Happy Friday,

I'm going to keep this email pretty short and sweet.

I hate crappy meetings, and way too many meetings are, in fact, crappy.

Lots of people don't know why they're meeting, the meeting lacks a useful structure, people are disengaged, and the conversation is focused on just a few folks. Then, we need another meeting to deal with how this one didn't pan out.

I've said for years that meeting facilitation is one of the most important skills that most companies lack.

I focus on a style of facilitation that could be described as collaborative facilitation. It is a fancy way of saying that the folks in the room will do the work of creating the information, insight, and answers needed. This is different from other meeting styles, which might focus on things like dispensing information.

So, I thought I'd provide a link to a book that I think is a great primer for running collaborative meetings and a website full of activities you can use in your meetings.

The book I want to share is called Collaboration Explained by Jean Tabaka. The book is short, sweet, and will leave you with a good understanding of the basic shapes and structures of collaborative meetings and how to be a facilitator of them.

Next, there is a website full of activities called Liberating Structures. What is nice about Liberating Structures is that they offer a wide array of facilitation activities that are presented in almost a cheat-sheet style. This means you can use these to put together a highly-collaborative meeting using tested methods.

Some of my favorite activities from the site are:

• TRIZ
• W^3
• 25/10
• Min Specs
• Fishbowl

I highly recommend these two resources for better collaborative meetings. You get the concepts and basic structures from the book and a library of pre-built activities from Liberating Structures. With a little practice, you'll see a world of options open up to make your meetings better if you start with these.

Sincerely,

Ryan