I was able to attend a workshop this past week hosted by Laura Burke called A Culture of Great Meetings. The two day course offered ideas on how to prepare for, design, participate in, and facilitate effective meetings. Here are personal reflection from the course:

Personal Commitments

I will create working agreements at the start of any session that I facilitate so that I effectively create a container for the participants to hold each other accountable for good behavoir.

I will use meetings as a tool to model the way, so that I can deliberately engage in organizational culture hacking and help shape a better tomorrow for effective meetings.

I will help participants understand authority dynamics in meetings so that they understand how and when they can contribute.

I will be intentional about meeting design so that I can get everyone’s voice in the room and ensure everyone’s voice is heard.

I will avoid value statements when gathering ideas and feedback so that I encourage all new ideas equally and remain neutral.

I will recognize that collaboration is not the absence of conflict, but rather it invites conflict so that I am ready and able to deal with conflict when it arises.

I will use the Groan Zone  as a tool to understand and explain divergence in meetings so that participants have a mental model and get a sense of “you are here”.

I will use prompts after opening a meeting so that participants get better context and are primed for ideation and divergence.

 

 

This gave me some great new tools and ideas for facilitation that I am excited to put into practice.

 

Until the Next Iteration . . .

Jason