Chapter 7 - Drive outcomes and process, not agendas

Actions – plan and run a meeting using the OPPT meeting format

Target – improve the relevance and quality of the outcomes and process of your meeting by at least 20 percent

In Chapters 3–5 we focused on eliminating unnecessary meetings, topics, and participants.

By now you should have a more focused agenda based on topics that are relevant to all attendees. If not, we suggest you go back and complete the previous three steps first.

This chapter is about focusing your meeting topics on outcomes and process to make them more action-oriented and to ensure that practical outcomes are delivered. It will also start you thinking about designing in higher levels of participation and engagement – the focus of our next chapter.

Traditional meeting agendas often consist of a list of topics. Unfortunately, when we see a topic title like “business review” it is not clear what output we want from the discussion. It could just be a presentation, we could be asked to give input, discuss options, or decide.

If you have a particularly difficult or regular meeting in mind that you want to improve, this would be a good time to print off a copy of the agenda and have it next to you as you read this chapter to see how it compares with the guidelines below.

A 2003 survey of senior leaders from 187 companies by Macron Intelligence found:

•	Agenda setting is often loose and unfocused

•	At half the companies surveyed, the agenda was the same from meeting to meeting or was ad hoc

•	When asked about what got on to the agenda, participants said that it was usually driven by a crisis in one area, historical precedent (every November we review HR) or “fairness” (everyone should get a chance to speak)

•	No one was explicitly in charge of looking after the agenda, with items often being added on a “first come, first served” basis

•	Only 5 percent of companies had a system for rigorously directing management’s time to the most important issues

•	As little as 20 percent of senior management time was spent on topics that drive value for the company

Meetings are such an important part of collaboration and decision-making and are so expensive that it is surprising we do not put more effort into planning and running them. Often an administrator oversees the agenda and just asks attendees if they would like to add anything.

A relatively junior person who may not have the approval responsibility to spend money in other areas can easily call a meeting costing thousands of dollars.

Some, usually more expensive, meetings do have facilitators but often they focus on the behaviors in the meeting rather than on the focus, design, and outputs of the meeting.

If you are serious about improving your meeting, appoint someone to an active role in the planning and management of the meeting. Make sure they read this book.

By focusing on outcomes and process we make our meetings much more likely to produce concrete actions and clear decisions.

It will also help clarify who should attend the meeting (and who should not) and you can design in better facilitation and higher levels of participation and engagement.

It is particularly important to be clear about outcomes and process in conference calls and web meetings where it can be harder for participants to understand their roles and what input is expected; it is also easier for them to disengage without you realizing.

To see how your existing meetings compare with this approach, at the next meeting you attend make a note for each topic on whether they pass the OPPT test.

1.	Was the Outcome explicitly stated in the agenda or at the beginning of the topic and was the outcome met?

2.	Did you follow an explicit Process and did that process lead successfully to the outcome?

3.	Were the right Participants present in the meeting to deliver the outcome and follow the process?

4.	Did you spend an appropriate amount of Time on the topic?

Your observations on these questions will help improve your understanding of how being clear about these factors will improve your meeting.

Having observed a meeting without this structure, now use it to plan your next meeting.

This simple tool takes us through a four-part process for planning more effective OPPT meetings, calls, and webinars:

1.	What outcomes do we want from each meeting topic?

2.	What process will we need to deliver this outcome?

4.	How much time is it worth spending on this?

“We spent an hour discussing one issue and then at the end we found out that the decision had already been made and they were just informing us of it – I wish we had known that at the start, what a waste of time.”

Begin by being clear about the outcome you want from having this topic on the agenda.

•	To generate ideas and a solution to a specific problem

•	To develop a plan of action for a specific situation

The outcome should define what will happen at the end of the discussion of the topic: what action, behavior change, or result do we expect to see?

If your first ideas about outcomes include “sharing information” or “listening to a presentation” please review the information in Chapter 4 and reconsider whether these topics need a meeting or just an email. Ask yourself the follow-up question “In order to do what?” to get closer to a practical outcome.

If the outcomes do not need participants to do anything differently, then consider alternatives to having them on your meeting agenda. The outcome should be something that needs live “synchronous” involvement of participants.

Example of a practical outcome: Decide which vendor to choose for a specific purchase.

Once we are clear about the outcome, we can then define the process steps we will need to deliver that outcome. If this includes some sharing of information, please consider how this can be done before the meeting in pre-reading materials (see Chapter 9 for more on this). A robust process should lead you inevitably to the required outcome.

Example: If the outcome is to “decide which vendor to choose” the process may be:

•	Discuss the three leading vendors and rank them against the criteria

•	Decide based on the ranking or by majority voting if the ranking is not conclusive

•	Will this process deliver the outcome? If not, you need to re-plan the process

•	Is this a “star” or “spaghetti” topic? (See above for definitions of these terms.) Do I really need a live meeting, call or webinar to achieve the outcome?

Based on a clear outcome and process, it is normally easy to see who needs to be involved. Some will be obvious. Others may be key stakeholders with decision rights or people who need to formally agree the resources necessary to successful implementation.

If you are familiar with RACI analysis for clarifying roles (where you identify who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, or Informed for a given task of decision), be careful with how you involve the Cs and Is.

•	“Consulted” is someone you ask before deciding

•	“Informed” is someone you will tell after you have decided

You can consult and inform outside your meetings and these individuals do not necessarily need to attend the meeting itself. This will keep your meeting size smaller, and smaller meetings are usually better meetings.

This may, however, mean you need to spend more time outside the meeting on stakeholder engagement before and communication of actions afterwards.

If you are not familiar with RACI a simple online search will throw up many examples and formats.

You should have a clear owner who is responsible for the delivery and success of each outcome.

Each section of the agenda may need different participants to reach the outcome and follow the process.

If you have ever spent hours discussing a trivial matter, you will know how frustrating this can be.

Given the costs of your meeting and the number of outcomes you want to deliver, you may have a limited amount of time you are willing or able to spend on a topic – be clear about this in advance.

Some topics are so important that if we spent the whole meeting delivering that one outcome, it would be a good use of our time. Others may be worth no more than a few minutes.

By having an initial time allocation, you can use this to facilitate during the meeting. When you are approaching the allocated time, ask, “We have already nearly used the time we allocated for this outcome; is it worth continuing or should we move on?” This often stops unnecessarily long discussions on low-value topics.

If you can calculate the value of your outcomes, it should be clear how much time and effort you should put into delivering them.

Use the OPPT meeting planner above to plan your next meeting, call, or webinar using these principles.

At the meeting, add a column to evaluate how well you met your outcomes and followed your process, whether the right people were involved, and whether you hit your planned timings. Use this to think about how you can continue to improve the planning and execution of your meetings.

As you start to use this template you can also give it to other people who wish to present at your meeting or add a topic. Make sure they are clear about the four OPPT steps in planning their session, ask to see their plan before the meeting and give them feedback on how well they followed their plan in the meeting itself.

Use the final column of the planner to record your observations about how well you followed your plan.

•	Were the outcomes clearly stated and were they met?

•	Was the process explicit and followed as planned?

•	Did we have the right participants involved?

The best meetings are ones where the outcome is relevant to us and the process gets us to the outcome efficiently.

Unfortunately, the process of many meetings is to share too much information in the hope that something useful will fall out. In complex organizations today we have access to so much information it can sometimes be difficult to identify what is relevant from the mass of data.

We call this process “panning for gold.” It is a bit like the old-time gold prospectors going into a stream and looking for nuggets of gold: if we are not focused we spend our whole life looking at mud and never find the nuggets; if we do not pay enough attention then the nuggets may fall through our hands. The trick is in paying attention to the right things.

I attended a management meeting with one of our clients to observe them in the morning, after which I would run a workshop in the afternoon.

In the morning, it was not clear to me what the outcome of the session was. The process they followed was for everyone to go through their budgets line by line to identify if there were any possible savings. The process took most of the morning and was painfully slow; a lot of the discussion was individuals defending why specific budgets could not be cut.

Over lunch the CEO asked me for my comments and I asked what outcome he was looking for. It may have been obvious to the attendees but it was not obvious to me. He replied that there was a $5 million gap between the latest business position and what they needed to achieve on costs.

I suggested that the process may be too detailed to get efficiently to the outcome he wanted.

After lunch, I opened the discussion by asking the participants if they knew that the outcome of the session was to find $5 million in savings. They replied that they did.

I told them that I presumed they had done some preparation before the meeting so I stood at a flipchart and asked them to shout out who had got budget that could close this gap. Within about five minutes we found the $5 million.

Once you are very clear about the outcome, it usually possible to design a process to get more quickly to the outcome. Resist the need to share everything and try to get to the point.

An Americas HR team of 12 people held regular best practice reviews where human resources people based from Canada to Chile would present their learning to colleagues doing similar jobs. Even at 15 minutes per presentation, this took three hours of their valuable face-to-face team meeting and it frequently overran. People often struggled to think of something they wanted to share and usually ended up sharing something they were proud of rather than anything that was useful to the others.

Participants found little value in this but the HR vice-president was keen to transfer learning between the individuals.

We redesigned the meeting around “wants and offers”; we asked each participant to prepare a flipchart with two columns. The first column was “wants” – areas where they were looking for ideas and learning to solve a problem they were facing. The second column was “offers” – areas where they thought they had a great idea to share with others.

After this first stage, we observed there were a lot more offers than wants – people were much more likely to offer their good ideas than to ask for help.

Next, we asked people to walk around all the flipcharts and mark their initials against the “offers” they were interested in finding out more about, and against any “want” that they thought they could help with.

After the second stage, there was very little interest in most of the offers. Only three of the offers had more than one person interested in them. However, lots of people thought they could help with other people’s problems!

We asked the people who were interested in the three offers to form small teams to discuss them. Where there was only one person with an offer to help someone with a want, we asked them to schedule a one-to-one conversation later. Most of the smaller conversations happened outside the meeting either in breaks or later on the telephone.

After 30 minutes, the best practice reviews were finished and during that period people had only been involved in conversations they had chosen to join because they had an interest or a need.

Including preparation time, this process took 45 minutes, instead of the three hours it used to take. People’s satisfaction with the quality and relevance of the discussions went up significantly.

Again, the trick was to design a process that delivers the outcome quickly and improves relevance and engagement for participants.

Trigger an action

Look ahead to the next important meeting that you are running. Schedule some time in your diary two weeks before the meeting for a planning session based around this chapter.

Discuss this with your team or at your next meeting

•	Review your most regular or time-consuming meeting, conference call, or webinar

•	Use the OPPT process to re-engineer it; how different would it look?

•	Produce an outline agenda for each of the planned topics using the OPPT headings and use it to run your next meeting or call

•	Be explicit with the meeting participants about what you are doing and why

•	At the end of the meeting evaluate the impact it had on the conduct of the meeting and the quality of the outputs