Tim Noyce Advies

Sometimes I write things on this blog that am almost ashamed to admit it took me years to realise. I find that the great revelations for me appear not as a flash of light but a slap on the forehead. The corollory of that is that I also hesitate to tell you guys what I learned because…well…. you probably all worked it out long ago….
[...]

I was inspired by this post at 43 folders to start thinking about meetings. I seem to be at different meetings to most people, perhaps because I have the luxury of running many of the ones I attend. Many posters complained that meetings they were attending were boring or irrelevant. I may be a bit hard-assed here, but I feel that you should then be questioning  the purpose of the meeting. It is highly professional to say respectfully and without malice that a meeting is not relevant to you.

Of course being able to say that with conviction depends on knowing the purpose of the meeting! My favourite question for starting any meeting is, ”why are we doing this? What do we hope to achieve?”. You would not believe how often people give me blank looks or contradictory answers. Do not back down from this question. You need to quickly determine the purpose of the meeting, so that you can work out what your outcome is. If you cannot see any useful outcome inside the meeting then state that in a respectful way and depart: you will be more productive elsewhere.

Another benefit of asking the why question is that it gives everyone a common focus. If a number of people do not agree on the desired outcome then you need to have that conversation before trying to decide anything else. Everyone needs to be pulling in more-or-less the same direction!

Once the outcome is clear the job of the chair is much easier: it is to ensure that everyone remains focussed on achieving the outcome agreed to at the beginning. Having clarity about purpose, is crucial: it allows her to decide whether what is being said is germane. If we all know that we are deciding how to handle a specific risk to the project, rough-up figures for the product introduction or choose a training programme for next year it will be clear when someone is going down a “rabbit trail” and you can close them down without friction.

I also feel that I have an obligation towards any meeting I attend: I must ensure that I understand what is going on or I shall not be able to contribute usefully. That is why I ask questions about anything I do not understand.

Finally, at the end of the meeting, you can check whether you achieved your outcome.

That is the quality check: did we do enough in this meeting or are there more actions needed to achieve the desired outcome? What next-actions did we define, for who? Do not wait until the last minute to call for next-actions, it always takes a little while to get that clarified.

Question for you fine folks: how do you keep meetings on track? What are your golden rules?

Every now and then something goes past in a meeting that I do not understand. When that happens I ask for an explanation, for help. I had to train myself to do that even when I was afraid of looking dumb. Please ask the question. I have had so very, very many experiences in which I said “forgive my limited knowledge, but what is that actually” and it added value.

1. Sometimes I discovered that I was behind the curve and needed to educate myself about content others took for granted.
2. Much,much more often I discovered that at least two other people were mystified too. Then it becomes efficient to inform all of us. It also prevents…
3. On a number of occasions I got conflicting responses from different corners of the meeting. That is a situation which gives you an opportunity to increase quality and eliminate misunderstandings downstream.

Birmingham University in the UK used to have something called a “lecture cube” for gauging the speed or uptake of a lecture. It was red on two sides, white on two more and green on the remaining two.

Depending on how the students placed them on their desks, the lecturer would see a field of colour in the audience that would let him know if he was too fast/obscure (red) or too slow (white). Green meant just right…

This sounds like a device that would be useful in big meetings. Looking around the room and seeing a lot of red would mean you have wandered off topic.

I recently blogged about using GTD in large organisations: it is an ongoing story. I have been working with an IT department and we have been using GTD as a way to ”cascade” the goals of the whole company all the way down to individual projects and next actions.

The key insight is that even the most beautifully crafted strategy is just “stuff” for you until you have made very explicit what you are going to do about it. Hmmm, we know that to do when we want to get clear about dealing with stuff, we use the fundamental thinking process. The way it works in practice is that managers at each level in the organisation look carefully at the vision and goals that they have been handed and use GTD-thinking to “boil them down” for their own area.

Of course when you are a manager many, even most, of your goals will be reached by delegating projects. That means you then need to run a negotiation with your direct reports and hash out exactly how they are going to respond to you: they may surprise you. Our experience so far has shown that people closer to the day-to-day operation have very useful things to say about what customers want and how services can be improved. That may of course mean you want to add some things to your and your boss’s plate, too…
[...]

I have a confession to make…. Recently I let my home inbox pile up for more than three weeks. It got bigger and scruffier all the time and started lowering at me while I tried to do other things. Of course something like that has a double whammy for me. I have all the guilt about stuff piling up that anyone has, plus the fact that I am a GTD coach, I teach this stuff, and should of course never have that kind of problem. Ahem.
[...]

At one of my speaking engagements in a school I asked a few of them what was “on their minds too much” and was told by a student that he wanted to catch up with one of his subjects. So I asked him what he would do to achieve that and he said, “weeeel I suppose I’d have to start by reading the standard book”. But of course that is a sustained effort that stymies lots of adults, let alone 11-year olds. So I told him how to trick himself into doing it….
[...]

How do you use GTD to improve management processes in an organisation? How do you ensure that people are working on things that are vital to the company? Something rather exciting has been happening to me in the last few months. End of last year I spent some time working with a department head who had very much “got” GTD, specifically because it had helped him to survive when he found himself doing two demanding jobs at once.

What started out as simply spreading the GTD principles out to his teams, training and coaching them, turned into much, much more. [...]

The nice thing about GTD is that you can keep coming back to it and discovering a new layer of meaning…
I am a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but I finally think I get Horizons of Focus…. you know, the 10,000 foot to 50,000 foot “altitudes” David Allen says ”stuff” turns up at. [...]

I have a dual relationship to GTD – I use it to keep my own world straight and I coach other people in implementing it too: I see it from both sides… Very often I find that things I picked up from David Allen’s books or podcasts resonate with me straight away, but some things have to wait for me to rack up the appropriate experiences. Today the afterburner kicked in. [...]