Planning The Meeting

By admin

In planning the meeting, we use our three fundamental principles of communication: making the connection, establishing the flow, and providing the reinforcement. We make sure we understand our specific role in the meeting, and prepare any handouts, documents, or presentation material, using these three principles. Even if we are only going to be talking, without the aid of documentation or charts, we follow these principles, and may even prepare a script. Although the entire event will be much less controllable than documents or presentations, we need to have a plan for making our points. Our three principles allow us to do this.

The main thing we need to understand about meetings is that the flow is difficult to manage. Obviously, if we go to a meeting and introduce a few topics, we must have a connection between those topics and some area or areas of interest, and we must provide reinforcement or substance behind those topics. So connection and reinforcement are as essential as ever, and are easy to achieve using the documentation or presentation techniques outlined in Parts I and II. However, flow is difficult to control. Even with a set agenda and a fairly dominant meeting chairperson, attendees will tend to get off on tangents. So we cannot count on being able to present or discuss a long string of topics with some preconceived flow properly relating them to one another. For example, let’s assume we outline how object recognition can enhance medical imaging, then talk about how neural networks can achieve object recognition, and finally discuss how our particular neural-network designs work. Our anticipated flow therefore has the following sequence:

1. How medical imaging is enhanced by object recognition

2. How neural networks can accomplish object recognition

3. How our neural networks work

Now that’s a good and logical flow, isn’t it? We start with the problem, introduce a technique to solve it, and then rationalize the technique. We flow from the need to the solution and detail the solution. But the problem is that good and logical things are usually incompatible with meetings. For example, maybe the chairperson has decided to let everyone talk about different ways to enhance imaging, then about methods to achieve the enhancements, and finally about how those methods work. Also, let’s assume that this chairperson is not opposed to sidetracks and excursions into other topics, and that outside interruptions will occur. Then, the sequence of events that will really transpire at the meeting is something like this:

1. Introductions and opening remarks

2. Ways to enhance medical imaging

   1. Somebody else’s method

   2. Anecdote about somebody’s aunt’s surgery

   3. Somebody else’s method

   4. How medical imaging is enhanced by object recognition (our first topic)

   5. Interruption by the boss

   6. Chairperson tells a joke (after the boss leaves)

   7. Somebody else’s method

3. Methods to achieve the enhancements

   1. Rationale for somebody else’s method

   2. Interruption by the boss’s boss, whose son, Junior, is the star of the local high school football team

   3. Discussion about last Friday’s football game, and how Junior spent most of the time on the bench (after the boss’s boss leaves)

   4. How neural networks can accomplish object recognition (our second topic)

   5. Rationale for somebody else’s method

   6. Speculation about how medical imaging will probably be used to diagnose the football player who got smashed in last Friday’s football game

   7. Rationale for somebody else’s method

4. How the methods work

   1. How somebody else’s technique works

   2. Complaint session about local network management

   3. How somebody else’s technique works

   4. How our neural networks work (our third and final topic)

   5. Interruption by someone who claims to be a boss, yet nobody recognizes this person

   6. Speculation about a hostile takeover by the person who claimed to be a boss (after this person leaves)

   7. How somebody else’s technique works

5. Meeting ends

You see the point here. If we have a flow across multiple topics, it is going to get pretty well shattered, scattered, or splattered in the actual meeting. So we simply plan for that. We plan our documents (handouts for the meeting), and any material we might show (such as charts) using the same methods discussed in Parts I and II for documents and briefings, with one major difference: we make all the charts and handouts (documents) short, easy to understand, and self-contained with strong links to our other topics. We plan our discussions accordingly. Then, despite the fact that they are addressed among many other topics and perhaps even reordered, our topics will make sense. In other words, our flow is replaced by reminders, within both our material and our planned talks, to make sure all the relationships among topics we want to achieve are intact and are executed. It’s a simple matter of adding enough reminder material to get the meeting’s participants back on our track (well, that train got back in here again, didn’t it?). Just think about what you would need in a handout, chart, or talk to be reminded of its predecessor, despite interruptions in between, and put that in the front end of the material. It works, and your material and discussions will have a cohesiveness that others’ will lack. Your topics will be remembered and so will you, which will make it more difficult for you to hide and avoid interruptions. But that’s the price of fame, I guess.