Meeting Facilitation

The Secrets of Professional Meeting Facilitators

Literature describing how to hold successful meetings has been widely disseminated and in abundance for over 40 years. Today, Amazon has over 300 offerings for “improving meetings”. One of them, How to Make Meetings Work, a book published by Michael Doyle in 1976, is still selling well. So WHY ARE so many people still complaining about wasted time in unproductive meetings?

The reason is current meeting practices focus on agendas and “WHAT” the meeting should accomplish. But as professional facilitators know, it is more critical to focus on process and “How” to accomplish results. The secrets for successful meetings come from having a “Facilitator Mindset” that concentrates on “How” to improve meeting participants’ “productivity of thought” in the following ways:

1. Finding the right two to three questions to ask: Asking the right questions at the right time gives the participants’ minds the best chance to find the right ideas, solutions and answers. It is amazing how powerful the effect on team thinking can be by asking “the perfect question”.
2. Providing the right cognitive (mental) tools: Just as a craftsperson needs the right physical tools, meeting participants need the right cognitive (mental) tools to best think about the task at hand.
3. Thinking within the right process framework: Like an athlete getting into a high-performance physical groove, meetings have their own process flow and groove that enhances high-performance thinking.
4. Ensuring the right “content-within-context” understanding. Effective thinking can only occur, if meeting participants have the right understanding and data to “think upon”. It’s difficult to solve a problem if you don’t understand it.

More information> www.yourmindatwork.com