Patterns for Leading Effective Meetings (Short Focus Group)

Organizers: Andy Schneider, Marina Haase

“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

Galbraith

Meetings are part of every day life. They are necessary for planning, discussing and deciding issues in projects. But most of us have – at least at one point – sat in a meeting that could have been a lot more effective and wondered how much more time we will need to waste… Many of us have even spent seemingly endless hours in meetings that seem dull, ineffective or even counterproductive.

On the other hand, practically every one has a repertoire of “best practices” that would help make meetings effective – if used. The purpose of our focus group is to collect these “best practices” and evaluate them from a pattern point of view as preparation for a pattern collection on leading effective meetings.

Agenda

1. To start off with we will collect “best practices” and already written patterns for leading meetings.
2. We will then spend about 5 minutes organizing the patterns into contexts (i.e. best practices for meeting preparation, best practices for after a meeting, best practices in a meeting...)
3. After that we will divide into small groups of three or four. Each team will choose one (or more) best practice(s) and spend time developing patterns (brainstorming) with the chosen best practice(s) as a starting point.
4. Before parting each team will have a few minutes to share their results with the whole group.

The focus group will be open to all EuroPLoP’ers who would like to join.

Preparation

Please bring along one best practice for leading effective meetings that you have either put into practice, seen used or seen ignored.