Area 1, Reasons and Objectives
- Why are you holding your meeting?
- Outcomes, impact and behaviour change
- Meeting reason: Information transfer
- Meeting reason networking
- Meeting reason: uniting your participants
- Meeting reason: motivation
- Meeting reason: decision-making
- Meeting reason: routine
- Designing meetings about strategy
- Making meetings memorable
Area 2, Production
- Getting started the right way
- Who has the final say about the meeting?
- Budgets: spending rationale
- Face-to-face, online or hybrid?
- Working with suppliers
- Venue choice and achieving your objectives
- Room set-up and achieving your objectives
- Food, beverages and meals
- Big meetings: crowd power
- Multi-day meeting programmes
- Sustainability
Area 3, Participants
- Who should attend the meeting?
- Whetting participants' appetites for your meeting
- Using diversity to unlock serendipity
- Meetings for participants from different countries
- Interaction? Yes, but for what purpose?
- Engagement must come to life
- Giving shape to your sessions: formats
- Participant bodies: what can they tell us?
- Conducting the meeting programme
- Managing clashes of Interest
Area 4, Content
- Speakers
- Q&A
- Spicing up content
- Connecting meeting content to a bigger picture
- How much fun can serious meetings be?
- Sensitive issues: elephants in the room
- Openings
- Closings
- Rituals and routines in meeting programmes
Meetings, by Design or by Default is an eminently practical book. It takes the reader by the hand and offers concrete advice on upgrading meetings with a view to improving their outcomes. Over 100 pieces of advice, in fact.
Meetings, by Design or by Default condenses the authors’ more than twenty years of pioneering work as meeting designers. It argues convincingly that meetings can be better – better in the three Es: Effectiveness, in Efficiency and in Energy. To create such meetings, the authors here share the design methodology they have developed in the course of their over 50 years as practitioners.
If you feel that the meetings you are holding have the potential to perform better on the three Es, this book tells you how to get that done.
The Extroduction is written by Martin Sirk.
