Successful Meetings in High Performing Organisations — Part 1: Before the meeting

Photo by John Price on Unsplash

A successful meeting starts with good preparation. Preparing (for) the meeting is not only the responsibility of the organiser. Everyone must play their part.

Assuming a meeting is needed or unavoidable, a good meeting invitation should contain all the necessary information.
Of course the date, time and place (physical or virtual) but also the topic, agenda, goal, audience, context, output. The organiser needs to clearly identify these elements and state them in the invitation.

Here an informal checklist for the organiser with a few questions that might help.

• The topic: why is the meeting taking place?
• The goal: what is the desired output or outcome that participants will try to achieve? This is also what needs to happen (at a minimum) by the end of the meeting to say that the meeting has been “successful”.
• The audience: who are the right people to include in order to achieve the goal? Decision makers, subject matter experts, advisors, stakeholders… Are there too many participants? Hypothetically, if you need more than 2 pizzas* to feed the audience, the answer is probably yes.

* “No meeting should be so large that two pizzas can’t feed the whole group”.

The Amazon’s Two Pizza Rule for maximising meeting effectiveness

• The agenda: what are the steps that are needed to be completed to achieve the goal? What are the heuristic, methods, tools? E.g. Data-Driven Decisions.
• The context: what is the relevant information or documents that need to be shared with the audience prior to the meeting?
• When and where: what is the best time? Are there any date or time constraints? Is there enough time for attendees to review the documents before the meeting? Will someone in a different time zone connect remotely? Is there a room with the right capacity available? Any instrument to be tested ahead of time? Link to conference to be added? Will the room be ready?
• — Optionals: is there anyone that, although non-essential for the success of the meeting, should be informed or…