How many times have you walked out of a theoretically important meeting and thought, “What did we accomplish?” More often than not, the problem isn’t with what did or didn’t happen at the meeting — nothing got done because the meeting’s goals were never firmly established. Whether it’s a 15-person executive team meeting or a 150-person leadership conference, the first step when planning an important meeting should be to draft an initial set of goals based on the answers to these two questions:
- What do you want to have debated, decided, or discovered at the end of this session that you and the team haven’t already debated, decided, or discovered?
- What do you want attendees to say when their team members ask, “What happened at the meeting?”
Answering both questions will give you a high-level understanding of what the meeting needs to accomplish.
Adapted from "If You Can't Say What Your Meeting Will Accomplish, You Shouldn't Have It," by Bob Frisch and Cary Greene
