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You spend most meetings, especially ones called in haste, using your ears as the primary mode of input for getting information (see Figure 2.5). Groups regularly fall back on conversation as the modus operandi. As a result, listening is the primary input mode for meetings.

Another place that you have done a lot of listening, hopefully, is in the classroom. Students spend anywhere from 12 to 20 years of their lives in a classroom, hearing daily or weekly lectures from a teacher or professor. Like meetings, lectures also rely on hearing as a primary mode of input for building memories. But the effectiveness of listening at creating good memories in lectures has been studied, and the results aren’t pretty. In his book What’s the Use of Lectures, Donald Bligh demonstrated that students in a lecture audience have a heart rate that is in constant decline, decreasing energy and focus.⁵ After about 20 to 30 minutes, people begin to have difficulty absorbing information via listening. Being at rest, bodies have a hard time maintaining sufficient energy to learn.

FIGURE 2.5 Listening is the mechanism used most often for absorbing information in meetings.

Think about how the experience of a meeting accommodates that loss of energy over time. You probably use calendaring software to distribute invitations to meetings, manage group availability, and document meetings that have taken place. Despite accommodating custom lengths, calendaring software interfaces default to 30- and 60-minute blocks by design.

When there are more than 30 minutes of straight listening to do, but 30 minutes are all that a reasonable brain can handle, that’s a problem. To account for this, try to break the meeting content into 20- to 30-minute durations. Within each 20- to 30-minute session, include time to reflect on what participants have heard. That reflection can take the form of conversation with the presenter, conversation with one another, or applying the knowledge in an exercise. Establishing a rhythm based on stages of memory improves listening as an input strategy for meetings.

Jane’s proposal planning meeting could have been more effectively structured as a single 90-minute meeting with three 30-minute sections. Each 30-minute component could focus on a single department’s lists, with the first 10 minutes on list one (dollar savings), the next 10 minutes on list two (time savings), and the last 10 minutes on reflection of those lists. Having all departments present for each other’s discussions would add value by eliminating redundant list items in real time.

Time constraints on workshop activities help people ignore their inner critic.

—ELLEN DE VRIES CONTENT STRATEGIST, CLEARLEFT LTD

The inner critic to which Ellen de Vries refers can rear its head as “imposter syndrome.” With too much time to focus on a single issue in a discussion, you might start to believe that you have nothing to say because you aren’t qualified to contribute, despite evidence to the contrary. This behavior is documented in psychological studies,⁶ and can be discouraged in discussions by simply preventing people from having too much time to spend in a single thought space. Aggressive time constraints encourage people to act more quickly and use the limited brain energy they have in powerful bursts.

Those bursts need to be refueled. You can create energy in longer meetings and workshops by feeding the brain with food. With extensive workshop facilitation experience and the help of conversations with a few nutritionists, Margot Bloomstein has some thoughts on how to keep workshops intellectually productive for extended periods of time.

WHAT SHOULD PEOPLE EAT DURING A MEETING?

Margot Bloomstein Principal, Appropriate, Inc.

Margot is the author of Content Strategy at Work and a principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy. For more than 15 years, she has shaped communication for brands like Fidelity, Harvard, Lindt & Sprüngli, and Lovehoney. She keynotes conferences and leads workshops worldwide.

Twice a week, every week, during my first semester of college, I would wake up in a history lecture. I’d jerk awake to the squeak of chalk or a crescendo in the professor’s delivery and then scramble to understand what was going on. This isn’t a story of amnesia or abduction—I meant to be in that lecture, and I wanted to pay close attention. I knew where I was. But I didn’t fully understand how I got to that point: I didn’t grasp why I invariably always fell asleep 15 minutes into that class.

Eating and Listening

Step away from the packed, toasty lecture hall, and it’s easy to see why I had such a tough time staying awake and giving the class the attention and rigor it deserved. I was a dutiful, attentive student—when my eyes were open. After my morning studio classes ended, I would meet friends in the cafeteria. Living on my own for the first time and still enjoying a revved-up teenage metabolism, I would often down a couple of grilled cheese sandwiches or that day’s pasta entrée, and maybe finish off the meal with an ice cream cone. Occasionally, I’d grab an apple or soda on my way out, then stroll across campus to my history class, which met at 1:30.

I walked into that class with big plans to learn and engage, but in reality I brought much more: specifically, 90 plus grams of fast-acting carbohydrates, and that’s not even counting the soda that came in with me.

Other than the two slices of American cheese between highly refined white bread, there wasn’t much protein or fat in my body to slow down the absorption of those carbohydrates. My brain was getting bathed in sweet, sweet glucose and was promptly lulled to sleep.

Some tough love in nutrition and its effect on my GPA helped me reevaluate what I was eating and how it affected my capability to learn. I don’t remember much from that history class, but I took away some important lessons that affect how I teach, facilitate, and organize workshops today.

Food That Does a Meeting Good

In addition to structuring what participants will do and learn, I pay close attention to what they’ll eat and when they eat it. In morning meetings, I want people to arrive ready to focus—and not just on their own grumbling stomachs or anxiety about the nearest coffee shop. Also, I want everyone to be able to fully engage. No workshop or meeting should include people not vital to its outcome. So if all participants are important, that means vegetarian participants, participants on calorieor carbohydrate-restricted diets, and people with gluten or other allergies are all important and deserve good food that meets their needs.

Good food isn’t just any food. Heed my plight with the grilled cheese sandwiches! If you want people to bring their best energy and maintain engagement following a meal, plan to give them the right nutrients to sustain that energy level. That’s not just coffee washed down with more coffee. In consulting with nutritionists, I’ve learned that we rely on simple carbohydrates for a quick source of energy. If you’ve ever downed a candy bar or a can of soda, you’ve felt the sugar rush. But when you didn’t chase it with something more substantial, you probably felt an energy crash soon after. Simple carbohydrates, like juice, soda, and refined sugars in white bread and pastries, will do that to you.

If you want food that creates and maintains energy, take advantage of how the stomach “layers” nutrients for absorption. We metabolize food components at different rates, but by mixing them, we slow the absorption and minimize spikes in blood sugar. Fat and protein slow the absorption of carbohydrates so that your body can draw on that glucose over several hours, rather than burn through it in mere minutes. What food should you offer workshop participants?

Morning Meetings

At breakfast meetings, skip the pastries in favor of prepared scrambled eggs. Offer bagels with peanut butter: carbohydrates slowed by a source of fat and protein! Premade breakfast burritos that incorporate avocado and black beans are another tasty source of healthy fat and protein. Yogurt with no added sugar meets many dietary needs, too, combining carbohydrates, protein, and minimal fat in one convenient, single-serving container.

Mid-day Meetings

To head off a post-lunch slump, again, put biology to work on your behalf. Put together a menu with more complex carbohydrates by trading white bread for whole wheat on the sandwiches—the longer those carbohydrate chains are, the more time they take to break down. Ensure that everyone, regardless of their dietary restrictions, can find sources of protein.

Afternoon Meetings

Later in the afternoon consider more nutrient-rich snacks than the ubiquitous cookie plate. Trail mix with dried fruit and nuts, yogurt cups, a communal cheese plate, or a raw vegetable platter can help everyone focus and engage with the content.

If you want your audience there, remember, you want them present—and that means you want their energy and attention throughout your time together.

Providing reasonably paced content and refueling with appropriate food will improve listening in meetings. But better listening alone is not enough. Studies of teaching strategies have proven that people learn across multiple mediums. The concept of multimedia learning is based on the cognitive theory of multi-modal perception, which covers how you make sense of the world around you using all available senses.⁷ Your brain finds more meaning by combining listening with seeing or with touch. The degree to which that meaning is accurate can be increased (or decreased) by the interactions that take place between different “modes” of information consumption.

There are lots of ways that the interplay of learning modes can trick you. Ventriloquists use visual perception to change auditory perception by creating the illusion that a human voice is coming from a wooden puppet. Human brains are predisposed to visual input being perceived as dominant; if what you see contradicts what you hear, you are more likely to believe what you see. So how does the brain “see” information in meetings, and how can you use sight to build better memories?