Nontechnical Meetings

Here’s a meeting structure I have found to be very useful for weekly update meetings. It’s a little long for a daily meeting, unless you have a small team.

Time Activity
10 minutes On a sheet of paper, thoughtfully right out your completed action items from the previous week, and your action items foe the coming week. Identify any potential problems at the end (three sections, 3 minutes per section)
0 minutes Pass the paper to the person to your left
1 minute Review and mentally prepare to pitch and represent your coworker’s week
3 minutes Explain their week to the group. 1 min per section allocated but by no means required. Refer to things on the list in the third person.
1 minute Everyone writes questions to hand off to actual coworker for review at the end. Next person to go can use this time to prepare to pitch for their coworker.
Flexible QA time for people to answer questions aloud to the group. l recommend a minimum of n2 minutes allocated at the end for questions answered to the group.

Could be cool as a Glitch.io app. Especially now.

Advantages include:

  • Simplified Messaging: Using jargon and buzzwords is like recording yourself speaking. Sounds good while you’re saying it, sounds a lot worse when it’s being played.

  • Uncomfortable Truths: Easier for people to say what they think when someone else has to say it.

  • Decorum and Decency: Since you rely on others to make your messaging clear, this kind of meeting teaches collaboration to adults who really should know how to play nice with each other by now.

  • Clarity: Questions answered by original author means no loss of clarity or depth of response. You don’t have to become a subject matter expert in {other person’s task}, just understand and represent it.

  • Efficiency (the real kind, not the on-paper kind): Faster than normal meetings because everyone has put the same 10 minutes into making sure they are understood. As opposed to nominally doing so. A discrete 10 minutes of group writing makes the rest of the meeting tighter, more engaging, and increases content density. Scales nicely to larger groups. Meetings of 6 can be done in as little as 45 minutes with 10 minutes of Q and A at the end. If you are extremely Type A, you can pre-prepare for the meeting.