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Well-designed things make our lives simpler or more pleasing. Design is an intangible currency that separates things that matter from junk. Something designed has been given appropriate and actionable consideration, with forethought and research guiding its creation and ongoing evolution.

Meetings are usually not designed. They are rather used as blunt force, expensive but ill-considered tools to solve communications problems. These problems don’t always warrant such a costly, high-fidelity solution. But even when they do merit that kind of solution, insufficient intention and energy go into creating the meeting experience itself.

If you are feeling like there’s no agenda and not sure why everyone is there, you’re likely not the only one.

—CARRIE HANE DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY COACH, TANZEN

A lack of a clearly defined agenda is a symptom of the problem, but designing a meeting means more than just having an agenda. The problem is that meetings aren’t considered in the same way that designers consider problems they are trying to solve. That’s what “designing a meeting” is all about: thinking about your meetings as though you were a designer.

Thinking like a designer means taking an iterative, cyclical approach—an approach that mixes in research and testing of concepts. Using a basic design process as a checklist for planning and evaluating meetings is how this is done. This design process approach, credited to Tim Brown,¹ describes four discrete steps that turn an ordinary process for making something into one that leads to a more positive outcome.

1. Clearly define the problem that a design should solve through observation and good old-fashioned research.

2. Create and consider multiple options, as opposed to sticking to a single solution.

3. Select the option assumed to be the best and begin an iterative effort to refine it from a minimum viable concept. This contrasts with spending excessive time visualizing the finished product in every gory detail.

4. Execute or “ship” at an agreed-upon level of fidelity so that you have an opportunity to see how the design fares in the real world with real people. After that, jump back to step one as needed.

This design process has led to countless innovations in all aspects of our lives. It is often credited as the process that allowed disruptive and successful ideas to emerge in the market. But imagine your workplace culture—perhaps you work for a large corporation with hundreds (or hundreds of thousands) of employees that engage in many ceremonial meetings, based upon hierarchy, tradition, and previous but unsustainable successes. Or you might work for a small, nimble, start-up business of just a few smart people, who only assemble when there is a shared sense of necessity.

On either side of that spectrum, it is likely that the organization isn’t thinking about the specific jobs that each meeting should perform. Applying those four steps of the design process to meetings themselves provides a framework for evaluating if an existing meeting is performing adequately. You can apply them to a single, important meeting in order to design it better, or use the steps to evaluate, improve, or even eliminate recurring meetings, such as a standing check-in for a project team, like the one Jim had with the vice presidents from the beginning of the chapter.