Tags: meetings

Meetings can be frustrating. But they don’t have to be.

A lot of the frustration comes from unmet expectations. You go into the meeting expecting one outcome, and when it doesn’t materialise, you declare the meeting a waste of time. But had you gone into that same meeting with different expectations, perhaps you would emerge from it in a happier state.

We were talking about this at Clearleft recently and I suggested that a simple little taxonomy of meetings might be a good starting point for avoiding frustration.

Divergent meetings

In a divergent meeting the goal is to generate ideas. These meetings often happen early in a project.

Quantity matters more than quality. Plenty of “yes, and…” rather than “no, but…” to create lots of suggestions. This is not the meeting to point out potential problems with the suggestions.

Convergent meetings

In a convergent meeting the goal is to come to a decision.

The meeting might begin with lots of options on the table. They need to be winnowed down. Poke at them. Dissect them. Ideally dismiss lots of them.

This is not the time to introduce new ideas—save that for a divergent meeting.

Just having those two categories alone could save you a lot of grief. The last thing you want is someone participating in a convergent meeting who thinks it’s a divergent meeting (or the other way around).

Those two categories account for the majority of meetings, but there’s one more category to consider…

Chemistry meetings

In a chemistry meeting there is no tangible output. The goal is to get to know one another.

In a large organisation this might be when multiple departments are going to work together on a project. At an agency like Clearleft, a chemistry meeting between us and the client team is really useful at the beginning of our partnership.

Again, the key thing is expectations. If there are people in a chemistry meeting who are expecting to emerge with a framework or a list or any kind of output, they’re going to be frustrated. But if everyone knows it’s a chemistry meeting there’s no expectation that any decisions are going to be made.

There you have it. A tiny taxonomy of meetings:

1. divergent
2. convergent
3. chemistry

This tiny taxonomy won’t cover every possible kind of meeting, but it probably covers 90% of them.

Ideally every meeting should be categorised in advance so that everyone’s going in with the same expectations.

If you find yourself trying to categorise a meeting and you think “Well, it’s mostly convergent, but there’s also this divergent aspect…” then you should probably have two separate shorter meetings instead.

And if you’re trying to categorise a meeting and you find yourself thinking, “This meeting is mostly so I can deliver information” …that meeting should be an email.

How to build a bad design system | CSS-Tricks

Working in a big organization is shocking to newcomers because of this, as suddenly everyone has to be consulted to make the smallest decision. And the more people you have to consult to get something done, the more bureaucracy exists within that company. In short: design systems cannot be effective in bureaucratic organizations. Trust me, I’ve tried.

Who hurt you, Robin?

Today was a day full of meetings, as so many Mondays are these days. But they weren’t bad meetings. These were necessary meetings. Not a single one of them was a client meeting. Instead I spent the day bouncing from one Clearleft meeting to another.

There was the weekly Monday morning meeting. We even managed to have that outside, before the raindrops started to fall. Then there was a resourcing meeting. Then I had a meeting with Anna about some potential upcoming work. Then there was the director’s meeting with Andy and Rich. Sounds cabalistic but it’s actually quite pedestrian.

The One-Minute Test — Medium

I really like this idea of Jared’s. Finish up a meeting by having everyone write down the answers to these three questions in 60 seconds:

1. What was the big idea? (What was the most important thing you heard at the meeting?)
2. What was your big surprise? (What was the thing you saw or heard that surprised you the most?)
3. What’s your big question? (What’s the biggest unanswered question you have at this time?)

I can certainly relate to these findings:

We find that it’s not unusual to discover that different people in the room had just attended completely different meetings. People are surprised by things that other people take as a matter of course. People take away a different emphasis about what was discussed. People’s fears and concerns are reflected in their outstanding questions.

How people sit in meetings and what it really means

Show me on the teddy bear where Nate Bolt touched you.

Good Kickoff Meetings

The companion website to Kevin Hoffman's IA Summit talk, this is a hugely valuable resource for an often-overlooked part of the design process: the kick-off meeting.