Читать книгу Meeting Design - Kevin M. Hoffman - Страница 15

What if Team Rocket never changed their meeting format? Sticking to a meeting format without further experimentation is like flying on autopilot: it only works for a limited amount of time. Symptoms of autopilot meetings include the same, strong personalities repeatedly driving the agenda and people tuning out, agreeing to whatever runs out the clock. Worst of all, the autopilot meeting loses sight of its original intention. With iterative changes over time, a regularly scheduled standing meeting can be tweaked to balance contributions and use structured collaboration to reclaim precious work time.

Team Rocket might experiment by introducing time limits for individual speakers. In certain corners of Google, time limits have proven to be one of the single most effective methods of keeping meetings aligned to decision-making.⁴ The ruthlessness of a simple countdown clock keeps comments on task (see Figure 1.3), warning the group when someone is running out of time to speak. Meetings with this tool start closer to the scheduled time and finish ahead of time. As suggested previously, writing before speaking within a target length, such as a single sentence, also encourages people to consider what they say before they say it.

FIGURE 1.3 Some departments at Google use a simple timer, called the time timer, to keep meetings on track.

Without questioning (and measuring) performance, standing meetings fall into autopilot, or worse, disrepair. Staying open to refinements of what is already taking place within an ongoing status meeting avoids these problems. But eventually, all recurring meetings must end, which is the last step in the process of designing a meeting.