Running Effective Meetings For Dummies

Chapter 18

Ten Alternatives to Meeting in a Conference Room

IN THIS CHAPTER

Breaking the conference room routine

Embracing the idea of sunshine

Realizing meetings can be anywhere and everywhere

Ibet at least some of you reading this book thought this chapter might be ten ways to do something other than a meeting. For example, we could’ve listed ten different asynchronous communication options that you could use instead of meeting face-to-face, virtually, or hybrid. And, frankly, that might be a useful thing to do in a book that’s not about meetings, but in a book that’s about how to make asynchronous communication work.

Instead, this chapter is all about alternative locations. Options of places you could meet, connect, and engage with each other that are not the conference room. Sometimes the old standard conference room becomes stale. We get used to operating a certain way and we get into patterns that may or may not be effective. These patterns are actually cued up by the environments we are in.

That means that in the conference room, we fall into our own patterns of behavior, and it’s hard to break out of them. People expect you to sit in a specific spot and to behave the same ...