7 golden possibilities (we don’t like rules).

1. Planning for success

What do you want? What do they want? These questions need to be answered in terms of emotional, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes. Try to wean yourself off purely business objectives because that’s rarely where your focus needs to be. Running meetings successfully is mostly about managing feelings, not facts.

2. Getting their minds on the right stuff

Sometimes a meeting can take a while to find its focus because people arrive from another meeting with their heads full of the old topic, unprepared, tired, under fed or caffeined up to the eyeballs. Consider some sort of transition device. One we use a lot is called ‘baggage check-in’. We go round the table and ask participants to check-in (mention/let go of) any distracting thoughts. All sorts of interesting things can turn up and people seem to enjoy the chance to decompress a little before being asked for more rigorous, intellectual engagement. All the leader needs to ask is “what’s on your mind?” or “what do you want to check in?”.

3. Handling the ‘big personalities’

We call these people: loud, pushy, talkative, chatty, bossy, show-boaters, big mouths etc. The trick (not really a trick, more of a point of recognition) is to involve these people as much as possible and at the same time to be prepared to protect the space of the less voluble participants ruthlessly. Golden rule: involve potential disrupters as you do your most co-operative participants. Keep everyone fully occupied. And the rationale for all this? People mostly kick up trouble when they feel left out or powerless. Kevin Holligan of Meeting Magic suggests partitioning time and attention by using devices such as sharing thoughts using Post-It Notes or giving the group other short tasks where everyone is allocated an equal voice. Probably most important of all – avoid the labels I’ve used – people aren’t born ‘pushy’ or ‘loud’ – we help to make them that way. And we can help them to not be that way too.

Inclusion not control

4. Keeping to time

Leaving a meeting on time is a rare event these days. People tend to put far too much on their agendas. Be sparing and respect your participant’s time boundaries. If you are realistic about how you plan the time slots within the meeting for each discussion point the people will be able to reward you with their attention. Meeting Magic suggest 12 minutes is the attention span for an adult. Sounds about right to me. To give yourself an even better chance of finishing on time… begin bang on time, do not wait for stragglers; they will soon get the message – even if you are as nice as pie when they come in late.

5. Involving the quiet ones

People who don’t say much in meetings behave in that way for a number of reasons. The meeting leader, and the other participants, rarely get to find out those reasons. One result of letting things continue without finding out the causes is that you always end up with the same result: the same people talk and the same types of outcomes come to pass. Another result of not involving the whole group is that unhelpful group beliefs have an opportunity to take root: “She’s a bit quiet, a bit shy…not much help really.” “You’ll never get a word out of him in the first hour… he’s a bit lazy… takes him a while to get going.” and so on. We think the key here is to identify who is likely to stay quiet and then ask their advice, before the meeting, about how they would like to be involved. Get to know them and how they like to be managed before it becomes a distraction for the group. If this opportunity does not arise then it can be helpful to go around the table at the beginning asking people to say a few words about the minimum that they want to walk away with at the end. This then gives you the excuse to keep checking that each person is getting what they wanted.

6. Getting things done afterwards

Meetings often get a bad reputation not because of what happens within it but from what is expected from participants afterwards. You might run the greatest meetings but if you get the reputation for weighing people down with long lists of To Dos your meetings (and you) will lose popularity. Meeting Magic’s advice here, and we agree, is to force people to prioritise before the meeting ends – set a group rule for the number of take-outs and encourage people to stick to it. Kevin Holligan also suggests giving people the chance to make a group start on the critical tasks. That way when people leave they have a head start on the task.

7. Helping other people’s meetings go better

But what if it’s not your meeting that is going wrong – what then? Do you just have to grin and bear it? We don’t think so. Here are three common problems and our suggestions on what you can say to nudge things along:

1. Help the other participants to regain perspective when they are getting buried in endless detail. Consider saying: “I’m finding the level of detail informative but I am starting to get lost in it – is that a problem for anyone else?”
2. Help the chairman who is losing his/her grip regain control by saying: “As the outsider I’d be very interested to hear what you (indicating the chairman) has to say.”
3. When the meeting shows no sign of ending and you either need to get away for another meeting or for your own mental health. Consider saying: “I have found this meeting really useful but I have completely run out of time.” Then watch three other people sigh with relief as they start packing their papers!

Hmm…

Some things just look right don’t they? They look like they are going to work. Some medicines look powerful. Some people seem plausible, like they are going to be dependable or creative or knowledgeable. Some graphs look really informative, you just know they are telling the truth. Sometimes you come across an argument or line of reasoning that strikes you as logical, truthful, accurate, honest, helpful. This is what psychologists call face validity.

Face validity.

It’s what something has when it looks ‘right’. Face validity is the thing that makes us trust a particular thing, person, piece of paper, concept or whatever. It is probably something that most people don’t acknowledge as being present in their decision-making processes – chiefly because it doesn’t have much to do with supportable logic

An example: Tomorrow morning you walk into a car showroom on the way to the service desk of your car’s brand dealership. You spot a car you really like the look of. Crikey, it’s just so, well, shiny. It smells so new and the doors – ooh, so heavy and clunky. I think I’ll open and shut it again. Clunk! CLUNK! Ooh, “I want it” you think. Then you ask for a brochure. You are given a badly photocopied sheaf of pages, stapled at the top right-hand corner. No, this isn’t a photocopy, you are assured, this is what the marketing department has sent us. This is a £25,000 car you protest. Oh, yes, the salesman retorts, and worth every penny. We’ve decided to put all our effort into the car and not really bother with marketing blurb – we thought the car should speak for itself. Do you take it for a test drive?

‘Thin slicing’.

Face validity, and our tendency to judge things against this subtle criterion taps directly into what the author of Blink, Malcolm Gladwell, refers to as ‘thin slicing’. It is about picking up lots of data subliminally and putting it to good (and bad) use in making complex assessments very fast. Experienced soldiers thin slice all the time in battle. Racing drivers do it a hundred times a lap. Art dealers do it with every major painting they examine; gamblers when sizing up every new opponent. So, the problem with this thin slicing is not that we do it or don’t do it.

A face validity – good or bad?

The problem is that we either don’t know we are doing it or choose not to own up to it. If we are unaware of how we are making a decision then thin slicing and the corresponding face validity ‘rating’ of what we are judging can get the better of us. So, ‘thin slicing’ + self awareness = good quality deciding. As for face validity itself – just remember about books and covers.