Something that at first glance might look as a great way of solving problems or pushing projects forward is pre-appointed “grand”-meetings where everyone is invited and the agenda is to come up with ‘big solutions’ and ‘great progress’.

Just by pre appointing the meeting will make the majority of people passive, the people calling the meeting will sit on the majority of the information and be prepared but the rest will await the meeting and then follow, participate but still follow. After the meeting everyone often feels secure with the ‘high level’ of the outcome since everybody participated and out of that only the best ideas come.

I’d say; wrong.

The meeting itself might be the monkey wrench that keeps you and your group from coming up with the best and most brilliant solutions.

Reasons:

1. People act different in groups and when facing problems. Some people act fast and some has to digest information and have a little time to come up with their brilliant output.

2. Ideas and creativity comes uninvited. It does not care about you sitting in a meeting with 8 other people. It might decide to come knocking tuesday night 22.00 when you are taking a shower. So, bulls eyeing everyones creative peaks during a meeting is impossible.

3. These types of meetings tend to, in practice, be more closed than open since the goal is to come up with solutions for and decide on large issues. Anything coming up before or after the meeting is often killed off with “… that has to wait until the meeting” or “… already decided”.

4. In most meetings Mr or Ms Large Mouth (mostly Mr) tends to take over and start poison the outcome, dictating views, strategies and ideas.

Instead of having those grand meetings, start up, say two weeks before the solution has to be delivered, an online forum/discussion where everyone can, at their own pace, read through and come up with feedback and input. This will let everybody digest and evaluate information, it will also prepare everybody for the decisions that has to be made so instead of one or two hyped up persons in a meeting with 6 or 7 followers you get 8 or 9 people really involved in the process. And I bet that everyone will have at least three or four creative peeks during that two week period. Another major advantage of the forum is that you can easily recap what has been said earlier (something that is considered a major interruption in a physical meeting).

Finish off the forum/discussion with a short and effective meeting where you all agree and decide the final details based on the outcome of the forum/discussion.