Facilitate Proceedings » Running Effective Meetings

4 ways to own your meeting experience

Danuta McCall — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:22:47 +0000

Says Reid Hastie: “I USED to be the disengaged participant — one who had good ideas about how to solve a problem or conduct a meeting, but didn’t contribute. I now take a more active role, aiming to make meetings more effective.”

To at least some degree, we own our experience in meetings and we play a role in making them either a waste or a good use of our time. That leads me to think about four things that we can and should take ownership of to improve our own meeting experience.

iPads Add Sizzle and Creativity to Meetings

Danuta McCall — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 16:47:29 +0000

A recent post on a site called iPad CTO caught my eye because its title : Increase Productivity with iPad-driven Business Meetings. Yes indeed! I thought – having just returned from an engagement where we used iPads to create a sense of intimate conversation amongst 400 people. The author of this post went on to posit: “The legacy of business meetings – boring, counter-productive, and a constant interruption of real work – shows that little progress has been made over the last century ……There’s a chance iPad’s involvement and deep integration into the way meetings are organized and implemented can move the needle just enough to improve your meetings in significant ways.”

Make Virtual Meetings Worth Your Time – Join Us!

Danuta McCall — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 22:13:08 +0000

Over the past year we have been offering a free webinar series entitled “Designing Interactive Virtual Meetings and Webinars that Keep Participants Engaged”. Every webinar has been unique, as each group molds its session from the participants’ collective experience, creative thinking and interests. Two upcoming events cause us to reflect on how our thinking has evolved from running these dynamic, highly participatory open sessions. The first event is our next webinar, scheduled for next week on Thursday September 23 at 8 am PDT, 11am EDT, 3 PM UTC (register). This webinar is a warm-up for Julia Young’s interactive session “Getting Great Results from Virtual Meetings” at the upcoming OD Network Conference in New Orleans

We know that every successful meeting relies on a well-thought out objective, outcomes and agenda. And, good facilitation that engages participants in open, thoughtful thinking and learning But there are some especially gnarly challenges associated with meeting and collaborating remotely. We’ve created a conceptual structure to frame them for discussion called The Six Critical Success Factors.

Come join the evolving conversation! You will experience an interactive virtual event and help build solutions to one of the biggest challenges facing virtual teams today. Register here.

The Facilitator’s Way: Plan Appropriate Group Processes

Susan Peryam — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:50:33 +0000

The elements of a successful facilitation plan include Group Processes, i.e., the steps or activities that transform Inputs (People, Information, Purpose) into the session desired Outcomes. In support of each process step we select the appropriate Tools – the facilitation methods that enable a group to collaborate to achieve the outcomes of that step (eg:, brainstorming, listing, grouping, prioritizing) and employ Techniques – the ways in which an activity (step in the process or tool) will be managed (eg:, large group, small group, silent refection, round robin).

How do you select the processes, tools, and techniques that you plan to use to facilitate a group? Do you take direction from the client? Do you ask the participants? Since you are the expert, do you design away based on what has worked in the past?

July Webinars – How to keep participants fully engaged

Julia Young — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:50:17 +0000

With our Interactive Webinars series, we’ve been exploring the concept of building highly interactive elements into virtual meetings and webinars. We invite anyone who is interested in exploring these ideas with us to engage in an interactive experience of creative thinking about ways to design collaborative activities in what is too often a one on many, presentation heavy format. Our series continues this month with more opportunities to collaborate on ideas about designing interactive webinars and virtual meetings. We’ve got two great webinars planned for July.

Public Webinars – Leading Virtual Teams

Julia Young — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:29:43 +0000

Our colleague, Nancy Settle-Murphy at Guided Insights is offering a rare set of public sessions this month for her two most popular virtual classroom offerings: Leading Virtual Teams on June 29 and Planning and Running Exceptional Virtual Meetings on June 30. Designed with busy people in mind, each of these virtual sessions delivers a wealth of vital information, skills and tools within a compressed period of time. In fact, participants receive about five hours’ worth of content by participating in a two-hour virtual session. Registration is strictly limited to 15 people for each session. Please click on the links above for more information or to register, or contact us directly for more information.

Death by PowerPoint or Web Conferencing?

Julia Young — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:24:03 +0000

The New York Times reports on Death by PowerPoint in the US Military. Is web conferencing going the same way?

So, you want to solve problems and generate quality ideas in your meeting?

Donna McAlister Kizzier — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:29:37 +0000

If solving problems or generating high quality ideas are among your primary meeting goals, which of the many meeting venues available to facilitators should you select? Face to face? Teleconferencing? Audio and video conferencing? Text messaging? Asynchronous or synchronous? With or without collaborative systems? Does it make a difference which meeting tools you select or the time frame you select? This month’s Research Brief addresses these questions, with a clear winner emerging.

As a reminder, each Research Brief refers readers to the full published article. Click on the link to read today’s full Research Brief. These Briefs are intended to communicate the results of my already published research to practitioners in the field. I appreciate and encourage your feedback; you are the best qualified to judge the relevant application of my research in the workplace.

Every Productive Virtual Meeting Needs A Communication Plan

Danuta McCall — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:20:23 +0000

In my last post, I made the case that facilitators should take a new look at how to make pre-work more valuable and compelling. There are great benefits to be gained from designing engaging pre-work activities (and incentives to complete them) before your virtual or face-to-face event. They range from raising the level of investment and preparedness of the participants to enabling the facilitator to set the tone for the meeting ahead of time.
There are two reasons why thinking out a communication plan for the meeting, and particularly the pre-work, is very helpful. First, it is a way to communicate the value, urgency, incentives and consequences of doing the pre-work. Second (and this is particularly true for those facilitating virtual events), time spent in advance connecting and building personal connections is enormously valuable in creating a trustworthy and enlivened environment for true sharing and interaction. In other words, a bit of advance phone and email work will pay huge dividends.
When constructing your communications plan, be sure consider the following.

Interaction: The Key To Successful Webinars

Julia Young — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:38:42 +0000

Designing Interactive Webinars & Virtual Meetings
How to Keep People Engaged

We received such enthusiastic feedback for our fall 2009 series that we are offering a new series of complimentary webinars where you, the participants, help build the agenda. Please join us Wednesday, February 10th or Thursday February 18th as we demonstrate eight principles for designing interactive webinars by engaging you as participants!

Are you spending too much time in ineffective virtual meetings and boring webinars?The one-way nature of most webinars and web conferences misses an opportunity to engage an audience and draw on the wisdom of the group.

The opportunity presented by a more interactive and collaborative approach to webinars and virtual meetings is to reclaim the many learning methods used in face-to-face workshops and adapt them for a virtual environment. The promise of interactive webinars is to increase learning, shorten meetings, promote greater participation with less multi-tasking and foster on-going collaboration. Ready to enroll? Click here.