Читать книгу Meeting Design - Kevin M. Hoffman - Страница 18

Jane is a “do it right, or I’ll do it myself” kind of person. She leads marketing, customer service, and information technology teams for a small airline that operates between islands of the Caribbean. Her work relies heavily on “reservation management system” (RMS) software, which is due for an upgrade. She convenes a Monday morning meeting to discuss an upgrade with the leadership from each of her three teams. The goal of this meeting is to identify key points for a proposal to upgrade the outdated software.

Jane begins by reviewing the new software’s advantages. She then goes around the room, engaging each team’s representatives in an open discussion. They capture how this software should alleviate current pain points; someone from marketing takes notes on a laptop, as is their tradition. The meeting lasts nearly three hours, which is a lot longer than expected, because they frequently loop back to earlier topics as people forget what was said. It concludes with a single follow-up action item: the director of each department will provide her with two lists for the upgrade proposal. First, a list of cost savings, and second, a list of timesaving outcomes. Each list is due back to Jane by the end of the week.

The first team’s list is done early but not organized clearly. The second list provides far too much detail to absorb quickly, so Jane puts their work aside to summarize later. By the end of the following Monday, there’s no list from the third team—it turns out they thought she meant the following Friday. Out of frustration, Jane calls another meeting to address the problems with the work she received, which range from “not quite right” to “not done at all.” Based on this pace, her upgrade proposal is going to be finished two weeks later than planned.

What went wrong? The plan seemed perfectly clear to Jane, but each team remembered their marching orders differently, if they remembered them at all. Jane could have a meeting experience that helps her team form more accurate memories. But for that meeting to happen, she needs to understand where those memories are formed in her team and how to form them more clearly.