Friday, 8 a.m. Meeting with your team / executive board / strategic committee/… (delete as appropriate). An extraordinarily important meeting: you are finally going to cut to the chase about the hot topic of the day. It brings back bad memories for you… It is the perfect example of a meeting which will drag out beyond the schedule, not reaching any decision and finally getting postponed. Again two weeks are lost. Furthermore, you are not a morning person.
Does it ring a bell? If, as we are, you are convinced that another kind of meeting is possible, here are 3 suggestions using Multiscore to boost the efficiency of your meetings.
What can Stormz do for you?
Apart from the tool (which we will explain further), the means to run effective meetings is essential. The real interest of this exercise is to help you to structure your meeting and guide it in order to get a concrete outcome. Whatever your issues, the process is very simple.
First: seek the advice of the meeting’s participants through the app. Each participant will individually assign a score for each point according to the scale you determined in advance: from 1 to 10, from 1 to 4… Use 5 to 10 minutes for this stage, depending on the number of items to assess.
Warning: your propositions must be concise and the informations must be limited (ten to fifteen cards max).
Now you can display the assessment results. First an overview, then an individual graph for every user. For each proposition, identify the minimum and maximum results and ask the participants to explain their assessment.
Ask questions to launch further discussions
- “What are the obstacles to…?”
- “Why did you decide that….?”
- “What seems relevant in this approach to you…?”
- “What do you think about…?”
The aim is to to move towards consensus.The visual impact of the individual graph makes the audience’s agreement (or disagreement) tangible and avoids the unspoken. As the conversation progresses, suggest to the participants to review their assessment and observe the “speech bubbles” moving on your graph. Opposites get closer to each other and to the average.
Through the assessment and the discussion, your own view on the situation became clearer. You might even review your opinion or decide to improve your propositions. Importantly, in a limited time and without leaving too much room for the usual digressions, you hold now the keys to make a decision.
Here are a few examples
During the meeting you present the main strategic guidelines for the next three years. Months of work for your whole team; in a nutshell: a huge task. You are going to present your outcome and many propositions which cannot be set up at the same time. You need to decide and identify priorities for the current year.
- Contribution to the objectives.
- Implementation capacity.
- Matching with corporate values.
You recently presented a complete and detailed strategy. Before to implement it, you coordinated the various teams (with a first Stormz’s workshop!) to imagine together the potential risks. Some risks were proposed and estimated; now it is time for action regarding the most important risks. You will discuss it with the participants and decide if it is rational to take a risk according to its seriousness, its probability, your level of control, or on the contrary if you need to review your project to anticipate the risks. - Probability
- Seriousness
- Level of control
You can adapt your scale according to your needs. A scale from 1 to 4 is ideal in that case to indicate if the level is ”low / medium / important / critical” for each approach. A small bubble situated at the top right will represent for example a very likely risk, very serious, with a poor level of control. That reveals that you need to take this risk into account.
You are almost finished. Just 2 or 3 candidates still running but it is hard to chose and you want the advice of your team, in an objective way.
- Matching skills / job.
- Team's capacity for work.
- Sense of humour
Ready to make the leap?
By following those few recommandations, you can implement your action plan, act to avoid the considered risk, approve your recruitment once and for all.
And now, play on! We are waiting for your feedbacks! Leave your comments here or on Twitter @stormzplatform.
A decision meeting in mind? Think about Stormz! And if you need help to try this new approach, do not hesitate to contact us to exchange!