Not all meetings are created equal. Some meetings engage, inspire, and clarify, while others leave us confused, depleted, and annoyed because we just lost two hours (or more) of our precious lives. The most engaging and effective meetings do not depend on the personalities in the room or the meeting venue, although those can help or hinder a meeting’s quality, but they depend on the way a meeting is designed and facilitated to meet the group’s goals. This article focuses on the power of using design to intentionally facilitate more human-centered, engaging and effective meetings.
As part of the Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems Program*, we heard from many of our alumni who find it extremely helpful to apply design principles they learned during our workshops to redesigning their internal meetings. Therefore, we wanted to share this article and worksheet in the hopes that it can help others create more dynamic and engaging meetings.
Designing engaging meetings has always been important, and now with “working from home,” it is more imperative
For many of us, we have often felt that we have way too many meetings on our calendar. And somehow, when we transitioned to“working from home,” we seem to have even more - and although we are staying in one place and not expending energy by commuting or moving about, these meetings can feel even more draining. This is because in many cases, some of the torturous and unengaging meetings that we had to attend in person before have simply been transferred online - making the experience exponentially more torturous.
Put people, not technology, back at the center of your meeting design
If the original meeting design and experience were not great, transferring that meeting online is definitely not going to make them better. Technology is not going to fix an un-engaging meeting, and will likely make it even harder to connect.
Instead, we need to focus on fundamental principles – we need to put people back at the center. The irony is that although people seem to be more in focus now that you can see them all in one place on your computer, that does not mean we are putting people at the center. We need to put their emotions, their experience, their needs at the center of the meeting – not just their faces.
So, we need to ask, how might we create more engaging, inspiring and productive in-person and remote meetings?
Process for Designing an Engaging Meeting (In-person or Remote)
The principles and process for designing a meeting are the same for both in-person and remote meetings, although the tools at your disposal and some tactics may differ.
Even if meetings have followed the same format and structure for decades, if you are leading the meeting, you have the agency to make it a better experience. Even the most mundane meeting, such as a recurring staff meeting, quarterly board meeting, or team project session can be redesigned to be more dynamic and effective.
The following are five steps you can take to design a more engaging and effective meeting, along with an accompanying worksheet.
We invite you to think of an upcoming meeting you want to (re)design. For some of you, it might feel a little scary to think about trying to design a new experience with your colleagues - but trust us, your colleagues will thank you for creating a better experience.
1. Design for the experience and not just the information
A human being’s critical elements include the mind, body and spirit. Why then, when we design a meeting - a convening of human beings over a specific period of time - do we design only for the mind?
What do people need to know? What information do I have that I need to share, or that others have that I need to hear? This approach usually translates into long presentations, often accompanied by a powerpoint that is not engaging or memorable. Nobody wants to be talked to for the duration of a meeting – in person or online. People want to be engaged.
Information is one component in an effective meeting, but there are other desired outcomes that can be designed for as well. In addition to engaging participants’ intellect, we must also engage their emotions, senses, and body. We must try to engage them as a whole person.
When you think of a good meeting you attended recently, what comes up for you? For me, I think of a meeting I participated in last week. It was a 90-minute zoom meeting for 60 people. It could have been a nightmare - but the meeting was very well designed and facilitated. The organizers were able to excite the group by having the meeting leads share brief, timed comments about why they are inspired to co-lead this effort. The meeting included the critical information about the initiative’s purpose, goals, desired outcomes, and visuals of the timeline and process. The meeting allowed for personal connections, despite the meeting’s size, by organizing breakout sessions in which participants were able to connect personally to 8 members of the group. Finally, the organizers solicited participants’ input via pointed questions peppered throughout the convening, for which participants shared their comments in the chat box.
The organizers, designer, and facilitator designed for the information they wanted to convey, as well as the participants’ experience. Integrating the informational, emotional and experiential elements of a meeting converts it from an informational download to an event that participants remember, experience and possibly even transform from.
2. Create a POP - Clarify and articulate every meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes
POP = Purpose + Outcome + Process*
A meeting’s purpose and its outcomes are sometimes implicit, especially for recurring meetings. It is critical to make each meeting’s purpose and desired outcome explicit to ensure that you, and everyone coming to the meetings, have the same expectations. Although this might sound obvious, meetings take place every day with a detailed agenda, but lack a clear articulation of purpose and desired outcomes. For those meetings, their designers found a way to occupy the meeting’s allotted time, but it is not clear towards what end.
i. Clarify your purpose. Nobody wants to come to a meeting when they don't know the point of the meeting. Why are you pulling people together? To build trust? To gain alignment on a proposal? To assess someone’s performance? To clarify a work plan? To reassure your team? To strategize around a partnership? You’ll notice that some goals might be tactical and others are emotional, and sometimes both. We often forget to articulate the emotional and value-based purpose for our meeting, which are as important, if not more important, than the tactical one.
ii. Articulate your desired outcomes: what are the specific outcomes you want to accomplish as a result of this action? Not the meeting’s activities, but the desired outcomes. You should be able to complete this sentence: “We will successfully achieve the meeting’s purpose of… if …”
For example, if the purpose of the meeting is to build trust, then the outcome might be “that each person leaves the meeting with a stronger sense of connection and trust with one another.” Or if the purpose is “gaining alignment around a proposal,” then the outcome might be “each team member understands the project’s timeframe, the goals, the group’s expected deliverables, and each team member can articulate what they are personally responsible for completing within the proposal’s scope of work.”
If you have a goal of co-creating the meeting’s outcome with your participants, then include that as a desired outcome and explore engaging ways to design for that goal. This scenario goes beyond the scope of this article, but invites an interesting discussion around participatory design.
iii. Articulate your process - read below for details on how to go about developing a process.
3: Focus on who is participating in the meeting and what information you need to share, emotions you need to address and behaviors you need to shift.
Good facilitation requires meeting your participants where they are, and then moving them to where you want them to be and where they want to go. The art is crafting the meeting with the right amount of information sharing, emotional pacing, and collective behavioral shifting. The meeting’s design can deliberately shift individual and collective emotions and behaviors.
Information sharing: Figure out what information asymmetries need to be addressed. Who has information they need to share? What information needs to be shared so everyone is working from the same baseline? How can you share this information in the most engaging way possible? If information is spread throughout the group, is there a way to have people show-and-not-tell in a creative way to share that information? Can you design it so that the information is shared quickly and people are heard?
Emotional pacing: In order to care for your participants, you need to also assess their emotional state and needs. What is the current context, and is that affecting their state of mind and heart? This step clearly assumes that you have your finger on the pulse of your participants’ emotional state. If you do not have a good sense, or are unsure about where some people are - simply ask them! Reach out and ask how they feel about the project, the meeting, and what they are hoping to learn. Possibly gather their input on where they feel the group is and where they want to go.
For instance, if an organization is going through a round of lay-offs and staff are uncertain of their status, they are unlikely to move quickly into a dynamic brainstorming session. You will need to find a way to air and address these concerns before you move the group into a place that feels generative, or ask whether that outcome is even possible given the state of the group.
If you are leading a project launch meeting, assess the participants’ emotional state related to the new project– are they curious? Excited? Agitated? Or annoyed? Does everyone feel the same way or are there widely differing emotions around the project at hand? Even if the group has divergent emotions, you can design for these different starting points. You might find a way to surface the annoyances and try and address them, and then you design the meeting so that those who are excited can help energize the rest of the group.
Desired behaviors: You also want to articulate any behaviors you are trying to facilitate in pursuit of your meeting’s desired purpose and outcome. How are you going to move the group from a passive state to engaging and voluntarily sharing? If the goal of the meeting is to generate ideas and the group you are convening tends to be more critical, how can you move them into a more dynamic, collaborative and generative state?
If your group is less forthcoming, you might need to start with some activities to loosen them up. These behavior shifts do not simply emerge because a facilitator asks the group to do something, but new behaviors are invited, coaxed, supported, encouraged etc. For example, we have all experienced the sound of tumbleweed when the facilitator states that the presentation is now over and it is time for comments. If you have spent the first 50 minutes talking at people, don’t expect them to perk up in the last 10 minutes when you want them to engage. If a facilitator wants participants to engage in the middle or towards the end of the meeting, then allow them to contribute to the meeting as early as possible. A round of introductions does not translate into contributions. Contributions involve more active participation - such as pre-planned or sporadic breakout groups to discuss a well-scoped question or discussions in the chat box on a specific question. To foster discussions, invite participants to reflect for 2 minutes in silence on a question, and then ask a few people to share (using a timer to ensure they do not speak for too long) while others put their comments in the chat box. (For more ideas on activities to engage participants, stay tuned for our upcoming video bites).
4. For each need above (information, emotions, and behaviors), explore a range of engaging activities
Now that you have prioritized what you want to cover and the emotions and behaviors you want to facilitate among the group, you can move to brainstorming different activities to address each of your meeting’s goals. This is your opportunity to imagine new ways of facilitating a collective experience.
For each goal identified in step 3, create brainstorming questions. For instance,
if you need a group to share the information they learned from a set of interviews - you might ask “how might the team share their insights efficiently and visually?”
if the desired emotion at the beginning of the meeting is “supported” - you might ask “how might we make participants feel heard and valued?”
if the desired behavior during part of the meeting is around “generating ideas” - then you might ask “how might we set up the space to create a rich brainstorm? How might we encourage everyone to share ideas during the 20 minutes allotted? How might we shift the group’s energy so they are likely to build on each other’s ideas?”
For each question you can come up with a wide range of activities - some that include everyone sharing using a timer so that everyone is heard, others that include everyone sketching a concept, some that use audio tools, others that place people into pair shares or small group discussions. Activities can use white boards (in person or virtual), paper and pen, audio messages, physical movements, verbal statements etc. The options are endless.
You don’t have to do this step alone - consider inviting a colleague or even a meeting participant into your brainstorming process. You won’t be able, nor need to, integrate all the ideas you generate from the brainstorm into your meeting design. Select from the ideas generated, and pick the one that best fits the meeting experience you are designing.
5. Create an outline for the meeting and then layer a detailed timeline.
Now you can create an outline for your meeting and see if and how all the pieces fit together. Sketch it out on paper: break your meeting into discrete phases - maybe into three or four parts. Layer on the information, emotions, behaviors and activities you selected and see how the meeting flows.
You might even think about it like acts in a participatory theater production. What are you going to cover, feel and experience in each act (info, emotions, behaviors), and how are you going to transition between each act? Does the final act land you where you want to be as a group?
The final step is to address the logistics. Does it all work? We often are trying to cover too much in one meeting. Create a timeline that follows the arc you have outlined above by setting an estimated time for each activity. How long do you need to cover the content and provide the instructions? Or how long for a pair share? How long for the question and answer portion of the meeting? Try to include some buffer time - maybe 10 minutes for an hour-long meeting - just in case some elements go over the time allotted. And some activities always run over.
Make sure to communicate all the logistical information to your participants in the meeting’s invitation, and at the beginning and end of the meeting. But don’t launch or close a meeting with logistics. Instead, offer an opportunity for the group to connect personally at the opening and close of the meeting (even if very briefly).
Conclusion
To recap, apply the following steps to design more human-centered, engaging and effective meetings:
Clarify the purpose and desired outcome of the meeting
Articulate and prioritize the information you need to share with the participants
Address the participants’ emotions
Design for the behaviors you want to shift
Explore a range of activities that address your goals, and select the ones to include in your meeting
Outline your meeting plan and check whether it will all work in the given time
Although at the outset this might feel like more work, if practiced, you will find that this process becomes more intuitive. This practice is like exercising any muscle - the more you do it, the stronger the muscle becomes and the more fluid the process.
Some meetings are definitely more complicated than others. More complex meetings can result from participants coming into the room with conflicting emotions; participants having competing priorities; or you are looking for specific collective behaviors (such as personal reflection or dynamic collaboration) which are absent in the organization or team’s culture. But regardless of the meeting’s complexity, we have found that taking the time to be intentional, explicit, and creative about designing your meetings is transformative to a group’s culture and effectiveness. Plus, it’s more fun, and we can all use more fun in our lives!
Notes & References:
*We hope you are encouraged to apply these principles immediately to your next meeting. This accompanying worksheet can help.
*The author Nadia Roumani is the Senior Designer with Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems (DSS) Program. Thank you to Stanford DSS colleagues Thomas Both and Susie Chang for their extensive feedback and comments.
*Stanford d.school’s Designing for Social Systems (DSS) program helps social sector leaders in nonprofit organizations, government and foundations increase their capacity to design creative and impactful programs, rooted in human insights, and tackle critical forces within complex systems.
*The POP Model was created by Leslie Sholl Jaffe & Randy Alford. The author adapted the POP from Rockwood Leadership Institute materials.