What strikes me about this list is how it basically renames stuff that already exists. I'm about to sound like I'm about 60, but please, bear with me.
Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement ... I hesitate to recommend having an "agenda" and "agenda items" because the word agenda implies a giant, tedious bulleted list of things to cover.
Yet an agenda is the best tool for controlling meetings if the chair is any good. It says "this is what we will discuss and decide and only this". A meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance encounters in the office kitchen. It's a transactional form of communication, a tool to make efficiently make collective decisions.
Do your homework before the meeting.
Which is why agenda are circulated -- and even more because:
Make it optional.
Yes! And as Tom DeMarco points out in (I believe) The Deadline, meetings which don't stick to the agenda lead inevitably to everyone having to come to every single meeting just in case something gets decided. If the agenda is trustworthy, people will stay away who should stay away; only interested parties -- who will do the homework because it's relevant to them -- will turn up.
Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting.
These are called "minutes". Properly written minutes are very useful and they don't have to be in legalese. The University Computer Club at the University of Western Australia, where I studied, have excellent minutes[1], written with a sense of humour.
Before I came to my senses, I used to be involved in student politics. And if that unpleasant experience taught me anything, it was the power of meeting mechanics. A well-run meeting is an extremely useful institution. Get in, discuss, decide, get out. Bam. No ambiguity, nothing left hanging.
As a chair there is one rule that counts: don't let the meeting get side-tracked. Stick to the agenda, work it. People quickly learn that they need to get their stuff onto the agenda in advance and the whole process begins to work better. Discussions become more focused, decisions can be made quickly and efficiently.
Those who are interested might like to join an organisation like Toastmasters or the Penguin Club to hone their skills, or get involved in committee work, or join a union, incorporated club or political branch. The skills of running an effective meeting are very useful. I applied them during my capstone unit at uni; my team delivered 92% of agreed functionality on-time with no significant defects. And part of that was running tight meetings.
"A meeting should not be a free-form discussion..."
Agreed, though if people in your office have grown accustomed to that style of meeting, then you'll need to do a lot of conditioning -- and keep a pretty short leash on things -- until they're used to a more structured agenda. Eventually, though, they'll realize just how much time and energy they save with short, focused meetings.
Let's say that you're chairing a meeting, and it's going off-track in a non-productive direction. I've found that a pretty effective cure for meeting chatter and tangential discussion is raising the specter of wasted time. This could be as simple as: "Guys, we have a lot to cover, and I want us to get out of here on time."
A statement like that does two things. First, it places the burden on the side-trackers to get back on topic by making them look like the bad guys (and not you, who might otherwise be seen as too rigid). Second, it reminds everybody that the meeting isn't happening in a magical bubble of parallel spacetime. It's ticking away very real minutes from the workday -- minutes that nobody's getting back at the end of the meeting. (For some reason, people seem to lose conscious track of time in meetings, and later wonder where the day went).
Finally, we should note that time-wasting meetings usually stem from the behavior of the meeting chair. If you demonstrate that you're willing to cave on the agenda -- or that your agenda is improperly long, vague, scattershot, improperly socialized beforehand, etc. -- then you're going to lose the room. Likewise, if you kick off your meeting with idle chatter, you're going to get idle chatter in return. (Don't open with "So, did you guys do anything fun this weekend?" and then expect anything but a 20-minute digression). It may seem unnatural to start the meeting right on topic, absent the social lubrication of small talk. But a meeting isn't the time or place for small talk, as you've pointed out.
Wait, 'minutes' are a record of what was said by who at the meeting. 'actions' (or 'actionable items' or etc) are "to dos". These need to be highlighted separately from the minutes.
I agree with you that well run meetings are crucial, and that traditional formats can be excellent. I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.
Meeting formats vary. The simplest things you need, though are:
1. Metadata -- who was there, start time, end time.
2. What was discussed. Regular reports are typical.
3. What decisions were made.
4. Who will carry out which decisions.
It's common to see 3&4 in one of two formats:
1. Interpolated. "Motion: Jack to install new monitoring package. Moved Jill, Seconded Wei Li. Passed."
2. Appended. A list at the bottom of "action items". The UCC minutes I linked above take this approach, which has the readability advantage.
I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.
Yes, absolutely. I saw meetings abused during my student politics days. Some really dramatic stuff.
Another, often overlooked point is when things need to be done by.
Also, I got in the habit of putting a table of actions right at the front of the minutes (after the preamble of time/date/attendees etc). It was the first thing people would see on opening the doc.
Edit: I once toyed with the idea of trying to write an iPad app that can automagically structure a set of minutes for you. It would have been a way for me to learn iOS and do something useful for myself at the time.
Experiencing meetings getting abused is certainly a worthwhile life experience. I too was fairly political at university and I saw great depth and planning go into getting particular outcomes from meetings for nefarious ends. You begin to notice signs and mannerisms that give away when someone is trying to be a jerk or working in cahoots with others to stack motions or derail discussion to get in a sneaky amendment or rejection. It's a game of strategy, really.
It is such a valuable experience because eventually you have to work with people who mess with meetings for a living (politicians, bureaucrats, middle managers in large firms, and the list goes on). Knowing their tricks puts you one step ahead.
> A meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance encounters in the office kitchen.
I saw this a lot of times and I still don't get it. I actually don't want chance encounters in the office kitchen. I don't use the office kitchen, and I don't want communication to be a matter of chance. I don't want to have to "hang around" when it comes to work.
I want to hear the "btw I'm also working on this pb for XXX in parallel" during the meeting if it should have any effect on my work. Even if it's not on the agenda. And I don't want a second meeting afterwards just to discuss this point. I don't want 10 meetings in a days with ultra tight agendas if all of it can be freely discussed in one.
I want one meeting with a clear theme (like "how's the project going"), but where you say anything you want, and we are all done with meetings for the day.
That's not a free form discussion. That's team status updates which you can do as an agenda item. In the event that they're of interest to people there those people can get together separately and discuss them.
But if they're not an agenda item they shouldn't be discussed because it's not that meeting.
The point is to allow people to make their own decision on whether they attend by giving them useful information on what will be discussed.
Just because that's what you want to do, doesn't mean that's what some particular meeting you happen to be in should be about.
Every meaningful point might not be on the agenda, and refusing to have a pertinent discussion because it was not on the agenda will lead to a second or third meeting, who knows when, with revised agendas that still might no be good enough. That's largely inefficient and a time loss for everyone.
Of course if nobody cares about some tangent point, it should be stopped on the spot. If a discussion appears while some of the stakeholders are missing, it might be postponed as well, but if it's not the case there's no reason no to go on and discuss it, just because it's not on the agenda.
>Every meaningful point might not be on the agenda, and refusing to have a pertinent discussion because it was not on the agenda will lead to a second or third meeting, who knows when, with revised agendas that still might no be good enough. That's largely inefficient and a time loss for everyone.
But this is exactly how it's supposed to work. It's efficient to table side discussions that don't apply to everyone. Otherwise, you're just wasting a subset of the participants' time.
A proper agenda should contain everything that absolutely needs to be talked about at that time. That is the focus of the meeting. If additional discussions are spawned that aren't covered by it, they should be taken offline, either with an additional meeting, or with an informal discussion after.
I guess your premise is that someone did extensive research before building the meeting agenda, communication by mail and other means allowed everyone to do one's homework, and everyone actually did it, so the meeting is really just to seal the consensus.
I agree in this kind of situation, unexpected items are of limited scope, shouldn't affect the meeting agenda, and can be dealt at other time.
Now, this would be more the exception than the rule, at least in my experience. And if you can reach this point in your organization, I think you can get rid of the meeting altogether, and just validate the different points by mail or group chat.
It's not if no-one cares, it's if not EVERYONE cares.
If you've got 10 people in the meeting and 6 people start discussing something, you've got 4 people who are having their time wasted and were given no choice in the matter.
Perhaps it has to do with the attitude towards meetings. If someone is wasting his/her time in a meeting, he/her should excuse him/herself and leave.
It's the same pattern as when you need to be in a meeting about a specific point, but not attend all the other points. You ask to have the stuff you care about come first and you can leave it after. If some unexpected things needs your input, you'll be called in anyway.
I'm not sure if that's as efficient as sticking to the prescribed agenda, and having the non-agenda stuff taken offline / discussed after.
You don't have to schedule an entirely different meeting room to talk about it - more often than not at my work, the people who want to discuss the unexpected point just stay after the original meeting has ended to discuss it.
To everyone who was there for the agenda, the meeting is effectively over - for the others, you could say the meeting continues on with the unexpected topic.
The important part is that everyone meets for as short as is needed - they don't have to keep running in and out of meetings to see if things are relevant, or stay and listen to things that don't matter to them.
Fully agree with you, most of the meetings I've attended I felt like I should have had my copy of Roberts Rules and my gavel.
You approve the minutes of the previous meeting, you transact old business, you open for new business, you address the chair when you want to speak (and stand so everyone knows who has the floor), you have a time limit for speaking (for contentious issues), and then you vote.
Anything that is unclear gets tabled until next meeting when someone proposes something thats actually thought out enough to have someone to 2nd it.
Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement ... I hesitate to recommend having an "agenda" and "agenda items" because the word agenda implies a giant, tedious bulleted list of things to cover.
Yet an agenda is the best tool for controlling meetings if the chair is any good. It says "this is what we will discuss and decide and only this". A meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance encounters in the office kitchen. It's a transactional form of communication, a tool to make efficiently make collective decisions.
Do your homework before the meeting.
Which is why agenda are circulated -- and even more because:
Make it optional.
Yes! And as Tom DeMarco points out in (I believe) The Deadline, meetings which don't stick to the agenda lead inevitably to everyone having to come to every single meeting just in case something gets decided. If the agenda is trustworthy, people will stay away who should stay away; only interested parties -- who will do the homework because it's relevant to them -- will turn up.
Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting.
These are called "minutes". Properly written minutes are very useful and they don't have to be in legalese. The University Computer Club at the University of Western Australia, where I studied, have excellent minutes[1], written with a sense of humour.
Before I came to my senses, I used to be involved in student politics. And if that unpleasant experience taught me anything, it was the power of meeting mechanics. A well-run meeting is an extremely useful institution. Get in, discuss, decide, get out. Bam. No ambiguity, nothing left hanging.
As a chair there is one rule that counts: don't let the meeting get side-tracked. Stick to the agenda, work it. People quickly learn that they need to get their stuff onto the agenda in advance and the whole process begins to work better. Discussions become more focused, decisions can be made quickly and efficiently.
Those who are interested might like to join an organisation like Toastmasters or the Penguin Club to hone their skills, or get involved in committee work, or join a union, incorporated club or political branch. The skills of running an effective meeting are very useful. I applied them during my capstone unit at uni; my team delivered 92% of agreed functionality on-time with no significant defects. And part of that was running tight meetings.
[1] http://www.ucc.asn.au/infobase/minutes/2011/