The Accountability Experts define 25 Communication Ground Rules and 10 Accountability Ground Rules for creating a successful meeting. Here are the first 3 examples of each:
Communication Ground Rules
- Don’t interrupt when others are speaking
- Give everyone equal “air time”; don’t monopolize the discussion
- No outside interruptions (cell phones, etc.)
Accountability Ground Rules
- Have an agenda and a set of ground rules.
- Clearly designate a meeting facilitator.
- Institute a clear process for setting and confirming meeting dates, times and locations.
See the complete list of Communication and Accountability Ground Rules.
If some of the Accountability Experts Guidelines feel unattainable in our easily distracted world, Talking Moose Media agrees. We were all taught the right way to have a great meeting, yet rarely have any three of those elements together at the same time. Enter Meeting 3.0. Meeting 3.0 embraces our distracted contemporary culture and uses our interconnectedness to help achieve meeting and business goals. Meeting 3.0 is defined by three simple ideas:
- Embrace the meeting within the meeting.
- Curate in real time the meeting within the meeting.
- Encourage and curate group participation where everyone can see (Google doc, white board or flipchart).
Embrace Meeting Within The Meeting
A meeting’s pillars used to be
- Like minded people.
- Gathering at a given time.
- At a particular place to discuss ideas.
- In order to make progress against stated goals.
The New Meeting
Increasingly “meeting” is defined less by place as some meetings have people logging into virtual “Google Plus Hang Outs”, joining via Skype or Twitter.
Social Media is the other new wrinkle. Even as you meet, some may be sharing “tweetable moments”, receiving text messages or be engaged in other conversations.
Meeting 3.0 At Conferences
If you are speaking at a conference we suggest taking three steps to insure your presentation goes well:
- Set up a special hashtag for your presentation.
- Curate tweets to fire during your presentation.
- Hire a “real time curator” to monitor your hashtag and the meeting hashtag.
- Determine real time social signals to speed up or move on to Q&A.
Meeting 3.0 – Smaller Meetings
Smaller meetings suffer from the same distractions. Encouraging active participation by all present is the best defense against losing the attention span of your attendee. We suggest any meeting has a “Meeting Champion” charged with meeting facilitation and documentation in media accessible to all (white boards, flip charts or a Google doc).
Modifying Smaller Meetings For Meeting 3.0
- Establish a Meeting Champion to facilitate the conversation on public media.
- The Meeting Champion opens by re-stating meeting objective and checks agenda.
- Check in and ask if there are Agenda modifications (first chance to participate).
- Curate what each attendee wants to accomplish on a white board or flip chart or other media accessible to all meeting attendees.
- Meeting Champion encourages collaboration by asking a relevant question.
- Meeting Champion curates brainstorm on a group accessible medium (white board or flip chart).
- If the meeting is virtual or some of it is virtual establish a hashtag or email to provide feedback or ask questions.
- As brainstorming begins to wrap, mashup collaborative ideas and prioritize action steps with assigned champions.
Medium Sized Meeting 3.0 Meetings
If a meeting grows beyond a handful of people you may need to mashup rules between handling social media at a conference and a small meeting. If you have more than ten people in your meeting assume some will be on social media during your meeting. Best move is to assign a hash tag and appoint a social media curator who can watch the #hashtag and respond or share content to the “meeting within a meeting”.
The larger the meeting the more attention needs to be paid to Meeting 3.0’s social dimension. Even if your meeting isn’t social keep in mind that you may want to share key ideas or action steps on your blog or via social media.
Sharing early stage product development builds a tribe of support that can make introduction of any new idea, product or meme easier as Quirky, Threadless and Pebble Watch prove. Threadless only produces t-shirts that have a built in market. Quirky exposes every phase of the product development cycle to encourage social shares and tribe building and The Pebble Watch team earned $11M for their cool web watch.
If you are interested in the business of benefits creating meeting 3.0 meetings can provide, contact Nikol Murphy, President of Talking Moose Media.
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