Kevin\u2019s new book, Meeting Design<\/i><\/a>, applies many design approaches (including user experience design techniques) to the concept of meetings. He shares some insights from the book with us in a Q&A interview.<\/p>\n [GET CERTIFIED IN UX]<\/p>\n Take our Professional Diploma in UX Design course<\/span>\n <\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n The more time I’ve spent in my career, the more I\u2019ve found meetings being a central theme across many work contexts. But, I’ve been really fortunate in that I’ve been exposed to really smart people doing really smart things over the years. I’ve tried to remember to ask them, “Hey, why do you do things that way?” And then when I’ve applied models in new contexts, I’ve learned that it matters more to be able to learn from (meeting) failures than seeking out the “perfect” approach to agenda building or facilitation.<\/p>\n There are three ways that I can think of meetings being problematic. There are meetings that you expect to be a challenge, such as difficult conversations with expected conflict. There are also meetings that you don\u2019t expect to go badly, where surprises from people, technology, or the culture of the organisation derail the mood or the intended outcomes.<\/p>\n And finally, there are meetings where there are no surprises or expected conflict, but they just seem … “less than ideal,” or unfulfilling. I hope the methodologies collected in the book provide a route to address all three kinds; and manage conflict while dealing with the unexpected, and increase clarity about meeting outcomes.<\/p>\n The physical environment, the organisational culture, people’s ability to align on ideas, and time all place constraints on meetings. They interact with one another. For example, \u00a0a culture that prizes consensus will probably have meetings that go over time, and, as a result, people will be late for the next one.<\/p>\n The human cost includes things like loss of momentum and energy; the exhaustion that comes from quickly switching contexts. On a normal day, I have between three and six meetings, and very rarely are those meetings all about the same thing. The time and energy it takes someone to refocus their cognitive lens is fundamentally a human cost.<\/p>\n Meetings have the capacity to provide insights into the culture of an organisation; what it takes to build clarity or progress in that culture. An organisation that has very effective meetings could have established rituals and a high degree of clarity around what value those rituals are providing (and how to measure that value).<\/p>\n For someone joining that organisation, the easier those meetings are to understand, the more “useful” the organisation becomes to them. For a manager, those rituals and measurements are gateways to understanding how to get the most from the meetings you have with your team.<\/p>\n If you are explicit about who <\/i>is facilitating a meeting, it removes ambiguity about who has put in the forethought on why everyone is in the room together. They become a guide. If that person is seen as a neutral party, the attendees will trust them to guide them through ambiguity and conflict.<\/p>\nHow did your own experience of being in meetings over the years (particularly in the design world) form the idea of the book?<\/h2>\n
In what ways are meetings problematic e.g. they aren\u2019t doing the work they should be doing?<\/h2>\n
As with any design problem, it\u2019s vital to first understand what the design constraints are. What are the design constraints for meetings?<\/h2>\n
Businesses usually focus on the total cost of meetings as the hourly wage of everyone who attends multiplied by how long the meeting lasts. But there is an important human cost too?<\/h2>\n
You use a UX analogy in the book when you say that \u2018Meetings are usability tests for organisations themselves\u2019. What do you mean by this?<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nOne of the biggest take-homes from the book is the importance of a facilitator in a\u00a0meeting? How does the role help design better meetings?<\/b><\/h2>\n