If you missed the first thrilling installment, you can go read it now.
Disclaimer: I loathe parliamentary procedure in general and Roberts Rules in particular, and this post will not deal with the machinations that I believe silence many voices, despite their intent. Whether any of the techniques I describe here can fit into a more structured meeting I leave it to the reader to decide.
"Occupy Winston-Salem" by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Down to Business
If you are running a meeting, you are (or should be) trying to do one of two things:
plan a thing
solve a problem
The thing might be an event or a new project or a decision that requires a vote; the problem might be a service that isn’t working or a personnel issue. It is possible there are other purposes for a meeting, but I’d urge you to consider the “is this a meeting that could have been an email?” question when contemplating holding a meeting that falls outside the plan/solve options.
I come from the activism world, from the “freedom is an endless meeting” world, from the consensus world, from the human microphone and hand signals1 world, if not quite from the all-time classic SDS meeting where they spent 24 hours deciding whether they could take a day off to go to the beach.
Most people do not come from that world and, understandably, do not want to inhabit, but there are a few things I think we can take from it.
The Stack
If you’re running a large meeting and there are a lot of people who want to talk, I highly recommend a thing called the stack that I learned from the ISO. Basically you get the names of everyone who wants to talk, write them on a chalkboard or a white board or a flip chart or whatever you have handy and then call on the people in order and let them have their say, preferably with a timer.
You can repeat the stack as often as needed, and you can dictate (usually at the beginning of the meeting) that people need to respect that everyone needs a chance to speak and that they might not get called on for every single point if it’s prohibiting other people from talking.
I love the stack because it makes clear who’s up next, who’s talked before, and the timer provides some incentive for each speaker to make their point succintly.
Reiteration
Reiteration isn’t a tactic or technique I learned anywhere I can remember, but I must have picked it up from people I encountered along the way. If you are running the meeting, whenever there’s a pause, take a moment to summarize and reiterate what people have said so far. Doing so reminds participants of what has already been said and helps them digest it. I’ve noticed that, when done well, it moves the meeting along and often helps prevent the laborious retread through points that have been made already.
Assignments
One might think that making sure everyone knows what they are supposed to do as a result of the meeting would go without saying, and yet it needs saying again and agian and again. At the end of the meeting, reiterate who is doing what, and by when. When I was running event type meetings, that usually meant A will write the press release; B will reserve the room/get the permit; C will make the flyer; D, E, and F will put up the flyer in places W-Z; G will rent the megaphone/get the refreshments/whatever; etc., etc., etc. Sure, people will forget and not follow through and you’ll have to remind them, but reminding them to begin with goes a long way toward preventing later forgetfulness—or to the all too frequent problem of not assigning tasks at all.
To Reiterate
I am not an expert. I have no degree in the subject of meetings. But I have run a lot of meetings. The longest, I think, was about two hours (eighteen or twenty people meeting a week after 9/11 trying to figure out how to stop the war—I’ll forgive the length on account of how that’s an impossible task for eighteen or twenty people in a small college town). The shortest were about twenty minutes, which is about how long it took for four or five people to plan an annual library event that followed the same format every year. If the meeting had a set schedule, I kept to it (a 5:30—7:00 pm meeting convened at 5:31 and conclueded at 6:58).
I have over three decades of experience attending meetings and more than two decades running them. I think at one point OKCupid had a question about your superpowers. I listed running meetings and finding dresses at Goodwill, and I’ll stand by those.
As with anything in life (and certainly anything I write), you can take or leave what I’ve outlined here. But I hope you’ll consider it.
There was a late 1990s-early aughts version of the hand signals thing called twinkling that everyone hated but that weirdly showed up again in Zoom meetings in the form of thumbs up emojis and actual thumbs up, smiles, nods, and so on on the calls.