We will celebrate the holidays and then take the following week off from meeting.

John Canfield has helped companies worldwide lead meetings in ways that get things done. He says a productive meeting is a decision-making meeting that comes from being collaborative. Improved performance comes from good implementation driven by improved decision-making created by collaboration giving improved ideas.

 

Traditional meetings are BOPSAT (bunch of people sitting around talking). This doesn't allow everybody to get involved and only lets the people who talk the loudest have their ideas heard.

 

A collaborative meeting has data accessible to all participants and allows more contributions. Where a traditional meeting usually has conflict, a collaborative meeting sees differing opinions as options that can be explored. Sharing in a traditional meeting is like an iceberg where the ideas above the water are the acceptable ones for the organization. Underneath are ideas that people won't share, ones that were forgotten when the meeting started, and any new thoughts that might have been generated by collaboration.

 

A collaborative meeting starts with the group defining the goals to be accomplished. Everyone is required to write options down and share them with the group. The options are placed on a scoreboard and scored for how well they meet the goals defined. John presented many good tools and encouraged us to search "good meetings" to discover meeting tools that might work for us.