Running Great Meetings and Workshops For Dummies

Chapter 1

The Business Case for Better Meetings and Workshops

In This Chapter

Reviewing why people hate meetings

Recognising when people get a lot from their workshops

Understanding meetings and workshops: similarities and differences

Everything important that you’ll ever do at work involves other people. Even if a large chunk of your working day is solitary, at some point, colleagues, contacts, critics or clients come into the equation. They check in with you or you with them because everyone wants to be clear about who’s on track, who needs help, or who’s made fantastic progress. But doing this one person at a time is inefficient.

So you have a meeting.

In most of our organisations and certainly those where interesting knowledge-work is being done, complexity is the order of the day. What we all do has become more specialised, more process-oriented and more project-driven. This means lots of complex problem-solving and continuous learning as everyone pulls together to meet deadlines, respond to changing environments and maximise both performance and productivity. You simply cannot do this one person at a time.

So you get together for a workshop.

When you leave a meeting or a ...