Almost every person, and certainly every business I work with, tells me that meetings are a big productivity drain that sucks the life out of getting things done within their demanding days.

There are, of course, many ‘Meetings Heroes’ within these businesses. You know – they are the people who plan and run their meetings well and, in turn, deliver their commitments from meetings within the expectations agreed.

2 things always fascinate me about this:

1 Almost everyone can name the Meeting Heroes they work with

2 Almost no one deliberately models (the grown-up word for ‘copies’) what these Heroes do!

Just recently I have been working on the challenges people face within their meetings, based upon our Making Meetings Smarter training programme (Please permit me a quick plug for this training which even the most sceptical or hardened corporate meeting survivalist finds useful!)

The recent problems I have been helping with are in relation to those meetings where the objective is to explore a specific situation and come up with some conclusions and a plan of action – as opposed to the regular catch-up, report and pick-up new actions type management or team meeting that is the bane of most peoples’ lives.

There are a number of approaches to managing these types of meetings and I just want to point you to one of the most powerful I know – Edward DeBono’s 6 Thinking Hats.

Now, to be clear – I am not an accredited DeBono 6 Thinking Hats trainer but I have used it enough in the real world of business meetings to be able to overview it s ‘Parallel Thinking Process’ to other hard pressed meeting managers and attendees and help them make it work for them.

If you want to explore our smarter meetings training – with or without expert input on the ‘6 Thinking Hats Parallel Thinking Process’ then just let me know

Meanwhile, you might find this 18 minute video on the 6 thinking hats process by fellow #IoDSurrey member and regular IoD 859 Breakfast attendee Paul Sloane useful.