Writing an attendee story

One of the things that I added a ton about is the attendee story, or really, how to write a better more useless agenda for your meetings.

I don't like the word agenda, since it's often misused, and it doesn't really cover the majority of the information you actually need to prepare for your meeting.

In the video (and the updated blog post), I describe the attendee story as having four key elements:

#1: The Why

You need to have a very good reason for having your meeting, a clear “why this meeting is necessary”.

With that why in mind you can define a clear purpose of the meeting, the single goal you want to achieve by the end of it.

#2: The What

Think of what you’d like to happen by the end of the meeting to be able to say that everyone’s time was used wisely.

Generally, it is some kind of artifact, the more tangible you can make it, the better.

To be able to identify a good WHAT of your meeting, you should use active words like ‘create’ or ‘decide’, and avoid words like ‘discuss’ or ‘share’.

#3: The Who

Think about who must be in the meeting to achieve the purpose and how you expect them to contribute.

This translates into clearly defining what each person you invite is supposed to get out of the meeting and what they are supposed to do during the meeting.

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Be as specific as possible.

#4: The How

Open conversation is not an appropriate way to conduct a productive meeting. You don’t have to have a workshop set up for every meeting, but you need to define how you are going to run it.

You need to have a plan for how you are going to drive the conversation during the meeting, and what kind of tools and practices you are going to use to help collect and organize people’s ideas.

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I hope that this can help you get the most out of every meeting you have.

Watch the full video in my blog 4 rules to follow to avoid useless meetings.

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