How to revolutionise your meetings

At their best, meetings can be a space for collaboration, team-building and effective decision making, where everyone’s opinions are heard and ideas are shared.

But so many of our meetings miss out on their creative and strategic potential. This matters because bad meetings create weaker outcomes, and also because meetings are the cornerstone of team culture. In this sense, meetings are a form of world-making.

Isabella Gady, a Programme and Research Strategist at the New York systems design studio 3x3, shared her insights on how to revolutionise your meetings during a workshop on hosting more effective, fairer meetings. Catch her 10-minute talk here:

**1. Start with yourself **

Firstly, consider your positionality: the way you see and understand the world. It influences how you interact with others, make decisions, and interpret others’ actions. Reflecting on who you are, where you come from and what position you hold is crucial for considering the biases you might bring to a meeting. This is a challenging process — it requires you to confront some closely held beliefs.

Openly communicating this can help to demonstrate allyship and inclusion. For example, adding your pronouns to your video-call nametag indicates that you take gender inclusion seriously.

"Remember, the feeling that you bring to a meeting is often passed on to the people that attend."

If positionality concerns how you arrive to a meeting, then reflexivity concerns what you learn from it. You should look back at what went well, what didn’t go well, and how people reacted to the things you said and did. One way to get excellent insights on this is to ask for feedback from your colleagues. Listen out for responses that you didn’t expect: these are a great way to highlight blindspots. If you have time, add your feelings and reflections to a professional diary. Remember, the feeling that you bring to a meeting is often passed on to the people that attend.

When writing up key takeaways, get diverse inputs on how your summary of the meeting will be interpreted. An inclusive meeting needs a democratic write-up.

One last suggestion: record your meetings and watch them back. You might cringe at the thought of seeing a recording of yourself, but it’s really a valuable way of picking up on things you’d otherwise miss in the heat of the moment.

2. Be honest about inclusion

Many teams claim to run inclusive meetings, but often “inclusive talk” is just a thin veil over existing power structures. Inclusive meetings matter, not just from a sense of fairness, but because they are vital for improving problem-solving, team morale, attracting talent and unlocking creativity.

So how can you separate signal from noise regarding inclusion? Ask yourself some probing questions:

• Who is actually making decisions in a meeting?
• Where does power genuinely reside? Is power shared?
• Who is involved in the meeting? Who is missing?
• Who benefits from the meeting?
• Is the meeting accessible?
• Do people feel welcome to participate?

The answers to these questions will vary a lot depending on your context. Try to see how closely your intended power structures match up with the existing power structures in your meeting. As with positionality, simply acknowledging hierarchies within a group can help to build a more inclusive environment.

3. Embrace the magic of being human

Meetings aren’t just for checking off tasks methodically. The true value of meetings comes from the interactions between minds. And yet, so many of our meetings are filled with updates, reporting, and instructions. This isn’t a great use of valuable collaboration time.

Before any meeting, honestly ask yourself — do I need to have this meeting? Would the purpose of this meeting be more appropriate in a different format, like a recording?

When you’re considering what you want to achieve in a meeting, lean into human “superpowers”, like critical and strategic thinking or creativity. Let your meetings emphasise these qualities. Leave the rest for emails, instant messages, or shared documents.

In a virtual world, it’s also very important to consider the role that meetings can play in empathy and trust-building. Include time for people to get to know each other, even at the expense of efficiency. If you’re comfortable doing so, turn on your camera — face-to-face interactions are a vital ingredient for building human connections. A few minutes spent on icebreakers, pulse-checks or idle chatter can pay dividends in team cohesion.