Meetings and Decision-Making

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’
— Dave Barry

Two Cornerstone Activities

If conversational capacity is a foundational aspect of building organizations that work, certain activities serve as critical building blocks. In this highly practical workshop you and your team will strengthen your collective conversational capacity by focusing on two cornerstone activities: running more effective meetings and making sharper, smarter decisions. You’ll learn to create an upward spiral of performance in which every meeting or decision strengthens the conversational capacity of the group, which in turn makes the next meeting or decision all the more effective.

Meeting time is practice time. Participants will learn to turn every meeting, problem, decision, conflict, or change as an opportunity to build their personal and collective conversational capacity. There should be no such thing as a boring meeting ever again, because you’re practicing as you participate, facilitate, or both. If you care about an issue, manage the conversations with as much discipline as possible. If you’re not interested in the subject matter, practice your skills by helping those people who do care engage the topic in a balanced and productive way. Either way, by “listening to what’s being played and then playing what’s missing,” you’re using every meeting to push the boundaries of your conversational competence.

Learning Outcomes

In this interactive, action-focused workshop participants will learn to do the following:

  • Create a shared approach to decision-making that leads to smarter decisions that people understand and are committed to implementing.
  • Learn to run meetings that are more focused, engaging, and effective. The goal is to decrease the time you spend in meetings while increasing the value you’re getting out of them.
  • Treat every meeting as a dojo for strengthening your team’s capacity to work in the sweet spot when it counts.
  • Foster demonstrably higher levels of engagement in meetings and decision-making
  • Make decisions in a way that fosters higher internal commitment to those decisions — even when they’re unpopular.

Throughout the session participants will identify key ways to apply the learning, and update their Personal Plans.

Complementary Workshops

This course works well in conjunction with these courses:

Length: 2 hours

Format: Virtual or in-person