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Brief note on attitude

Reading this piece carefully will take a few minutes. A brief review may lead you to conclude that it’s “overkill”, and that you prefer to “keep things simple” – meaning that maybe you’ll read it later. As a meeting leader, you owe it to your participants to plan productive meetings. This piece will help you do that. Maybe make a game of it. Try to find anything that you think is unnecessary. Try to find things you would do differently. Whatever you do, keep in mind that this piece was written by someone who has led thousands of meetings. The advice herein is imbued with inescapable principles, that if embraced will likely result in your meeting participants to regard the meetings you lead to be worth their time, but if ignored will lead your meeting participants to question their involvement.

Meeting Name

Use the following format for naming a wiki page, Google docs name, Word document name, etc.: YYYY-MM-DD [Org Unit Name] Meeting. Let’s break this down

  • YYYY-MM-DD: Date in a format that is recognizable across cultures, and supports sorting by date (as opposed to M/D/YY, which doesn’t).

  • [Org Unit Name]: Replace the brackets and the text with the name of the organizational unit. For example, “Board”.

  • Meeting: The literal string “Meeting”. This allows the same name to be used for both agendas and minutes, which is helpful in that often agendas are edited to produce minutes.

  • Example: 2020-06-17 Board Meeting

  • Optionally, for physical files (e.g., Microsoft Word, PDF), replace space characters with underscore characters. Example: 2020-06-17_Board_Meeting.pdf Doing so will avoid escaping improve readability in cases where web servers escape (replace) spaces with %20 in filenames of files they serve as downloaded files (e.g., 2020-06-17%20Board%20Meeting.pdf).

Meeting Participation

  • Member List: A numbered list of the group’s voting members. The list is numbered to easily note how many members the group has, which is required to determine whether a quorum has been achieved. This list should be present in the agenda, which is distributed prior to the meeting. Optionally, list the person’s role in the group (e.g., Chair, Treasurer).

  • Members Present: A numbered list of the group’s voting members who are present during the meeting. The list is numbered to easily note how many members are present, which is required to determine whether a quorum has been achieved.

  • Other Present: Simply noting who else was present during the meeting. Optionally, list the person’s applicable role and/or reason for being present.

Meeting Logistics

  • Time: If the participants are in different times zones, list applicable times with city-indicated time zones. If participants are in the same time zone, just state the local time.

  • Duration: State the duration in hours or minutes.

  • Logistics: State the physical location, dial-up information, or online meeting information as applicable. Alternatively, reference meeting details in a calendar invitation.

  • Resources: Links to resources that apply to all meetings of the overall organization and/or the organization that is meeting.

Meeting Topic Groups

Grouping meeting topics helps meeting planners to focus their attention on main topics.

  • Opening Topics: Topics that occur at the beginning of each meeting. These topics generally do not change meeting to meeting.

  • Main Topics: Topics that are specific to the meeting at hand.

  • Closing Topics: Topics that occur at the end of each meeting. These The list of topics generally do not change remains the same meeting to meeting.

Meeting Topics

Topic Numbering

It is often useful to reference opening and main topics by number. They are numbered sequentially. Closing topics are not numbered. The reason is that if they were numbered, then they would have to be renumbered when adding and deleting main topics. It is rarely useful to reference closing topics by number.

Opening Topics

Topic

Topic Leader

Desired Outcome

Notes

Minutes taker

Chair

The desired outcome is that a minutes taker is selected.

  • Ideally, determine in advance who will take minutes.

Quorum

Chair

The desired outcome is that the chair has reminded the meeting participants what the quorum requirements are and has determined whether a quorum has been achieved.

  • A quorum is not required to meet.A , but a quorum is required to conduct business (topics that require a vote).

  • See Quorum Requirements Table

Agenda

Chair

The desired outcome is that the meeting participants agree to the agenda, adjusting first it as required.

  • This topic is important as a mechanism to encourage participants to stick to the agenda.

Prior unapproved meeting minutes

Chair

The desired outcome is that the working group has approved all unapproved meeting minutes.

  • A quorum is required.

Outstanding tasks

Chair

The desired outcome is that the meeting participants understand the status of all tasks outstanding as of the end of the previous meeting.

  • Be careful that this topic does not turn into a opportunity for taking tangents. Stick to brief updates.

  • Do not address tasks that are addressed in a main topic.

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Topic Item

Examples

Notes

Topic name

  • 2021 draft budget

  • Website Portuguese language support

  • The topic should generally be a noun/subject, not an action or outcome.

Topic purpose

  • Decide

  • Plan

  • Discuss

  • Inform

Each main topic shall be assigned one of the following four topic purposes:

  1. Status
    colourRed
    titleDECIDE
    One or more predetermined decisions need to be made, which require a quorum to be present and a vote taken. Generally a motion will be drafted before the meeting and will be present in the minutes with placeholders for mover and secondernames of those who moved and seconded.

  2. Status
    colourGreen
    titlePLAN
    One or more decisions need to be made that don’t require a quorum or a vote.

  3. Status
    colourYellow
    titleDISCUSS
    No decisions or planning are envisioned. Just a discussion. May include brainstorming.

  4. Status
    colourBlue
    titleINFORM
    The topic leader will inform the rest of the team about the topic in accordance with the desired outcome. No decisions, planning, or discussions are envisioned beyond a couple of few clarifying or elaborative questions.

The applicable Confluence status indicator (the color-coded labels shown above) shall be placed after the topic name in the agenda. The reason for this is to help meeting agenda / minutes reviewers to quickly identify topics that may interest them. This exercise may, along with composing the desired outcome, help the agenda composer think through the purpose of each agenda topic.

Leader

  • Chair

  • Standards Committee Liaison

  • Chest Chester Nimitz

  • Each topic must be led by somebody.

  • The person may be identified by role or by name.

Desired outcome

  • It is important to start this topic item with “The desired outcome is…” The reason is that meeting planners tend to address action (e.g., “discuss”) rather than outcome.

  • Meeting planners will often complain that specifying desired outcome is difficult. The more difficult, the more reason to specify it.

  • If the desired outcome is not compelling or important, then remove the topic from the agenda.

Pre-meeting notes and references

  • A link to prior meeting minutes

  • A link to a proposal

  • Discussion points

  • Links to references (e.g., wikipedia page)

  • Almost anything goes here.

  • Do as much work as possible in preparation for the meeting, leaving the minutes to address what happened during the meeting.

Minutes

  • Vote outcomes

  • Key points

  • Generally leave this blank until minutes are taken.

  • DO NOT put pre-meeting notes or references in the minutes section.

  • Pre-populate with templated content (e.g., vote information, adjournment)

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