Facilitation techniques- 1
Introduction
Meetings are the most important tool we have to work with other humans. We have 40 hours in a work week. Those hours need to be used carefully. When you put several people into a room you are now using up precious time so its even more important to use that time carefully. But at the same time when you add more people without meeting techniques you actually can waste all the time. Thus having really good facilitation techniques is critical to ensure that you are using time wisely. I will lay out all the tools you need to know to run amazing productive meetings. This post is the introduction and I will be posting techniques each day. Please enjoy!
My story
I always hated meetings at work when I first started working. I saw them as a waste of time. I wanted to get back to work! I felt awkward and shy. I never understood the purposes of meetings. I hoped I wouldn't be called on. I would actually get so stressed out in meetings that I could barely think straight. All the people were overwhelming. It just felt like a waste of my life.
Then one day in 2005 I joined Toastmasters and there I learned that meetings could be productive high energy events. I learned how to run a meeting well. I learned about agendas, time boxing, meeting roles like facilitator, timer, note taker, etc. It was mind blowing. I started to pay attention and developed a desire to make the meetings I attended more productive and become a great meeting facilitator.
I did manage to learn and exercise the skills and that was the skill that helped me get promoted to being a software architect. The architect’s main job is to run amazing technical design meetings to orchestrate the technical information out of engineers and into a format that everyone can understand.
I took this same skill into being a product manager where I met with customers, engineers, sales, marketing, finance, and more to build a successful product.
Looking back on my career, I would say the number one skill that has made me successful is running a productive meeting. I am very excited to share those skills in this section.
Now I am going to tell you about a huge success I had and it should give you an idea of how to run a big important meeting and what is possible. I used the 4D outline, which is something I’ve adapted from the 3D outline laid out in Tony Jeary amazing book Life is a Series of Presentations.
We had one week to get our 5 engineers ready to start coding. My cofounder and I had created a lot of documents that we wanted the engineers to review and understand. I laid out the topics that my cofounder and I wanted to cover. Then I laid out the available time. I started slotting topics into the times. I gave lots of lots of time so we wouldn't feel rushed. We had a great time. I am shocked how well the team was set up and prepared for the start of the coding after this one week of meeting. We had a full design ready to go with tasks assigned to engineers at the end of the week.
Here is the agenda that we ended up with.
Example Sprint Week agenda
If you are running an important meeting, be sure to use this template to plan it.
There are many important techniques to running great meetings. Today’s post was just the introduction. Look for tomorrows post for a discussion of types of meetings.
