How to use this book

The techniques in this book can help you prepare and plan for a meeting. Although there are a number of different meeting formats you can choose to follow, we find most meetings include 4 key parts.

These are:

• Starting
• Diverging
• Converging
• Closing

Starting

Lots of people use the term ‘ice-breakers’ to refer to an activity at the start of a meeting to get people talking to each other. We don’t like the phrase, maybe because we’ve seen people use the phrase for activities that are completely unrelated to the topic of the meeting. We prefer the phrase ‘Check in’.

For us a check-in activity has 3 purposes:

• To get everyone in the room to talk in the first 5 minutes of the meeting. Evidence suggests that if they do, they are more likely to contribute in the rest of the meeting.
• To connect people to the topic of the meeting, and in particular how they feel about the topic, or what they know.
• To connect people to each other and establish some trust or relationships in the room. This is greatly dependant on: who the audience is, if they know each other, and how much trust you need in the room for the meeting you are going to have. All of these are things you need to consider in your preparation.

Diverging

Most meetings require participants to brainstorm a wide variety of things. For example topics to discuss, challenges to address, decisions to be made, etc. For anything like this it is important to include activities that help people diverge. That is to create lots of ideas before they decide which to focus on. The reason for this is that most of our best thinking doesn’t happen immediately. It also helps a group collaborate and create an idea together by building on each other’s ideas. We call this the diverging part of a meeting. Depending on the type of meeting you might have several diverting parts to your meeting.

Converging

While creating lots of ideas is a really useful technique, meetings that don’t bring those together into an agreed decision or action step, are often a waste. Therefore most meetings require a converging phase where participants select which ideas they want to try, or choose the best course of action. A converging phase follows a diverging phase. Again you could have multiple of these in a meeting.

Closing

Wrapping up or closing a meeting is also crucial. Many meetings that run over time neglect this part completely. Closings can help people feel their time was valued. It also gives the facilitator an opportunity to get feedback on their facilitation. Finally it is a great time to wrap up by reminding people of their actions, and agreeing the next steps that will happen.

Below is a list of these 4 phases. Under each we have indicated which techniques that you find in this book could work for those phases. Note some techniques work well in more than one area. You can use this list to quickly find techniques you need to plan your meeting.