.com/articles/emergence -gestalt-approach-to-change.php. 150

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Terkel, Louis. 1972. Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books. Vroom, Victor H., and Philip W. Yetton. 1973. Leadership and Decision-Making. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press. Weber-Lucas, Judy. 2013. “Meetings: Getting Things Done.” October 21. Weisbord, Marvin, and Sandra Janoff. 2007. Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

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acknowledgments A successful canoe trip requires remarkable support. This trip was no exception. These are the people who made this trip possible.

the advance party Nancy Breuer is a developmental editor extraordinaire. From the initial outline to the finished product, Nancy has been with us every step of the way, guiding and cajoling us with grace and humor. Nancy’s motto is “your content, in your voice, on your schedule.” This book is testimony to her ability to deliver on her promise. This is the third time that Steve Piersanti has been our editor, and each time he takes our work to places we did not think possible. Steve’s ability to see the gem of an idea and envision possibilities we didn’t perceive for our own work is remarkable. We are glad to count Nancy and Steve among those people whom we first met as business associates and whom we now count as friends. Jeevan Sivasubramaniam, managing director, editorial, and Neal Maillet, editorial director, were voices that helped shape this book, even though they were not directly involved in editing it. Julie Beedon helped us write about the first version of the Meeting Canoe (Axelrod et al. 2004) and still cares about it to this day. Bob von Elgg created the Meeting Canoe metaphor and its original graphics and, most importantly, Clockman’s image. Thanks to Joe Lafferty for his preliminary work on the chapter graphics.

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the crew We thank those whose stories give this book life and credibility: Eric Lindblad, Colin Anderson, Barbara Bunker, Steve Piersanti, Chuck Mallue, Angie Keister, Kim Gallagher Johnson, Kevin Limbach, David Axelrod, Judy Weber-Lucas, and John Bader. Praise from members of our brain trust gave us the courage to continue, and their criticism made this book what it is today: Sharon Jordan-Evans, Laura Davis, Chuck Mallue, Kevin Limbach, Chris Trout, Kim Gallagher Johnson, Angie Keister, Maria Odiamar Racho, Barbara Bunker, Angeles Arrien, Julie Beedon, Bill Treasurer, Nancy Voss, Steve Treacy, Jerry Kaye, Annette Freund, Judy Siegal, Ruth Wagner, Mary Corrigan, Steve Cady, Laura Hansen, Allison Bichel, Pam Theriault, Liz Guthridge, Rosi Barbeau, Molly Breazeale, Kristen Quade, John Nawn, and Susan Skinner. The professional manuscript readers—Nic Albert, Josh Millican, Sara Jane Hope, Josh O’Conner, and Sandy Chase— provided enthusiasm and delivered the message “you can do better” in a way we could hear it. Our colleagues, mentors, teachers, and clients: what we have learned from you made this book possible. Our children, Dave and Heather, were cheerleaders for us along the way. Our grandchildren, Zach and Andy, are wideeyed in the knowledge that their grandparents can actually write a book.

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the landing crew The folks at BK—Kristen Frantz, Mike Crowley, David Marshall, María Jesús Aguiló, Zoe Mackey, Kylah Frazier, Katie Sheehan, Kat Engh, Johanna Vondeling, Catherine Lengronne, Courtney Schonfeld, and Charlotte Ashlock—are working to make this book available to the world. Special thanks as well to Dianne Platner for her artistic sensibility and extraordinary caring for our work. Together with Rick Wilson your watchful eyes guided the production of our manuscript into the finished product it is today. Words of gratitude to copy editor Sharon Goldinger, whose eye for detail does not let anything slip by, and to Beverly Butterfield, who produced the pages and helped create the book’s interior design, as well as Rachel Rice for indexing. Finally, special thanks to Rachel Singer for your tireless work on our behalf. Through every outline, draft, citation, and revision, you have been there for us. This boat would not float were it not for your efforts.

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index A “Abilene Paradox” example, 90 action steps, discovering the way things are, 27 agendas, determination of, 126 Alcoa, 19 Anderson, Colin, 15 approach to meetings, 4 arguments/conflicts in meetings, 110–111 Aruda, Ken, 15, 16, 17–18, 126 athletes, 82–83 attending to the end, 24, 28 in chat meetings, 30 creating a road map before leaving, 103–104 Gestalt cycle of experience, 104–105 in huddles, 31 ideas for, 147 key points, 106 knowing what you’re doing before you start, 102–103 overview and parts of endings, 102–103 in staff meetings, 32 taking time to reflect, 104–105 in town hall meetings, 34 in work sessions, 38 autonomy factor in meetings, 15, 16, 17–18, 136

B Bader, John, 33, 35 behavior in meetings changing bad habits, 116–117 of leaders, 115–116 managing problems, 112 steps to changing, 140 Branson, Richard, 82 Bunker, Barbara, 13, 130 bystander role, 14 C Calgary Health Authority, 73 call center example, 72 care conversations, 58, 84 challenge factor in meetings, 15, 16, 17–18 change, how best to lead, 2–3 chats decision making in, 97 Meeting Canoe system for, 30 clarity for decision making, 90 lack of, 111 clean-slate drills, 49–50 closing of meetings, 18 collaboration, 135 Columbia disaster example, 70–71

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common ground, identifying, 113 conflicts/arguments in meetings, 110–111 connecting people to each other and the task, 24, 27 care conversations, 58 in chats, 30 creating personal connection, 27 dialogues for, 60 good versus token connections, 59 in huddles, 31 ice breakers, 58–59 ideas for, 147 investigative reporting exercise, 63 key points, 66 lasting connections, 63–65 overview, 56–59 questions for, 60–63 sending invitations, 48–49 in staff meetings, 32 in town hall meetings, 34 in virtual meetings, 40 in work sessions, 37 contributors (team members) agenda items of, 17 choosing the right, 121 key points, 132 responsibility for outcomes of, 130 role and responsibilities of, 11 158

sabotage by, 114 seeing others’ viewpoints, 131 speaking your truth, 130–131 steps for engaging, 142 tips for effective meetings, 148 treatment of, 50–51 conversations care, 58 guiding, 26–27 inputs and outputs, 29 small talk, 49 stages/parts of, 27–28 courage questions, 63 creativity, 39, 85, 86–87 criticism, inviting, 127 culture of meetings, 2–4 cycle of experience, Gestalt, 104–105 D deadlocked meetings, 111 de Bono, Edward, 95 deciding/decision making, 24, 28 antidotes to group grope in, 93–96 avoiding mistakes in, 91–93 in chat meetings, 30 choosing a method for, 28 clear rules for, 127–128 deciding to decide, 98 deciding who decides, 91

index

deciding/decision making (continued) how you decide, 93 in huddles, 31 ideas for, 147 identifying and choosing responsibility for next steps, 97 key points, 99 lack of clarity for, 111 by meeting type, 97 for problems in meetings, 113 in staff meetings, 32 what you decide, 96–97 who, how, and what in, 90 in work sessions, 38 by the wrong people, 121 Denki, 15 designing meetings forming the design team, 121–122 key points, 138 suggestions for, 134–137 design thinking, 134–135 dialogues about the future, 85 for decision making, 90 for making connections, 60 for making sense of reality, 76–77 discovering the way things are, 24, 27 building a shared view of reality, 71–72

Calgary Health Authority example, 73 call center example, 72 in chat meetings, 30 Columbia disaster example, 70–71 in huddles, 31 ideas for, 147 IDEO’s Node chair example, 74–75 key points, 78 making sense of your reality, 76–77 missing the point, 69–70 results of, 68–69 in staff meetings, 32 in town hall meetings, 34 in work sessions, 37 dreaming time, 86–87 dreams. See eliciting people’s dreams Duhigg, Charles, 19 E effective meetings contributors’ steps for, 130–132 facilitators’ roles in, 134–138 key points, 20, 128 making new choices for, 6 Meeting Canoe system for, 39 new approaches to, 4 tips for leaders, 126–128 159

index

eliciting people’s dreams, 24, 27 in chat meetings, 30 commonality among dreams, 83 grounding dreams in reality, 81–83 in huddles, 31 ideas for, 147 key points, 88 power of, 27–28 in staff meetings, 32 taking a break from, 86 taking time to dream, 86–87 techniques for, 84–86 in town hall meetings, 34 in work sessions, 38 emotional decision making, 93 employees, participation in workplace improvements of, 6–7 ending meetings. See attending to the end energy in meetings, loss of, 8–9 engaging participants, 142 environment, creating a safe, 26–27 expectations for meetings, negative, 7–8 F facilitators factors in lack of success for, 12

160

first rule of facilitation, 136 key points, 138 role and responsibilities of, 11 roles for effective meetings, 134–138 technique for balancing power by, 137 tips for effective meetings, 148 feedback factor in meetings, 15, 16, 17–18 first aid for meetings bad habits as problem, 116–117 changing your venue, 115 common problems, 110–111 crew problems, 114 getting professional help, 117–118 key points, 118 managing storms, 114–115 overview, 108–109 Step 1: Say the Unspoken, 109, 112 Step 2: Ask, Do you see what I see?, 112 Step 3: Ask, What do you want to do about it?, 113 when the leader is the problem, 115–116

index

first rule of facilitation, 136 follow-up reviews, 26 Ford, 6 “four questions” exercise, 60–63 Fritz, Robert, 83 future, discussing the, 85 future-oriented questions, 62 future present, 85

H habits changing bad, 116–117 of holding meetings, 3 keystone, 19 huddles decision making in, 97 Meeting Canoe system for, 30

G Galbraith, Jay, 33 Gestalt cycle of experience, 104–105 getting work done in meetings, 5–6 Girl Scouts example, 76–77 GM, 6 goals, identifying, 26 group-centered approach to decision making, 28, 98 group grope antidotes in decision making breaking down the proposal, 96 description, 93–94 Thinking Hat process, 95 thumbs-up/thumbs-down, 94 voting, 94–95 guides, facilitators as, 134–138 gut feelings in decision making, 93

I ice breakers, 58–59 ideas, sources of, 86 IDEO, 74, 134 “I Have a Dream” speech (King), 81–82 Inclusion Model, 35 informal meetings, 30, 97 innovation, 39, 74–75 inputs, description, 29 insights, 86 interactive learning, 72 intervention for getting stuck, 136 invitations, sending personal, 48–49 iterations of designs, 135 J Johnson, Kim Gallagher, 36 K Katz, Judith, 33 Keister, Angie, 35–36

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keystone habits, 19 King, Martin Luther, Jr., “I Have a Dream” speech, 81–82 L language issues, accommodat ing different languages, 52 large meetings, welcoming people to, 51–52 leader-centered approach to decision making, 98 leaders agenda items of, 17 avoiding decision-making mistakes by, 91–93 decision making by, 91 factors in lack of success for, 12 as problem in meetings, 115–116 role and responsibilities of, 11 tips for effective meetings, 148 welcoming participants, 51 leadership tips for effective meetings clear decision-making rules, 127–128 inviting criticism, 127 key points, 128 wise use of power, 126 Lean Manufacturing, 7 162

learning factor in meetings, 15, 16, 17–18, 72 Limbach, Kevin, 84, 126 Lindblad, Eric, 19, 120, 126 listening counting everyone’s voice, 137 importance of, 127 logical decision making, 93 M Mallue, Chuck, 39–41 mandatory meetings, 4 Marshmallow Challenge, 134–135 materials for meetings, providing advance, 51 meals, at beginning of meetings, 51 meaning factor in meetings, 15, 16, 17–18 Meeting Analysis Questionnaire, 143–144 Meeting Canoe system. See also attending to the end; connecting people to each other and the task; deciding/decision making; discovering the way things are; eliciting people’s dreams; welcoming people acceleration of change using, 35–37 for chats and huddles, 30–31

index

Meeting Canoe system (continued) description, xi, 18, 22–23 guiding conversations with, 26–28 key points, 42 parts of, 23, 24 reasons and applications for using, 39–41 ski lesson example, 24–26, 84, 105 for staff meetings, 31–32 town hall meetings, 33 working from front to back of, 29 work sessions, 33 Meeting Experience Questionnaire, 141–142 metaphors, 40–41 Miller, Fred, 33 misalignment of endings, 103 missing the point, 69–70 mutiny, 115–116 N necessity of meetings, 3, 120 neuroscience, of welcoming, 45–46 Node chair example, 74–75, 134 O one-day processes, 35 O’Neill, Paul, 19

organizational effectiveness (OE), 35 organization of meetings, logistics of, 51–52 outcomes, responsibility for, 130 outputs, description, 29 ownership of meetings, 121–122, 126 P paper mill example (connec tions), 63–65 personal connections. See connecting people to each other and the task Piersanti, Steve, 13, 130 pocket guide, 145 power balancing, 137 wise use of, 126 preparation for meetings by contributors, 130 preparing the meeting room, 50 presentations, missing the point of, 69–70 priority, order of agenda items, 17 problems in meetings, what to say/do, 110–111 productive meetings, factors in, 14 professional help for problems, 117–118 163

index

Q Quality of Work Life, 6–7 questionnaires Meeting Analysis, 143–144 Meeting Experience, 141–142

responsibilities in meetings, 11 contributors’, 130–132 reviews, 26 rewards/reinforcements, 117 road maps for ending meetings, 103–104 roles in meetings, 11 beneficiary, 13–14 bystander, 14 investor, 13–14 room preparation, 50 room shape and feel, 122

R rapid prototyping exercise, 134–135 reality building a shared view of, 71–72 grounding dreams in, 81–83 making sense of your, 76–77 tension between vision and, 83 reality questions, 62 reasons for meeting, identify ing, 120 recorders, roles of, 17 reflection for ending meetings, 104–105 for making sense of reality, 76–77 relationship questions, 62–63

S sabotage by contributors, 114 safety Alcoa’s, 19 creating a welcoming environment, 26–27, 127 neuroscience of need for, 45–46 reasons for establishing, 44 Six Sigma, 7 ski lesson example, 24–26, 84, 105 slate-cleaning drills, 49–50 small meetings, welcoming people to, 48–51 small talk, 49 space shuttle disaster example, 70–71 speaking the unspoken, 112, 113–114

proposals, questions for considering, 95–96 prototyping exercise, 134–135 purpose of meetings, 2–4, 120–121, 126

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speaking your truth, 130–131 staff meetings decision making in, 97 Meeting Canoe system, 31–32 stakeholder meetings, 33 Star Model, 33 Steelcase, 74–75 structural tension, 83 stuck/unstuck design process, 136 successful meetings factors against, 12 finding information, 147 five electrical charges of, 14–15 five questions for, 120–122 ideas to remember, 145– 146 key points, 123 tools for, 145–146 T tasks, commitment to, 57.  See also connecting people to each other and the task TaylorMade-adidas Golf, 84 team members. See contribu tors (team members) threat avoidance, 45–46 timekeepers, role of, 17 time management allowing more time for items, 17–18

breakdown of time spent in meetings, 10 determining length of meetings, 122 estimating time for agenda items, 17 volunteer timekeepers and recorders, 17 wasting time, 45 token connection, 59 tools for success. See successful meetings town hall meetings, 33 decision making in, 97 Meeting Canoe system for, 34 transitions, welcoming people, 47–48 translators, creative ideas for finding, 52 trust building, 27 core components of, 57 creating, 56–57 truth, speaking your, 131 Two Truths and a Lie exercise, 58–59 U unspoken, stating the, 112, 113–114 unstuck/stuck design process, 136 user input for design process, 135 165

index

V video games, elements of, related to meetings, 15, 16, 17–18 viewpoints, seeing others’, 131 Virgin Atlantic, 82 virtual meetings, 39–40 vision of the future, 85 tension between reality and, 83 voluntary meetings, 4, 5, 126 voting, for decision making, 94–95 Vroom, Victor, 92–93 W “wall-hangers,” 2 Weber-Lucas, Judy, 15, 16, 17–18 welcoming people, 24, 26–27 building on, 53 in chat meetings, 30 creating a transition through, 47–48

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factors in feeling unwelcome, 48 in huddles, 31 ideas for, 147 importance of, 52–53 key points, 54 in large meetings, 51–52 neuroscience of, 45–46 in small meetings, 48–51 in staff meetings, 32 in town hall meetings, 34 in work sessions, 37 wooden raft example, 22 work improvement processes, 7 work sessions, 33, 34 application of Meeting Canoe system for, 40–41 decision making in, 97 Meeting Canoe design for, 37–38 Y Yetonn, Phillip, 92

meet the authors Who are Dick and Emily?   Dick and Emily Axelrod have been together for more than forty-five years. They met in 1967 in Pusan, Korea, where Dick was serving in the US Army as a signal officer and Emily was teaching children at Pusan American High School. Friends often ask, “Was it like MASH?” MASH was not far from the truth. They soon fell in love and were married in September of 1968. Since then, they have raised two children, Heather and David, and became the doting grandparents of Zach and Andy. Along the way, they formed the Axelrod Group, Inc., in 1981, a consulting firm that pioneered using employee involvement to effect large‑scale organizational change. While they bring different perspectives to their work, they are totally aligned when it comes to wanting to leave the world a better place than they found it. What do you get when you combine Dick + Emily? During their life together, they have had many dinner conversations about the best way to improve the world. Dick has believed that if you could bring dignity into everyone’s work ex­­perience, where people knew their voices counted and their hearts and minds were engaged in the work, there would be positive impacts on families and ultimately the society as a whole. Emily would counter that the way to improve the world was to improve families because strong, healthy families are the cornerstone of society. With Dick and Emily, you get an unusual combination of a kid raised on Chicago’s South Side (Dick) and someone who brings her folksy southern wit and spirit to the 167

meet the authors

work (Emily). You get the discipline of Dick’s engineering-based education from Purdue University and a master’s in business from the University of Chicago and Emily’s grounding in physical education from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, along with the heart of a family therapist (master of social work) from Loyola University Chicago. Dick’s early experiences in his father’s model airplane factory and at General Foods—one of the first companies in America to use self-directed work teams—had a great impact on him. Emily’s roots in Wilmington, North Carolina, gave her a sense of community and how people in communities work together for the common good. Recognized worldwide, they have received awards from Benedictine University, the University of Chicago, and the Or­­ ganization Development Network. Throughout the years they have shared what they know by teaching others at American University, Benedictine University, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago, to name a few.

who are dick and emily’s clients? Their diverse clients read like a “who’s who” of the business world. They include Allstate Insurance Company, Boeing, British Airways, Coca-Cola, General Electric, HewlettPackard, Intel, MetLife, and Novartis. They also work in the not-for-profit world, where their clients include the Girl Scouts, UK’s National Health Service, Calgary and Fraser Health Authorities, Chicago Public Schools, and the Union for Reform Judaism.

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what else have they produced? Dick authored Terms of Engagement: New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations, and they coauthored You Don’t Have to Do It Alone: How to Involve Others to Get Things Done and Let’s Stop Meeting Like This: Tools to Save Time and Get More Done. In addition, they are frequent conference presenters. Emily is an avid sports fan and coached the women’s swim team at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dick is a longsuffering Chicago Cubs fan, which explains his optimistic spirit. They are easily accessible at [email protected] or [email protected], or you can pick up the phone and call them at 847.251.7361.

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the axelrod group— the story behind the story Dick and Emily Axelrod come from a long line of entrepreneurs. Dick’s grandfather was a tailor, Emily’s dad was a lawyer who never practiced law because he had to take over the family dry goods business, and Dick’s dad manufactured model airplanes. Included in the mix are aunts and uncles who were artists, pianists, university professors, and a hardware store owner. So it was no surprise when in 1981, Dick left a promising career at General Foods to form the Axelrod Group. At the time, Emily was studying to get her second master’s degree, a master of social work. At the same time as Dick was leaving General Foods, his friend and colleague Jim Shonk landed a huge contract with Ford and needed help. For many years, they worked together at companies such as Ford and General Telephone (the forerunner of today’s Verizon) by implementing Quality of Work Life and Employee Involvement processes that created new union-management partnerships while increasing quality and productivity. This kick start from Jim was just what the fledgling Axelrod Group needed to launch. Emily, in the meantime, was honing her skills as a family therapist working with troubled children and their families as well as working to resettle Russian immigrants in Chicago. Periodically, Emily would work with Dick to conduct communication skills training programs. During the early 1990s, Dick was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the approach most consulting firms were using to bring about organizational change. You know the process: it consists of sponsor groups, steering teams, and project 171

the axelrod group

groups—all organized to create the change, be it a new strategic plan, a new product development system, or improved organizational processes. When these groups finished their work, they then faced the arduous task of “selling” their solution to the organization. This need to sell the solution brought many a change process to its knees. Out of this dissatisfaction, Dick and Emily developed the Conference Model®, a process for involving the “whole system” in creating organizational change. Every new idea needs someone who is willing to try something that is unproven. Ken Goldstein, who at the time was director of organization development at R. R. Donnelley & Sons, was willing to give an untested idea a chance when no one else would. Because of the early success at R. R. Donnelley, companies like Boeing, British Airways, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Inova Health System, Weyerhaeuser, and the Canadian and UK health systems were able to benefit. At the height of this innovation, Dick had triple bypass surgery. That is when Emily jumped into the Axelrod Group with both feet. She gave up her therapy practice and made her family systems skills—which were so instrumental in the development of the Conference Model®—available to the Axelrod Group full-time. Along the way, colleagues have joined the Axelrod Group. This worldwide network provides a range of skills that enriches the Axelrod Group’s offerings. The publications of Terms of Engagement (Axelrod 2010) and You Don’t Have to Do It Alone (Axelrod et al. 2004) have enhanced Dick and Emily’s thought-leader status and

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cemented the Axelrod Group’s role in collaborative change leadership. You can learn more about the Axelrod Group and the services we provide at our website (http://www.axelrodgroup .com). Contact us at [email protected] or 847.251.7361.

beyond the book You can obtain PowerPoint presentations and other free stuff available only to our readers at http://www.axelrodgroup.com/ books by entering the following password: LSMLTD68E.

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Also by Dick and Emily Axelrod, with Julie Beedon and Robert W. Jacobs

You Don’t Have to Do It Alone How to Involve Others to Get Things Done

We all need to involve others to accomplish tasks and achieve our goals, but all too often involving others seems like more trouble than it’s worth. This book is the Swiss Army knife of involvement, offering a set of tools that can be used in any setting to get you the help you need. The authors lay out a simple, straightforward plan that begins with five key questions. The answers to these questions serve as a guide to finding the right people and keeping them energized, enthusiastic, and committed until the work is completed. “The best of the current crop of books on this topic...gives a complete blueprint for involving others.” ––Paul B. Brown, New York Times Paperback, 120 pages, ISBN 978-1-57675-278-4 PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-57675-879-3

Berrett–Koehler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco, www.bkconnection.com

800.929.2929

Also by Dick Axelrod

Terms of Engagement

New Ways of Leading and Changing Organizations, Second Edition

Building engagement is crucial for every organization. But the traditional top-down coercive change management paradigm—in which leaders “light a fire” under employees—actually discourages engagement. Richard Axelrod offers a better way. After debunking six common change management myths, he presents a proven, practical strategy for getting everyone—not just select committees or working groups—enthusiastically committed to organizational transformation. This revised edition features new interviews—everyone from the vice president of global citizenship at Cirque du Soleil to a Best Buy clerk—and recent neuroscience findings that support Axelrod’s model. It also shows how you can foster engagement through everyday conversations, staff meetings, and work design. Paperback, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1-60509-447-2 PDF ebook, ISBN 978-1-60509-448-9

Berrett–Koehler Publishers, Inc. San Francisco, www.bkconnection.com

800.929.2929

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