Meeting facilitation
How to run a meeting that earns the hour it takes from everyone in it.
The cost is larger than it looks
A one-hour meeting with eight people is a working day. That is the number to hold in your head when deciding whether something needs a meeting at all, and it is the number most agendas are not written against.
- Multiply the length by the attendee count before you send the invite.
- If the answer is a working day, the agenda should be worth a working day.
- The cheapest facilitation decision is not holding it.
An agenda is a set of questions, not a set of topics
"Roadmap" is a topic and tells nobody what will happen. "Do we cut scope or move the date?" is a question, and everyone can tell in advance whether they are needed to answer it. Questions also make the end condition obvious: the meeting is over when they are answered.
Open with something that is not the agenda
The first two minutes of a remote meeting are spent waiting for stragglers and watching people unmute. Filling that with something light is not a waste — it is the only unstructured time the group gets. Keep it short and never make it a performance; the goal is warmth, not participation under observation.