Where the Action Is: The Meetings That Make or Break Your Organization

Using an agenda and sharing notes after a meeting are the equivalent of table manners. They provide just enough meeting etiquette to avoid embarrassment but not enough to bring mastery. You need to learn this stuff, just like you need to learn how to say “please” and “thank you.” But just because you know which fork to use for the salad, it doesn’t

While a well-run meeting engages everyone, a well-structured meeting constrains dominant individuals.

Agile Rituals are not a type of meeting; they’re elements in a Meeting Flow Model (see chapter 35) defining all the different types of meetings Agile developers need in order to get their work done.

Create a Culture in Which It Is Okay to Make Mistakes and Unacceptable Not to Learn from Them This is Work Principle number three in Ray Dalio’s book Principles. It resonates deeply with me and with the people I’ve met who strive to operate at high performance levels.

Study after study has shown that the words we use to describe what we do can have a dramatic effect on what happens next. In his books Influence and Pre-Suasion, Robert Cialdini shares dozens of enlightening examples. In social psychology circles, this phenomenon is called priming or framing. The way you frame a meeting can set the tone and the bou

We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience. —John Dewey, Philosopher and Psychologist

PMQ looks at the quality of an individual meeting. Learning to run a meeting well is a worthy accomplishment! Leading one good meeting matters, but as we all know, most meetings are not solitary beasts. Only bad meetings stand alone; failed sales calls and botched negotiations are not joined by a second meeting. The rest of our meetings travel in p

Meetings are used as a collaboration tool to quickly create shared perspective. Meetings function by pulling a group of people together, creating alignment around their work, and pushing them out along a coordinated path toward a goal. Meetings must be held frequently enough to maintain this shared perspective and create momentum along the path. Me

If people know the organization’s current goals, understand the longer-term vision they’re being asked to help build, and appreciate the current conditions affecting their work, they have a clear understanding of what they need to achieve.