The Problem with Most Meetings and How to Fix it—With Stickies
At this very moment, millions of people are sitting in meetings simply waiting for their turn to speak. They wait for their “airtime” while the “audience” listens passively to the “broadcast”.
The problem with most meetings is that they comprise of people just sitting around and talking. One or two loudmouths take up all the time while everyone else keeps their thoughts to themselves.
As a result most people believe what is said and done in meetings isn’t actually that important. The real discussion happens afterwards. At lunch, during walks, smoke breaks, carpools, and over private chats.
That’s when people get to truly say what they think, and many of them have some really damn good points.
But sadly, all of that creative energy simply disappears into the ether.
It’s tempting to blame meetings themselves as distractions from the “real work”. But ignoring the quality of your meetings could cost you more than just time.
Meetings shape your work culture more than you think.
For a typical employee, meetings with managers, leaders and stakeholders are a window into parts of the company they don’t get to see every day.
Their experience of those meetings become generalized into an overall impression of the company and their place in it.
If they feel engaged, included and productive, they will leave that meeting with a positive impression of the company.
I’m in good hands, and I made a difference.
If they feel disengaged, ignored or dismissed, they will leave that meeting with a negative impression of the company.
Can I really trust those in power? Do I matter to them?
But despite the importance of meetings — especially in cultivating morale — few people are ever taught how to run a good meeting. And even fewer are taught tools and methods to run different types of meetings effectively.
If you lead meetings, read on. This article will help you transform culture-killing, waste-of-time, “airtime” meetings into morale-boosting, productive and collaborative work sessions.
With, yep, stickies.
Stickies: A Powerful Thinking Tool for Teams
Why stickies? Two reasons.
1. Everyone gets to provide value at the same time.
Never ask, “What do you think?” to a group of people in a meeting. It all but guarantees low quality responses.
There’ll be a period of silence followed by a few comments, to which you feel compelled to respond on the spot. Often, this dissuades others from commenting further.
By asking for voices to fill the air, you unwittingly initiate an “airtime meeting”. It is the most inefficient way to elicit responses and ideas from a group.
Instead, give each person a pad of stickies and a marker.
Ask them again, “What do you think? Write down any feedback, questions, ideas, concerns onto your stickies. One per sticky.”
After five minutes, each person has a pile of stickies in front of them. And you have successfully extracted 10x more information about what’s going on in their heads regarding your topic.
2. The focus is on the problem, not on each other.
Place yourself in the shoes of one of your meeting attendees.
You have a concern about the topic, but the meeting leader seems really excited about it. You have no idea what anyone else thinks.
If you speak up, you’ll draw attention to yourself. You might be judged as pessimistic or negative. You might be expected to defend your point. Or you might be ignored or dismissed altogether, and that would be embarrassing.
Is it worth it?
Whether or not any of that would actually happen, it’s just so much easier to stay quiet.
Delightfully, however, you don’t have to make that choice.
You simply write your concern onto a sticky note and move on to write many other sticky notes, too.
Instead of getting preoccupied about how your comment would be received for 5 minutes, you generated 10 sticky notes with useful questions, ideas, and comments.
On the wall, your stickies sit equally among all the other stickies. And you stand side by side with everyone facing them. Yours and everyone else’s focus stays on the topic instead of each other.
What sorts of situations are good for stickies?
No matter what your meeting objective is, your goal should always be to enable the group to do their best thinking in the shortest amount of time.
Use stickies anytime you need help generating lots of “data points” in a short amount of time.
I don’t mean data in the quantitative metrics kind of way. I mean the stuff inside other people’s heads you’d like to know about.
When you need to identify themes and patterns.
When paleontologists first found dinosaur bones, they had no idea what the final shape of the skeleton would be. But they kept digging for bones until enough of the picture was filled in for them to begin creating theories for how the bones fit together.
If you have lots of information, but no big picture, reach for the stickies.
When you need to fill in the blanks of an already existing structure.
How will you actually achieve this quarter’s goals? The Gantt chart you drew alone in your cubicle is probably wildly inaccurate. Get the people who are actually going to do the work tell you what the timeline should include.
If you have a big picture, but no details, reach for the stickies.
3 Steps for Using Stickies in Meetings
- Provide a thinking prompt.
- Write stickies.
- Arrange stickies.
Step 1: Provide a thinking prompt.
Even if you’ve invited all the right people to the meeting, you may still need to provide some context.
“The VP has asked me to put together a set of best practices for our sales partners in other regions based on whatever it is we’re doing that is making us the top sales team in the country.”
Then, ask the group to provide you with data — pieces of information in their heads. Notice that you are not asking the group, “What are our best practices?” That would be premature.
Instead, you ask: “So I’d like to know: What do you think are all the factors that contribute to our success?”
Now, if you stopped here, there’d be a period of silence followed by a trickling of comments.
But you won’t stop here. You’ll go on to say:
“I’m going to pass out some stickies to everyone. I’d like you to write down every tip, tool, technique, skill, attitude, organization style, and anything else you think is relevant. One per sticky.”
Make sure your prompt is an open-ended question (make it start with “What” or “How”). And write it up on the whiteboard along with examples of what you’d like them to write.
Step 2: Write stickies.
Set some ground rules to maximize the group’s output:
“Don’t worry about overlap or being original. Be as exhaustive and detailed as you can. If you’re not sure if it’s relevant, include it anyway.”
Pass out stickies. Set a timer for 5–10 minutes. Go. No discussion.
If someone stops writing, encourage them to keep going until time is up.
Step 3: Arrange stickies.
This is the fun part. This is what human brains were born to do. The act of looking for patterns and making groupings mimics the way we think and learn.
Ask everyone to put up their stickies. Encourage them to look at everyone’s stickies and work together to stick similar stickies together into clusters.
Start discussing. Take the lead in making clusters and naming the patterns you see.
Break up big clusters into smaller themes. Look for connections between seemingly unrelated stickies. Clusters will form a natural hierarchy based on the volume of stickies and the group’s intuition.
Lastly, give each cluster a title written in a form that answers your original question prompt. Take photos of the entire wall and of each cluster.
By the End
You should have an organized, prioritized map of the entire group’s response to your prompt.
Not only that, you’ll have a room full of people who are all on the same page.
Happy stickying!
Have a specific meeting situation you’d like to try using stickies for? Describe it in a comment, and I’ll try to help ya out.
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