This post describes an exercise that can be used by participants in meetings in order to make them more effective.

As a best practice, before conducting official business in a meeting, it is usually helpful to find out what the participants’ expectations are. For example:

• What is the goal of the meeting?
• What are the required outputs?
• What is required of the participants?
• How will things proceed?

However, if you start asking these questions directly and launching a discussion over them, you risk the meeting getting off-track and never getting to the main point of business.

I suggest you use the following exercise to gather information: have participants write the answers to these questions down. This format allows each participant to think about their own answers and ideas, to share those ideas with others, to be listened to and be heard, and finally, understand fully what to expect from the meeting.

With this technique, you should be able to achieve the following:

• Everybody will have a chance to speak up and voice their opinion several times and with different people
• Opinions won’t be judged or commented upon
• Participants will find out if they share similar views and/or hear different points of view
• The participants will be familiar with one another’s responses and ideas
• During the final sharing session, the facilitator/organizer summarizes everyone’s contributions

This is just one of dozens of facilitation techniques described in ICAgile Facilitation Training provided by Luxoft Training. Check out our next session and upgrade your skills.

Svetlana Mukhina
Agile Coach