Yes, an objective and an agenda can help you run an effective meeting, but these two tools – a destination and a pathway – are much better.

WHY THIS MATTERS: Professionals today spend 23 hours in meetings each week, up from 10 hours in the 1960s. Unfortunately, 71% of managers feel meetings are unproductive and inefficient.

Many have tried to make meetings more productive by requiring leaders to create an objective and an agenda. And almost everyone senior enough to run a meeting knows these 2 tools and agrees they are valuable.

Yet we continue to languish in unproductive meetings. Partially because many don’t create an objective and agenda despite knowing it will help. Partially because these tools are like using a screwdriver when you can use a drill.

REPLACE OBJECTIVES WITH DESTINATIONS: Running a meeting is about getting a group of people to move together toward a shared goal. While the objective explains the reason for the meeting, it only implies the shared goal. Consider this objective:

Determine how our organization can shift public opinion to be more favorable to our industry.

This objective gives the meeting direction, but it doesn’t explicitly state the items you hope you have when the meeting ends. The destination – the output of the meeting – is:

3-6 ideas our group could consider for a public influence campaign

Note the difference. The objective is abstract and hard to measure. The destination is concrete and easy to measure. A destination makes it easier to tell if the conversation is on track and if the meeting is successful. Clarity enables focused facilitation, while ambiguity enables distraction.

To create a destination, ask yourself: What do I want to leave the meeting with?

REPLACE AGENDAS WITH PATHWAYS: Agendas are typically bullet point lists of topics that will be discussed. Agendas help structure meetings, but they don’t focus the meeting leader on the most difficult and important task of a leader – moving people toward the destination.

To move people to the destination, you need to understand where participants are currently and determine the best way to get them to the destination. Creating a pathway shifts the leaders’ mindset from “what needs to be covered?” to “how will we move participants from where they are to the destination”?

Without a pathway, you may start the meeting described above with the question: “What are 3-6 ideas our group could consider for a public influence campaign?”

But there’s a chance all you’d get are blank stares because people haven’t been spending their days coming up with public influence campaigns. Developing the pathway is about setting participants up to successfully reach the final destination.

To do this, the pathway goes further than the agenda, answering the question of topic and format. Format can be as important as topic in moving someone forward. Consider a range of formats for each step in your pathway:

• Individual reflection
• Pairs
• Small groups
• Full group with individual activity (e.g., everyone posts 3 ideas on the board)
• Full group discussion

Consider the pathway for the destination mentioned above:

Destination: 3-6 ideas our group could consider for a public influence campaign

WHEN TO USE THESE TOOLS: If objective and agenda are screwdrivers, destination and pathway are drills. They are much more capable of making a meeting successful, but they’re also not always necessary. For a quick check-in, you may only want to pick up the screwdriver of objective/agenda. For the bigger, longer, complicated meetings, try out these tools and let us know how it goes.

If you have questions about how to use these tools or would like to learn more about how we could work with your teams to reduce time in meetings and make meetings more effective, send us a note.