Don’t Set an Agenda Before Important Meetings
You’ve probably heard this advice about meetings before: Set an agenda and stick to it. But if the purpose of your meeting is to solve a complex challenge, this advice couldn’t be more wrong. If you’re convening a diverse group to tackle a complicated problem, it’s far better to have the group decide on the agenda together. Plan to spend 10%–15% of your overall meeting time to getting the agenda right: a half hour for a half-day meeting, a couple of hours for a two-day meeting. Start with individual brainstorming so that people can form their own opinions on what the group should cover. Then have them anonymously post their ideas on sticky notes for others to see. Together, everyone should then identify themes and cluster similar ideas together. Once you have a good list of possible topics, ask the group to make final decisions about what should be on the agenda. This process can be time-consuming, but going through it together will ensure that participants are engaged and feel ownership over the process — and the outcome.
You’ve probably heard this advice about meetings before: Set an agenda and stick to it. But if the purpose of your meeting is to solve a complex challenge, this advice couldn’t be more wrong.
Complex problems — like how to grow a company faster, or realize the benefits of a merger, or comply with new regulations — are often multifaceted and entangled, and to solve them you can’t dictate what the group will discuss. After all, how do people talk about something that is an amorphous mess? Plus, a preset agenda will bias the outcome and undermine the group’s ownership over the process. And you can’t possibly know ahead of time the topics the group needs to discuss to figure out the solution.
The group needs an agenda, but the group members need to decide how to spend their time together — whether that’s a few hours or a few days. Below are the steps we recommend. You’ll need to allocate 10%–15% of your overall meeting time to getting the agenda right: a half hour for a half-day meeting, a couple of hours for a two-day meeting.
Ideally, people will show up having done the prereading, you’ll briefly remind them of the challenge at hand, and then you’ll introduce whoever in the room doesn’t know each other. Give everyone a few minutes to gather and record their thoughts on the topics the group should cover. If you don’t have them do this individual reflection first, you risk falling into groupthink and losing any benefit from the diversity in the room. Ask them to quietly reflect on the question and document their thoughts on sticky notes. In addition to topics the group should cover, people may want to record any ideas or concerns they have.
Next, ask them to post their sticky notes for everyone to see. Try to do this in an anonymous way so that no one knows who suggested what. Give them time to scan the notes and ask them to look for thematic connections and duplicates. Move those thoughts together into clusters. While this helps to organize the content a bit and get people ready to start forming possible topics, the real point of this step is to give people time to see what is on everyone else’s mind.
Now have people suggest topics that emerge from the clusters and that should be considered for the final agenda. Invite everybody to suggest as many as they want, and make sure they know it’s OK to agree or disagree with what others are suggesting. If enough people agree, a topic makes the shortlist. If not, it’s politely set aside.
With a shortlist of possible topics in hand, give the group a finite amount of time to whittle down the list to the final agenda. In most cases, you’ll need about one-third of the agenda-setting time to complete this step. You might also want to suggest the number of topics they should settle on, which will depend on the length of your meeting and how long each topic will take to cover.
The group can merge topics that are similar, or in some cases nest several topics within one another. Some topics might be dismissed as being out of scope or unimportant. Have someone record all of these decisions. At the end, everyone should know why each topic made the list, what will be covered in that portion of the agenda, and what result is expected from the discussion.
There are certainly other ways to develop the agenda with a group. If you want to create your own process, just be sure it follows a few guidelines:
During the final sorting and deciding, it’s possible that people will disagree on which topics to address. That’s great — it demonstrates commitment and ownership. Here are some questions you can use to help the group evaluate potential topics for discussion.
People are used to arriving at meetings and reading through a preset agenda. By turning the agenda over to them, you set a different tone. This isn’t going to be the same old meeting. People are expected to be engaged and take ownership over the process and the outcomes. And they’re in it together.
David Komlos is the co-author of Cracking Complexity: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast (Nicholas Brealey; May 7, 2019) and the CEO of Syntegrity, which helps leaders rapidly solve complex challenges, generate strong buy-in, and mobilize people for action.
David Benjamin is the co-author of Cracking Complexity: The Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast (Nicholas Brealey; May 7, 2019) and the Chief Architect of Syntegrity, which helps leaders rapidly solve complex challenges, generate strong buy-in, and mobilize people for action.
Don’t Set an Agenda Before Important Meetings
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