September 20th, 2007 in Management
Meetings Should End With Next Actions
After a few years studying the way creative teams work and developing excellent productivity and organizational solutions, Behance have a few tips regarding meetings.
Meetings that end without action steps are a waste of our time. When our Action Pads contain no action steps after a meeting, we realize that the meeting should have been a voice-mail or email. The lesson: Only call a meeting when you suspect that actions will come out of it.
Do you find any reason to hold meetings that don’t result in a list of actions?
Tip: Our Action Addiction – [Behance]
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Comments
Phill says on September 20th, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Hi,
I completely agree the last item on the meeting (even if informal between two of you)should be spent making sure the actions are all present and correct, better then than in a week when you can’t remember it was you, or what that item was about.
However, slightly off topic, but what are the pads shown in the picture?
Phill
craig says on September 21st, 2007 at 12:36 am
Behance also make great stationary. Those are their Action Pads:
http://www.behance.com/Outfitter
Dustin Wax says on September 21st, 2007 at 11:27 am
The first time I heard the phase “next action” was when I was working at a dot-com startup at the height of the Internet boom in 2000. If you have any experience with dot-com startups at that time, you ay recognize the picture of a chaotic workplace with a virtually flat org-chart (there were three levels: CEO, nearly everyone else, and admin assistants and sales officers) and no clear job descriptions. When I was offered the job, I had to *ask* for a job title, which was made up on the spot; I never had a written description of my job.
In any case, shortly after I started, NASDAQ crashed and it was decided, somehow, that it was time to get serious, and a marketing VP from Nielsen Marketing was hired on, and I was moved into the newly-formed marketing group. On his first day, we met to discuss current projects and give their status; as each person finished, he’d ask “Ok, what’s your next action?” At the end of the meeting, he reviewed all the NAs so far and listed a few more that hadn’t been claimed by anyone and asked “who’s going to do this?”
Here’s what happened: I went back to my desk with, for the first time since starting on, a clear idea of what I had to do over the next few days, why I was doing it, and how it fit with everyone else’s activities. Not only that, but I *ownd* my NAs, having made a commitment to them in the meeting. Just like that, we were *working*,instead of planning, figuring out how to do what we wanted to do, evaluating courses of action, etc.
Of course, all the positive action in the world wasn’t going to bring back the NASDAQ and the VC and the world of fast, easy money that had fueled the dot-boom and 9 months later we went dot-bomb and I was laid off. But I certainly learned a lot from working with someone who understood how to get things moving!