We've Got to Start Meeting Like This

A look at companies that hold unique meetings for developing products, building camaraderie, generating ideas, and reviewing employees' needs and achievements.

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We've all been there. Stuck in yet another agonizingly boring, ineffective, unproductive meeting. When, we wonder, can we get back to our real work? We're happy to report that there are exceptions to this sad state of affairs. We've checked out a variety of organizations to see what we could learn about making meetings work. Here's a look at some of the more creative strategies and tools we discovered.

"OK, hands up."

With that simple phrase and a raising of the leader's hand, meetings at City Year, a Boston-based, nationwide nonprofit service organization, are called to order. Other hands shoot up as one by one, conversations cease, until all is quiet. Although City Year uses this physically engaging meeting-start-up technique in groups as small as a dozen, it's especially valuable with large groups, says Edith Buhs. Buhs is the national director of the Academy, the training arm of City Year, which teaches effective-meeting techniques and provides tools--not only to City Year's 1,200 staff and corps members but also to interested nonprofit and for-profit corporations.

Effective-meeting workshops were originally deemed necessary because of the youth and diversity of City Year's members, but experienced meeting goers could easily adopt some of City Year's power tools. Most meetings begin with a warm-up exercise of some kind. At a recent meeting anticipating the organization's 10th anniversary, a four-by-eight-foot magazine-cover mock-up commemorating the event encouraged big thinking: participants generated ideas for the stories the "magazine" would feature. Other meetings might begin with what are called "ripples," named for a phrase in a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, in which he said that acts of courage send a "tiny ripple of hope." Anyone can share a ripple. The ripple may be something that happened within the organization. Or maybe it's something from last night's 11 o'clock news. The point is to celebrate the good, to create an updraft of positive emotion.

Most City Year meetings employ a ground rule called NOSTUESO to keep domineering or wordy individuals from monopolizing discussions and to ensure that all voices are heard. The acronym stands for "No One Speaks Twice Until Everybody Speaks Once."

Meeting leaders are also taught to end their meetings with another meeting, a minimeeting called "+(delta)." The mission: to quickly assess the meeting itself. Under the plus sign, leaders write down what worked. Under the delta symbol, they record changes that need to be made, phrasing those recommendations in positive terms: not, for instance, "Meeting too long," but rather "Meeting should be shorter."

The Computer-Aided Note Taker
Organization: Mattel Media, a division of giant Mattel Toys in El Segundo, Calif.
Purpose of Meeting: To develop products

"If people are writing things down, they're often not paying attention," says Andy Rifkin, senior vice-president of creative development for Mattel Media. Thus, there's no note taking allowed at Rifkin's new-product-idea meetings, creative huddles of seven or eight people. Just one self-proclaimed "technographer," Bernie DeKoven, records everyone's ideas on a laptop, the entries appearing before the group either on a 35-inch color monitor or projected onto the wall.

DeKoven--whose title at Mattel is "doctor fun/staff designer"--is not your ordinary note taker. An expert in meeting dynamics, he founded the Institute for Better Meetings, which nowadays takes a backseat to his full-time duties at Mattel.

Unlike whiteboards, which fill up and have to be erased, the holding tank in DeKoven's computer is boundless. Following the group's direction, he can edit ideas as he goes along, drag related notions alongside each other, rerank choices, and, without saying a word, redirect everyone's attention merely by scrolling back to earlier notations.

Even without a meeting maven like DeKoven on board, you still might want to consider the idea of having one person take notes on a computer, because of a key additional benefit: everyone can leave the meeting with a hard-copy record in hand, and that instant meeting record can be E-mailed to the rest of your company. As a plus for Mattel, DeKoven stores what he and Rifkin call "boneyard" ideas--ideas that are rejected in the meeting--in a separate section of the notes. Out of sight but easily brought back to mind, some of those dismissed notions often become valuable later on in the context of another project. Touring with toy buyers a while back, Rifkin heard repeated requests for activity-based toys for boys. Picking through the boneyard of a year-old meeting, he found a Hot Wheels CD-ROM concept for designing and decorating cars and printing licenses and tickets. Thus did Hot Wheels Custom Car Designer go from idle to high speed in about 6.5 seconds. It has disappeared from toy-store shelves almost as quickly. The meeting moral: Don't flush your rejects.

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