Kata 6

Kata 6 - Organizing meetings efficiently

"This meeting could have been an email!"

Meetings can be powerful tools for collaboration, but they often become boring, uninteresting or, in the worst case, pointless. This Kata is about how to make meetings more efficient and more effective.

Preparation (individual work)

• Read the Kata "Organizing meetings efficiently" (see below), do the exercises.
  Tip: You can find the complete text of the Kata after the agenda.

Agenda (circle/group work)

• Check-in: (10 minutes)
  What has been on your mind this past week in relation to digital collaboration?
  Two-minute timebox per Circle member.

• Main topic: (45 minutes)
  Present your results and findings from Kata 6 - Designing efficient meetings to each other and discuss them.

• Check-out: (5 minutes)
  What will you do before the next meeting?

Kata "Organizing meetings efficiently"

• Read through the basics in preparation:
  Organize meetings efficiently

• As a review, take another look at the theory under Communication - Topic area: Meetings.

• In Kata 4 - Choose a suitable channel, we asked you:
  "Does it have to be a meeting when everyone listens to one person speak?"
  Pick a meeting from the calendar from the last few weeks that you hosted and answer the following questions:

• How was the agenda for the meeting created?

• Were minutes / documentation of the most important findings create during the meeting? If so, how? and where are they now?

• Was it clear to all participants after the meeting what tasks had been defined?

• How could you have organized your meeting more efficiently?

• What points could you have clarified without this meeting?

• What information could have been shared with everyone beforehand?

Plan your next meeting taking into account the knowledge gained and experiences made so far. Share how it went in the next circle meeting.

If you want to do more:

• If you are planning a meeting with your team, create a shared document / OneNote page / wiki page for the meeting where you plan the topics to be discussed together before the meeting and use it to put together an agenda.

• For each item, consider whether it needs to be discussed "live" (synchronously) or whether it can be clarified (at least in part) in advance (asynchronously).

Tip: Whoever has placed an item on the agenda is also responsible as the topic owner, as is responsible for

• providing materials / documents for reading ahead of time, and

• moderating the agenda item during the meeting