Facilitate Proceedings » Meeting Design

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.

Select virtual meeting technology to support the group process, not the other way around

Julia Young — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 20:22:11 +0000

Remember that old piece of advice: Don’t put the cart before the horse? The Number One Challenge that facilitators and trainers have with virtual meetings and webinars is: How to keep participants engaged? I suggest that this is directly related to the Number One Trap that we fall into when moving from face-to-face to virtual events: starting with a piece of technology and then trying to make engagement happen. While technology can accelerate great communication, meeting effectiveness and virtual teamwork, it cannot create it. Rather we need to 1) start with our meeting or learning objectives, 2) understand the different types of interaction we are seeking to create during different parts of our agenda or process and then 3) select technology to support the desired interaction.

In our workshops and webinars about leading virtual teams and getting great results from virtual meetings, we use the following schematic to discuss how to select virtual meeting technology to match the type of interaction we need.

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.”

Good Meetings – Like Organizations – Are Guided by a Mission Statement

Danuta McCall — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 23:45:00 +0000

One way to know that you’ve arrived at the very essence of an issue or solution is when you can articulate it completely and accurately in very few words. That’s why good mission statements are short, some even crafted in a single phrase. One description I like is “short enough to remember, and strong enough to inspire”. And that’s why it sometimes takes a while to get it right.

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.

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.

Get the Point Across… Without PowerPoint

Julia Young — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:38:08 +0000

I recently came across this super example of a different type of presentation. The topic is “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.” Not only is the message clearly articulated, it is beautifully drawn so that we are captivated as we listen. Enjoy!

Strategic Planning in Second Life

Julia Young — Thu, 13 May 2010 17:38:45 +0000

Strategic planning in Second Life plays out in this YouTube video of a session with IBM and Schneider Electric. I am left wondering if the technology really creates the engagement that the narrator mention or if the technology simply prompts the meeting planners to design in more interaction than a typical virtual meeting.

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.

6 Ways to Make Pre-Work Compelling

Danuta McCall — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:15:40 +0000

Most facilitators and team leaders I’ve talked to see the value of assigning some sort of pre-work before a virtual meeting and bemoan the fact that only a small fraction of the participants take this request seriously and complete their assignments. It’s time to take a new look at how to make meeting pre-work more valuable and more compelling.

There are two important reasons to design pre-work into your webinar, online conference or workshop. The first is to get your participants ready to take full advantage of the session by thinking ahead about the content, beginning to formulate ideas or getting to know the group. Participants who have completed well thought out pre-work are “primed” for active and open participation in the real-time event.

The second is to get you ready to facilitate the session effectively. By knowing more about your participants and their interests, you are in a position to develop focused questions that will stimulate ideas. In a virtual setting this becomes even more critical, as you typically have less time in which to achieve your meeting objectives and lack the visual cues that make it easier to adjust your course in mid-stream.