Run a real meeting from agenda to notes, then review how it went a week later.
Run one meeting for real, from the agenda you send out to a review you write a week after it. Practice is what changes how you run meetings; reading about them changes very little on its own. Allow about 45 minutes of your own time across two weeks, plus the time spent in the meeting.
The first time you send an agenda built on outcomes, name the decider aloud and read actions back to the room, it will feel a little awkward. The meeting will also finish differently from the ones you usually sit through. You do this once, properly, using the tools from this module.
The meeting doesn't need to be an important one. For a first attempt, a small meeting you fully control works better than a large one where a director is likely to take over. Possible choices are a weekly team check-in, a project kick-off, a planning session for a team event, or a meeting with two other teams to agree a handover. Two conditions apply. At least three other people must attend, and there must be at least one decision to make. A meeting with no decision leaves you nothing to close.
Choose one you already own, or one you can offer to run within the next two weeks. If you don't chair meetings yet, ask your manager whether you can run one. You might put it like this: "Could I run Thursday's planning meeting? I'm working on chairing skills and I'd like to try an agenda and notes format." Most managers agree, since it saves them work.
Next, test whether the meeting should happen at all, using the questions in Lesson 6.1, Decide if this needs to be a meeting at all. If you find it could be an email, that is worth knowing, but choose a different meeting for this project.
Lesson 6.2, Write an agenda people can prepare for, gives you the format. In an outcome-based agenda, the purpose is a single sentence describing a result. Every item is phrased as an outcome or a question and carries a time and an owner, and decisions are placed first.
Send the agenda, along with any reading, no later than one working day ahead. Keep a record of who replied, who asked questions and, where your tools show it, who opened the attachments. This record is your baseline for whether people prepared.
Each of the following moves is taught in Lesson 6.3, Chair the room and the screen. In your opening, state the purpose, the outcomes and the decider, who is the person who settles things if people disagree. During the meeting, draw in at least one quiet person or one remote attendee by name, and give them a specific question. Maintain a parking lot, the list of off-topic items you set aside, and make sure people joining online can see it as well as those in the room.
With five minutes left, halt the discussion. Go through each decision and action, saying who owns it and by what date, then ask the group whether anything is wrong. Lesson 6.4, Close with actions, owners and dates, covers this read-back.
As soon as the meeting ends, while you still remember it clearly, write down for your review who you brought in, which items were parked and where the discussion drifted.
Daryl, 29, is an engineer at a utilities company (all of Daryl's details are an example, and your numbers will be your own). His team held a safety review every month. It normally took 90 minutes and finished without any clear changes, so he picked that one. The purpose he wrote was: "Decide which two of last month's near-miss reports need a procedure change, and who writes each change." His agenda had three items over 45 minutes. It went out on Tuesday for a Thursday meeting, with both reports attached.
His opening words were: "We're here to pick two near-miss reports for procedure changes and agree who writes them. Siva has the final call as safety lead." Ming had filed the loading bay report but had never spoken at the review. Daryl asked her about the report by name, and what she said settled the first decision inside a few minutes. A side argument about new gloves went into the parking lot. The group finished at 42 minutes, and Daryl's notes were out by 5pm that day.
When he checked a week on, three of his four actions were done. The fourth, a revised loading bay procedure, depended on input from a contractor, so he and its owner agreed a new date. In his review he recorded that the meeting took half its usual time and produced two procedure changes, against none from the previous three reviews. The one thing he would change was to send the reports two days ahead rather than one, since two people admitted they had read them on the way in.
Your notes go out the same day, laid out as decisions, actions and parked items (the format from Lesson 6.4), and short enough to read on a phone.
Set a calendar reminder for one week later. On that day, mark each action as done, started or not touched. If a follow-up meeting is already booked, begin it with this check. If there isn't one, message each owner, along the lines of: "Checking in on the vendor quote from last Thursday, how's it going?"
You end up with four pieces. Keep them together in one document so you can reuse them in the course's final project:
the agenda you sent, with its purpose sentence and items phrased as outcomes the notes you sent, listing decisions, actions, owners, dates and parked items a line naming who you brought in and how each of them responded a review of about 150 words: how many actions were complete after a week, what went better than in your usual meetings, and the one thing you would change next time
If the meeting goes badly, you can still write a useful review from it, as long as you can explain the reasons.
Run one real meeting from start to finish using the tools from this module. Write the purpose and agenda, send it ahead, chair it, close it with read-back actions, send notes the same day, and check a week later how many actions got done. You finish with four documents: the agenda, the notes, a list of who you brought in by name, and a short review.
Run the meeting and send the notes. After a week, write a short review of which actions were completed and what you would change.
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