Tips for Communicators

Generate New Ideas with Mini-Retreats

Want to creatively examine problems or generate new ideas – without spending days away from the job?  Consider a “mini-retreat.”  This brief, but action-packed, activity can get you and your people focused on whatever need or opportunity happens to be facing you.

Schedule your mini-retreat in a corner of a staff meeting – say, 30 minutes of tight discussion.  Or use a series of focus questions to marshal wide-ranging thoughts on a topic of concern.  Or lead ten minutes of intense brainstorming.  Or split your people into two-person teams and give them a limited period of time to re-engineer a process.  Or turn your problem into a game, and build your mini-retreat around some simple competition.  Or give your people a short period of silence – and instructions to visualize solutions to a problem.

Whether you use any of these mini-retreat formats, or develop one of your own, the focused retreat can be a refreshing change of pace – and an ideal way to generate ideas and enthusiasm.

Turbo Charge Your Meetings

To make your meetings powerful and productive, use these unusual, but highly effective, techniques:

• When you must make a decision, first determine the decision method:  vote, consensus, delegation, or  empowerment of the chair, for example.
• When you’re trying to boost the pace of a short meeting, ask members to stand up.
• Refer issues to subcommittees – but then ask subcommittees to meet right then and there, and reconvene the meeting after a set period of time.
• Ask a member (possibly the chair) to follow up on to-be-completed tasks several days before the meeting.
• Place time limits on each agenda item.
• Instead of “minutes,” ask your meeting secretary to compile a brief summary of discussion and “action notes.”
• Appoint members to specialized functions, such as “timekeeper,” “facilitator,” “translator,” or “resource expert.”

Build Efficiency into Your Meeting

Whether it’s an editorial planning meeting or a general staff meeting, use these efficiency tips to get optimum results out of your gathering:

1. Create a "timed" agenda, with a specific number of minutes allotted to each agenda item.
2. Assign meeting-related tasks, such as research or audio-visuals, beforehand.
3. Create an objective or preferred outcome, for every agenda item.
4. If the meeting is intended to be short, stand throughout the meeting.
5. For discussion of problems or issues, present a series of pre-selected options – either to focus discussion on the most obvious solutions or to stimulate in-depth discussion.
6. Assign a clear action to one or more participants after every issue is addressed, and record it in the meeting notes.
7. Throughout the meeting, use "summative" statements to confirm the consensus of the group, and keep discussion moving.