Types of meetings
Meetings fall into the following categories:
- Problem-solving
- Decision-making
- Planning
- Feedforward
Problem-solving meetings
- Ensure stakeholders agree on the definition of the problem and what tool will be used to solve it
- Provide plenty of time for discussion and debate
- Consider inviting a neutral facilitator to run the meeting
Decision-making meetings
- Keep the number of attendees low
- The key decision maker doesn’t need to attend, just be kept in the loop
- Make sure the team knows how they will be impacted by the decision
- Never run a decision-making meeting when the decision has secretly already been made
Planning meetings
- The shorter the term for which you are planning, the fewer people you should invite
- Consider the following:
- How far into the future can you realistically plan for?
- How easy it is to change your plan in the future?
- Keep short-term, medium-term, and long-term decisions separate
Feedforward and feedback meetings
Feedforward meetings are about status reporting and new information. Feedback meetings are about evaluation, retrospective, and post-mortems. These tend to be recurring meetings.
- Keep the meeting short
- Limit the attendees to the people who can truly contribute to them and need to hear the information