How to Make Meetings Work 🪑

A round-up of facilitation techniques from professional coaches!

Too many team meetings are boring, uncreative, and wasteful.

Disagreements are avoided, a few voices dominate, and energy and enthusiasm are drained. As a result you get confusion, wasted effort in the short term, and an erosion of trust and motivation in the long run.

I believe this is an area that remote work made worse.

Zoom calls are a poor, lesser version of in-person meetings: they are more draining, less engaging, and generally harder to run well. As a result, meetings today have a sketchy reputation (to say the least) among engineering teams, with many people capitulating to either 1) bad meetings, only good as meme material, or to 2) using async comms for most interactions.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Meetings can be good: they can be spaces where people align on goals, build trust, unlock creativity, and move forward with clarity.

But how do you get there?

One of the key elements that separates a successful meeting from a dreadful one is good facilitation. Chances are you have already experienced it in the past: think of a well-run workshop you attended, or a meeting that actually works, where there is a clear agenda, the owner goes through the various steps, everyone speaks their mind, and the whole thing works like ‌clockwork.

How good did that feel? But also, how rare is that?

The good news is facilitation can be learned, and there exist plenty of methods and techniques you can adopt to make your meetings more engaging and effective.

To explore this, today I am bringing in Ray Cooper and Joel Chippindale, two of the most knowledgeable coaches and facilitators I know. They run a full program on how to make meetings work, where people learn these skills alongside peers — you should check it out!

(As a Refactoring sub you also get $60 off by using the code REFACTORING50)

In this article they will explore some of the reasons why groups should come together for conversations, and will share some practical tools you can start using right away.

Here is the agenda:

1. 🤝 Building a shared understanding — how a shared vision is a catalyst for faster and better decisions.

2. 💡 Exploring ideas — how to unlock quieter voices and ensure everyone is heard.

3. ⚔️ Making decisions — how to converge and navigate conflict.

4. 🪴 Reflecting and learning together — how to create a culture of reflection that improves things over time.

Let’s dive in!

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🤝 Building a shared understanding

Understanding each other’s work is hard, and ensuring that we do so is often treated too simplistically within teams.

A good, shared understanding across the team leads to higher intrinsic motivation, less duplication, and faster and better solutions — but it’s also hard to pull off.

Unfortunately for many, “creating a shared strategy” often looks like this:

• An exec doing a presentation and the team asking questions (if they are lucky), or

• On a daily basis, a standup where everyone simply lists off as many things as possible to prove that they are “doing enough”.

A less tactical / longer term approach is to involve more people in strategy and planning. While it takes time to get everyone together for half a day, when structured well it saves a lot of time down the line on delivery.

To create a shared vision, Jennifer Britton suggests this exercise:

Imagine it's one (or three, or five) years in the future and the team is coming together to celebrate its achievements. Consider:

• What are the goals we have been working on?

• What achievements have we had?

• What have we been prioritizing?

• What are we known for?

• If we could not fail, what would we accomplish?

• What are the values that underpin our work (customer service, integrity, etc.)?

• What do the values look like in action (behaviourally)?

• What strengths are we leveraging?

• What focus have we been holding?

• How does our work connect with others? Stand alone?

• What are we saying no to, in order to hit, or exceed, the goals?

• What is the core of our vision?

I’ve worked with groups as large as 40 people to develop a shared vision — and while the final wordsmithing might happen within a smaller subset of people that might not always represent everyone, the process of understanding one another’s perspectives is always invaluable for a team.

When I did this recently a research team found that drawing images helped them quickly see the differences in what they respectively prioritize in their work, and gave the group useful metaphors to refer back to when they are comparing differences in opinion later on.

But we don’t just need a shared understanding at this macro level. Teams also work better together when there’s regular shared understanding around the skills they bring and the challenges they have.

To achieve this, one of the exercises I like the most is Appreciative Interviews, where pairs take it in turns to talk about what success looks like to them.

Here is a basic template to implement it:

1. Specify a theme or what kind of story participants are expected to tell. (3 min)

2. In pairs, participants take turns conducting an interview and telling a success story, paying attention to what made the success possible. (7–10 min each; 15–20 min total)

3. In groups of 4, each person retells the story of his or her pair partner. Ask participants to listen for patterns in conditions/assets supporting success and to make note of them. (15 min for groups of 4)

4. Collect insights and patterns for the whole group to see on a flip chart. Summarize if needed. (10-15 min)

5. Ask, “How are we investing in the assets and conditions that foster success?” and “What opportunities do you see to do more?” (10 min)

Reflecting on this together gives people an opportunity to understand what they contribute to a team, and builds a sense of solidarity and connection between people that work together.

Creating a shared vision is the first step to make progress

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💡 Exploring ideas and solving problems

One of the reasons lots of engineering teams do daily standups or 1:1s is to have a regular ritual of keeping each other in the loop, and to make it easy for others to jump in and support you on things you’re stuck on.

But many teams can end up “going through the motions” with this kind of structure, or reverting to more dominant members of the team to share their ideas or solutions. To shift people into a more conscious collaboration mode you could think about bringing in a structure to the conversation that shifts the normal patterns.

Two useful techniques for this are Troika consulting and 1-2-4-all:

1) Troika Consulting

In Troika Consulting one person brings a challenge and shares an overview for 1 minute. They then switch off their camera and go on mute (or turn around if they are in person) while the other 2-3 people discuss their questions, assumptions and solutions in relation to the challenge.

Here is the basic sequence of steps: