Sunday, February 20, 2011

Hold Conversations, Not Meetings

Meetings can take up a good part of the day of in-house counsel.  It is fairly common knowledge that effective meetings require a bit of planning and management.  Indeed, the more topics there are to cover, the more important structure becomes.  But structured meetings are not always conducive to problem solving.  "The best way to energize thinking is to hold conversations rather than meetings," urges this blog post from Sydney, Australia:  Hold Conversations, Not Meetings.

The advantage of having more conversations (and fewer meetings) is that "you will find that people begin to solve [the] wickedest problems faster, and in a richer way."  The author describes a conversation as "informal," "alive and interesting," and "even a little dangerous" at times.  For those who (like me) like structure, the author advocates that you try experimenting with a new format to see what happens," by replacing the agenda with questions.  Hold Conversations, Not Meetings.  You may want to give this a try (or suggest it to some of your meeting leaders).

This summary was prepared by Perry Cone and posted at www.leadinginhouse.com/

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