Sections of the Meeting Part 2

The agenda is like a map showing the participants where we are going in this meeting

We saw in Part 1 of sections of the meeting, that the facilitator is like a director of a movie in setting the tone, ensuring that the participants don’t get lost or worse angry! We continue reviewing the sections of the meeting in this post. In part 3 we will finish describing the sections of the meeting.

Review the agenda

An agenda is a list of topics and activities that will occur during the meeting. The agenda is the agreement of what will be covered. Read the agenda to the participants. Ask if there are any additions to the agenda

It's important to make sure everyone is good with the agenda. This allows you to maintain control because everyone agreed to the agenda from the beginning. If anyone disagrees see how much change they want. If it's too excessive say the following, “This is an important topic and I want to be sure we have time to give it the time it needs. We will set up a separate meeting just to cover it.” This usually works well to keep your members happy and let you continue. If there is time for a small addition, feel free to update the agenda and move on. Remember that if you add a new item to your agenda you need to do a quick mental check to ensure that you have the right participants at the meeting to make that item valuable to cover.

Purpose overview

It's important to get all your members to be on the same page about the purpose for your meeting. After you've read the purpose, ask for confirmation that everyone agrees this is the right purpose to spend your time on. If anyone disagrees try to get on the same page as quickly as possible. If it's not possible, you might need to tell the person that unfortunately you must continue. If the person is a powerful influential person, you might to reschedule.

To prevent this from happening you need to spend time with your stakeholders before the meeting happens. Make sure that you get everyone on the same page. Send the agenda out before the event so that if anyone has any issues, they can let you know before the event starts. Ping important people to ask them everything looks fine before starting.

Body of meeting

During the body of your meeting is when you do all the hard work. You can divide up the meeting into small chunks and run different activities during each. I love using the 4D outline for planning.

List and how to run activities for each category of meeting

This is an example of a planning meeting agenda.

Example of a 4D outline

Click here to get the spreadsheet version of this that you can copy and use for your next meeting.

We have only gotten to cover up to the Body of the meeting. In part 3 we will review the final stages of every meeting.