My personal experience is that  there seems to be a balance point for each meeting in terms of how specific the agenda points and outcome are. If the points are too detailed (twenty items for discussion in a 60 minute meeting) I have seen just the first five actually getting discussed…

I think you point about clarity of…[Read more]

Creating a welcoming space in the meeting room can have a surprising effect on enabling people to relax. One seminar I led had an interesting piece of feedback –

“I knew it was going to be fun because there was a beautiful display of flowers on the trainer’s table”

It is often the tiny details that make the most impact in…[Read more]

The best bits of the extraordinary meeting of the Handforth Parish Council Planning and Environment Committee held on Thursday 10th December 2020 at 7:00​pm, the meeting was held using Zoom video technology.

Thank you for these. I was wondering if you could expand on how specifically each of these factors could effect the focus of the meeting? Are there particular criteria that the person can use to help guide them in each of these circumstances?

Indeed, in gatherings with diverse motivations, where attendees come from…[Read more]

One of the things I have noticed with public meetings is that the level of distraction / diversion of attention seems to increase exponentially with the size of the space and number of people present. Also that the dynamic of the group is effected by the number of people present – opportunities for any form of discussion…[Read more]

Introductions is an area that seems to have a lot of cultural factors that need to be taken into account. For example, in Japan, there are factors of the highly ritualised process of exchanging business cards. In both West Africa and the Middle East, one may be expected to share details about family and children – and ask the other…[Read more]

These are great – thank you.

Couple of questions for you –

First – do you have any specifics about how to invite people who you think it is very important that they attend but may be extremely busy (perhaps a person further up the organisation) and have a default of NO! to meeting requests?

Secondly – could you give an example of what…[Read more]

Thank you for these.

I think there is a key point about joining instructions – it is not enough to go to the venue website and take what they say for granted about it being at the right level of detail – for example I have seen venue websites have maps of parking which just showed WHERE to park, but omitted that there were VERY FEW…[Read more]

Thanks for the above.

My experience with physical venues is that the 80/20 rule seems to apply. 20% of venues will give you 80% of your problems. I have seen venues that one might expect gold-standard service turn out to have next to no parking; have zero skills in helping set-up audio-visual equipment in terms of having the cables…[Read more]

Thanks for starting this off.

I was wondering if you had encountered situations in organisations where there is a culture of inviting just about everyone who might even be peripherally effected by the meeting to be there “just in case”. I have been in many meetings like this and wondering if there are any interventions to gently change…[Read more]

Thank you for this.

I was wondering if you have come across issues with the different types of software used for this and if you have any ideas on how to deal with people  (for example from other companies or organisations) who have to be at the meeting but are not on the internal booking system?

https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/jeff-bezos-knows-how-to-run-a-meeting-here-are-his-three-simple-rules.html

“No PowerPoints are used inside of Amazon,” Bezos proudly declares. “Somebody for the meeting has prepared a…

[Read more]

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