Meet the Meeting Model

By Daniele Davi'

How can a book about effective and efficient meetings be life changing?

If you spend a considerable part of your life in meetings and they are unsatisfactory or frustrating, that will impact the quality of your time.
Time is money. Time is limited. Time is the most expensive currency and it can't be traded.

After reading this book, you will be more conscious of how you are spending your precious time. Using the MEET (Motivational, Effective, Efficient, Transformational) meeting model, you will have tools to improve the quality of your time and your life before, during and after meetings. Use time well when alone, when meeting with others, in private, in the workplace, during social gatherings or business events and achieve your goals.

Time is your life passing by.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniele Davi'
• Release date: May 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215967195

Book preview

MEET The Meeting Model - Front Cover

MEET

THE MEETING MODEL

Art and science of meeting successfully

Leaders’ toolkit for successful meetings

DANIELE DAVI’

danieledavi.com

Copyright © 2022 DANIELE DAVI’

MEET the meeting model

Art and science of meeting successfully

Leaders’ toolkit for successful meetings

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

Copyright © 2021-2022 Daniele Davì

Portions of this book have been published in 2021 and 2022 on the author's blogs: danieledavi.com and gramland.medium.com.

Second edition (7_3): 2022

First edition published in: 2022

eBook ASIN‏: ‎ B0BQS3V94B

Paperback ISBN: 9798370712081

eBook ISBN: 9798215967195

Imprint: Independently published

The information contained in this book is based on the author's experiences and research. While the author has made every effort to provide accurate and up-to-date information, the author and publisher cannot be held responsible for any errors, omissions or for any actions taken by readers based on the information contained in this book.

Characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. The author has no affiliation with any of the organizations mentioned in this book and the views expressed in this book are solely those of the author. Any mention of specific companies or products is for informational purposes only and should not be interpreted as an endorsement or recommendation by the author.

Contents

MEET THE MEETING MODEL

Introduction

PART I Meetings

1 Early observations

2 Later observations

3 Meetings, a strategy for evolution

4 Meetings are for getting shit done

5 Successful meetings, successful life!

PART II  MEET the model for successful meetings

6 Defining successful meetings

7 Successful meetings are effective

8 Successful meetings are efficient

9 Fulfilling meetings are motivational

10 Fulfilling meetings are transformational

11 M.E.E.T.

12 The MEET model,  a first step toward happiness

PART III  Applying the  MEET  meeting model

13 Purpose versus process meetings

14 The 3 stages of MEET meetings

15 Before the meeting - MEET meetings preparation for organisers

16 Stage zero - Alternatives to meetings

17 Meeting agenda template

18 Before the meeting - MEET meetings preparation for invitees

19 Meeting size

20 Meeting duration

21 During the meeting – Introduction to  MEET  meetings execution

22 Meeting roles

23 Meeting time

24 Meeting execution

25 Strong opinions  weakly held

26 Working Agreements

27 Behaviours to watch out and avoid

28 After the meeting -  MEET meetings

PART IV  Type of meetings

29 MEET meetings are agile

30 A deeper look to specific type of meetings

PART V  The future of meetings

31 Hybrid and remote meetings

32 Working from home and the impact of culture, civility or toxicity in online meetings

33 MEET,  the art of meeting successfully

Essential Tools

Appendix 1: MEET meetings -  Facilitator Checklist

Appendix 2: MEET meetings -  Participant Checklist

Appendix 3: Activity and scenarios for effective and efficient meetings trainers

Appendix 4: Guide to a 1st retrospective for not-yet-agile teams

Acknowledgements

About the author

Books by this author

To my wife Simay,

and my son Leonardo.

Thank you for always being there for me.

MEET the meeting model

Art and science of meeting successfully

Leaders’ toolkit for successful meetings

DANIELE DAVI’

danieledavi.com

Introduction

I often get bored reading very long introductions.

Most of the time meetings are unnecessary and boring. One main issue is that most people are unaware of why meetings suck. Another is that most people do not know how to make meetings successful. The more rules they make around meetings the worse the meetings get. If you spend a considerable part of your life in meetings and they are unsatisfactory and frustrating, that defines a part of your life. Everyday.

Having successful meetings is a habit that can be incept, practiced and built up. When success becomes a habit and you add motivation to what you do and you keep yourself open to transformation, then what you get is more than just success. You achieve a fulfilling life!

This book right now is a toolkit in your hand. The MEET model together with practices, checklists, exercises, knowledge, experiences and the rest that I am sharing with you now are powerful tools. This book collects over 20 years of personal and professional observations, expertise, reflections, practices, tools, techniques, workshops notes.

It's up to you to take what you need, apply it as you can to your reality.

It’s easy to change what you want to change. Successful meetings and a fulfilling life come with the habit of being motivated and open to transformation, which means being open to change the things you don’t want to change.

Enjoy the book!

The ultimate freedom for creative groups is the freedom to experiment with new ideas. Some skeptics insist that innovation is expensive. In the long run, innovation is cheap. Mediocrity is expensive—and autonomy can be the antidote.  

Tom Kelley - General Manager, IDEO

PART I

Meetings

1 Early observations

When I was a kid, we would visit some relatives with my family. After a while, for instance 30 minutes, my parents would stand up and say it's time to go. Everyone would stand up but the conversation would go on and on. The ritual of saying goodbye without leaving the premises would continue for at least an hour and often much more.

People would not just finish a conversation already initiated but they would start new debates about literally anything. Knowing this ritual, (or bad habit), I would continue sitting down waiting for them to say goodbye for real. My mom would tell me to stand up as if going out depended on me, but she would not be able to make one step towards the exit.

Every step toward the door was a conquest. A flash of hope that would soon die after anyone made another question or comment that I knew would trigger a very long and articulate answer. I was trying everything: sitting back, moving forward, taking my jacket, standing in front of the door or even opening the door to go ahead and call the elevator; all unsuccessful strategies.

As a kid, getting bored was one of those things that stimulated my imagination. I didn't know this at the time. Although I was quiet and patient, it never made sense to me why people would not sit and finish the talk and then just say goodbye in 5 minutes.

Where I come from, a fast or short goodbye would be considered rude. Perhaps it is still the same in other parts of Sicily, in the Mediterranean countries and other cultures out there.

Farewell should not take more than 10% of the visit or family gathering. If you sit for one hour, you have 6 minutes to make your way out and say goodbye, arrivederci, au revoir, adios, hoşça kalın... It would be rude but it would make sense.

When I grew up, I was really enjoying my time out with my friends. Often though it would happen that someone would be late -not necessarily always the same person- and we would just wait to be all together before deciding what to do or where to go. Although we were the first generation with mobile phones and free SMS, at that time we didn't really make the best of it or we didn't fully understand the benefits and infinite possibilities of asynchronous agreements. 

Rather than deciding ahead where to eat and drink or where to spend the Saturday night, my friend and I had the habit of always meeting at the usual square to do so.

Once all the tribe was reunited, we would start a long debate, a sort of negotiation on where to spend the evening, without realising that often, the evening was passing just like that: deciding what to do. We would meet around 10 PM and it would take over 2 hours before knowing where to go. Then, with the chaotic and saturated traffic, it would take at least another hour or more to arrive at the destination and find a parking spot. Sometimes, the place - carefully selected by voting (of course after a long Italian-parliamentary-style debate) would be just about to close or they would be overcrowded with no available tables. As I had no strong preferences, I was asking my friends to decide and let me know via text message. I had to confess that at some point I was the one arriving late at our gatherings, with the hope to skip at least an hour and half of discussions. A flash of hope, that would die as soon as I was realising that someone else -probably for the same reason- would have arrived anyway after me. After all, we were always rotating between the same 3 or 4 overcrowded trendy places or overcrowded alternative places. 

The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

George Bernard Shaw

2 Later observations

While designing training and studying meeting anti-patterns, I realised many business meetings follow the same structures of the previous familiar and juvenile examples.

In some 30' minutes meetings, people spend half of the time waiting for each other or making small talks; they face the focal point of the agenda when the time is overdue.

The result? They occupy the room for longer, delaying the next meeting. If the meeting is online, they will arrive late to the next event, making other attendees to be waiting for them. Often, at the end of the meeting, the people who are late are the ones who say another meeting is needed to discuss the same topic. And if they do not change anything, they will perpetrate the same actions and results: ineffective meetings.

In other meetings, the desire to make decisions in a more democratic way, discussing everything every time or involving too many participants results in a repetitive ceremonial with no real value. The same for tick-box meetings. I have seen dozens of people meeting twice a week to go together through a software release checklist form, but most of the time there were no code changes and no releases needed.

In some other cases, options are already narrowed down and there is nothing left to decide which makes the meeting just a farce. In this age, the age of information, we need to stimulate and encourage processes that support data-driven decisions. We need to be transparent, visible and real.

There are people paid to make some decisions. As leaders and team players we need to support and encourage people that have critical or specific responsibilities to make decisions. We need to make them feel supported not only when they make the right decision but also when a decision turns out to be sub-optimal. People have the right to make wrong decisions and learn from their mistakes. Taking away that responsibility and spreading it around often means more meetings and more frustration with no subsequent learning.

The right to make the wrong decision goes with some prerequisites: low impact on other people and their work. How do you achieve this? Limit the scope of the decision. Many reversible micro-decisions are better and safer than big expensive resolutions carved in stone. The right to make the wrong decisions requires a culture of safety and trust. How can we practically keep this right while avoiding extra cost, extra waste of time and frustration? Short feedback loop, transparency on decision and artifacts, fast and continuous inspect and adapt activities with defined roles. In three words: empiricism, awareness and responsibility.

In one word: agility.

It doesn't matter if people attend business meetings or family visits or friends’ gatherings, or meetups, or run into an old friend. Many people do not make the best use of their time.

When we feel entirely responsible for the time we waste, we are able to accept it and we even justify our way of doing; however, if we think someone else is (co)responsible for that waste of time, we blame others, or more generically the act of meeting or the process behind and beyond the meeting. As Stephen Covey says in simple words, We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions.

Let’s consider two opposite situations.

If all meetings during the day are delayed and overdue, at the end of the day, extra-working hours will be needed. The invisible, often unpaid, frustrating overtime will catch you and keep you longer at the office, in the subway or train, in the traffic or in your work-from-home space.

On the contrary, if all meetings during the day start on time or even finish before, you can get more things done and enjoy life during and after your working hours.

Now, the first situation doesn't actually require all meetings to be skewed. It takes only one erratic meeting to blow up the entire day or more. So it’s crucial to make systemic improvements and build good habits around meetings. A few good episodes will not be enough to save the day.

So what?

People could enjoy the same amount of time, or even get more enjoyment and more things done in less time, if they learnt more on how to bring quality to meetings and encounters. 

It probably requires someone to be simultaneously highly time-sensitive and a good observer with bias for action, optimization and performance to: 

1. Recognize we can spend our time better.

2. Believe that it is possible to shift mindset, train people and provide them with tools so that when they are together, they can enjoy each other's company whether it is for private or business reasons.

3. Share these tools, practices and techniques so that everyone can get valuable time back and more enjoyment, success, happiness, fulfillment in their life.

That someone is me! I am sharing and offering the MEET model, with its principles, habits and recommendations so that someone else can enjoy their time, advocate for a better way of meeting (successful and fulfilling) and contribute to creating a better world starting from fixing something we do (usually badly) everyday, multiple times a day.

How can a book about effective and efficient meetings be life changing?

Time is money. Time is limited. Time is the most expensive currency and it can’t be traded. After reading this book, you will be more conscious of how you are spending your precious time. You will have tools to improve the quality of your time and achieve your goals. Use time well when alone, with others, in private, social and in business events.

Time is your life passing by.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.

Dave Barry

Ní neart go cur le chéile!

There's strength in unity!

Seanfhocal (Old Irish saying)

3 Meetings, a strategy for evolution

Meetings are the most common and ancient form of collaboration. Sitting around trees, stones or bonfires, humans took evolutionary advantage over other species thanks to their capacity to provide mutual support, collaborate on ideas, achieve cultural, social and technological advancements. Meetings are the fertilizer of ideas and civilization. Thousands of years ago as well as today.

In his attempt to understand human nature, Abraham Maslow defined a hierarchy of needs that proceed from the most basic to the highest, passing by the social needs. The Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs includes: food and water, shelter and safety, belonging, esteem from others, self-esteem, self-actualization.

It is evident that while being busy in getting their essentials, humans got used to gathering together not only to increase their own enjoyment but mainly to improve chances of success in satisfying a hierarchy of universal needs. Whilst looking for food or safety may have been initially a competitive activity that it became at some point a cooperative game.

Hunting together, harvesting together, working together. Meeting.

Eating