Meeting Design Blog

Bad meetings are a pain felt universally. You might be feeling it this very minute.

A poorly conceived or executed meeting can have repercussions far beyond the work effort it supports, so I’m keen to examine the user experience design of meetings themselves. I’m very excited to share that I’ll be doing this in a book for Rosenfeld Media entitled Meeting Design. The book will apply design rigor, iteration, and creativity to an everyday thing — the meeting — to yield some better results in our projects and our work cultures.

Popular opinion in design literature dismisses meetings as a necessary evil; toxic to the work itself. I think we can do better. We can rebuild meetings. We have the design smarts to do it. We can make them better, stronger, and faster at getting to results. This book collects principles, frameworks, and tactics that balance the desire for participation against measurable outcomes and effective ways to make decisions as a group. My hope is that such a collection will help people who lead meetings as much as those who prefer to keep their heads down and get some work done.

I’d love to hear from you. What would you like to read about in a book that applies design thinking to meetings? What do you want to change about meetings in your culture, and how can improving the design of the meetings help you?