SURE-Fire Meetings
by Dwayne Hodgson
GLP Programs Director
Dialogue Education Coming to a Boardroom
Near You!
If you'd ask anyone
what they think are top biggest wastes of time at work, I'd
bet you that "meetings" would come up in most people's
top three answers.
It has been our experience that by carefully
adapting the principles and practices of Dialogue Education,
we can create learning-centered events that are both effective
and engaging. Might Dialogue Education do the same for meetings?
In May, GLP Senior Associate, Valerie
Uccellani and myself
explored that question in the inaugural run of GLP's new SURE-Fire
Meetings workshop. SURE, as you probably guessed, is an acronym
that stands for:
Safe
People need to feel safe enough
to join in meetings willingly and voice themselves honestly.
Useful
A meeting should be a good use of the time and energy for everyone
there. Consider having only a subset of the full group for each
meeting or topic.
Respectful
Too often, meetings that people "suffer through" are
not respectful of their time and their input. Everyone's contributions
should be invited in the design, facilitation and follow-up/evaluation.
Engaging
Adjust the design of the meeting to maximize active participation
by using effective visuals, tap into people's perspectives and
feelings on key issues, use small group work and pair work as
appropriate.
SURE-Fire Meetings draws heavily from
adult learning theory because it is premised on the understanding
that meetings should be valuable opportunities for individual
and collective learning to advance our common work together.
As such, the principles of Relevance, Immediacy, Praxis, Clear
Roles, Inclusion, Sound Relationships and Different Voices are
all helpful.
Meetings are also about making decisions.
Therefore, this workshop both draws on practices from our Dialogue
Education toolkit and borrows from others.
A sample of tools created for SURE-Fire Meetings:
-
A pre-meeting design process
to both Assess (Ask, Study and Observe) and to Advance specific
issues prior to the start of a meeting
-
A modified 7-part Framework
for Meeting Preparation that prioritizes the Situation faced
and determines who should come based on the relevance of the
topics to them;
-
A new 6-Level hierarchy of
Meeting Objectives that specifies the level of decision making
that a group will have engaged in during the meeting for each
agenda item.
We also draw on the insights of other research
and practitioners, especially on ways to narrow options and reach
consensus. In my experience, Dialogue -based workshops are great
at generating ideas--we ask a good Open Question with all the resources
they need to answer it, and they generate lots of creative answers!
In a business meeting, however, we need not
only to generate ideas, but to select from these options and
reach a consensus on how to proceed. As such, the course explores
a number of other techniques like Ranking Exercises, Paired
Comparisons and Formal Consensus Decision Making that could
help groups to narrow their options and agree on the best course
of action.
The course also looks at what our role is
as a meeting facilitator. Often we wear several hats: Chair,
Timekeeper, Topic Expert, Boss, Idea Proponent, Minute Taker,
Mediator, Coffee Maker….but the multiplicity of roles can
cause confusion and sometimes conflict of interest. As such,
we have found that being very clear on what your role is on
any given Agenda item is key.
The feedback that we received from the participants
was very encouraging. Here is a brief sample of their comments:
- Enjoyed the modeling of various techniques
and trying them out.
- Great team work Val and Dwayne!
- Content is amazing and rich and I can
delve into this for some time.
- Really appreciate the transparency
and the meta levels.
- Really appreciate the time and attention
to the work and the people
- So much good stuff! It was all useful.
Val and I are now working on revising the
course. We have already scheduled another session after the
Dialogue Education Institute in the Fall (October
9-10), and we have had several requests for in-house courses
as well.
If you are interested in hosting your
own session of SURE-Fire Meetings, please review the website
page and/or the flyer
and give me a call at 1-866-284-4572 (toll free) or email dhodgson@globalearning.com.
