There are so many poorly run meetings that many people hate them. Considering their cost, it’s worth improving them, especially if they are your meetings. An easy way is by getting four things right and visualizing them. This applies to any kind of meeting–regular, special, face-to-face, or virtual. They create the acronym OARRs. The metaphor should help you remember them. Let’s look at each one briefly.
1. Outcomes: If you do nothing else, get these clear at the beginning of meetings. This is where you would express your expectations in a regular meeting and indicate the agreed-upon outcomes of a design team in a special meeting. They should describe what you want to have happen by the end of the meeting. Clarifying outcomes is the most effective action you can take to improve meetings. Writing them down visibly makes a big difference.
2. Agendas: A simple agenda is a list of the items that need to be covered, in the order you want to treat them. A graphic agenda would do this in a “time block” framework where graphics boxes around the items are sized to the amount of time you want to spend on them.
3. Roles: Increase your flexibility by holding different roles and describing them clearly. Coach any facilitators or visual practitioners you work with to clearly indicate his or her role as well. Metaphors help. Are you the driver of the meeting, a coach, a referee, an evaluator, or designer? These are all leader roles but are very different from one another.
4. Rules: Make agreements about how you will handle known kinds of problems in advance of incidents. It can often prevent them from happening at all. How do you plan to handle people who are dominating? How will you deal with decisions? Are you going to make them? Will you accept input? Are you working by consensus? Can people use computers? Can they text during a meeting? All these things are better dealt with in advance.
Visual Listening Is at the Heart of Visual Meetings
What does work is true engagement, interaction, and, most of all, real listening. The heart of visual listening is the act of reflecting what people say interactively with graphic visualization. Once this happens, then the pattern finding and planning that happen occur at an entirely different level of involvement and effectiveness. Putting person-to-person communication back at the center of your leadership, without sacrificing the quality of your thinking, is the goal of visual leadership.
Bob Horn, founder of Information Mapping in Boston, loved to record in his regular meetings. “It was so easy for me to dominate as the boss,” he said. “Recording gave me something to do that was really effective–I was actually listening and everyone could see it in black and white.”