Meeting Design: For Managers, Makers, and Everyone

Kevin M. Hoffman

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

Meetings don’t have to be painfully inefficient snooze fests —i f you design them.

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. The book applies 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. 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. 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.

Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive.

Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success.