Creating a Meeting Agenda

So far we’ve looked at why we meet, meeting roles, and now let’s look at creating an agenda.

What is an agenda? An agenda is a list of topics and activities that will occur during the meeting. See the definition for more. How is an agenda made? Very carefully. You must know the purpose of your meeting. You must talk to stakeholders to figure out what each can contribute. The agenda is the outcome of those discussions.

• Propose

• Outcomes

• Required attendees

• Optional Attendees

• It should have sections. 

• Timings for each

Timings are tricky because it's hard to estimate how long it will take. I like to mentally review the activities to see if I’ve added enough time. Recently I ran an online summit. I added 5 minute buffers throughout the event to allow for small slippages in the schedule. I used this time to recap what we’d heard so far, and preview what was coming up. Another tip with timings is that shorter tends to sharpen the minds of the participants. If you give a set of 3 people 7 hours to brainstorm 10 ways to solve a problem, they will multitask, go on tangents, go for lunch. But if you tell them they have 5 minutes to come up with 10 ideas, they will focus and get it done. Another example of this is if you give an engineer 1 hour to review the high level architecture of the system, they will take it. They will include all the details that they are proud of. But if you give them 20 minutes and 5 minutes for questions, they will prioritize and think hard about how to explain the system so non specialists can understand it.

In short, time focuses the mind. Keep each section of your agenda as short as possible. This short time frame creates urgency and will lead to better results for your meeting.

With a clear agenda you will run a productive meeting. Next post we will look at an overview of the type of segments of a meeting.