Running Great Meetings and Workshops For Dummies

Chapter 2

Planning Your Meeting

In This Chapter

Reflecting on your meeting objective

Writing agendas

Planning for and managing personal energy

If you’re going to hold a meeting, you have to have a plan. It’s as simple as that. And the more complicated your meeting or workshop, the more complicated your plan will necessarily be. Sounds like common sense, but common sense is pretty uncommon when it comes to meetings and organisations! So this chapter helps you think through all the things you need to plan to make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible on the day. Your approach has to be that you have a plan in order to deviate from it at best or abandon it at worst. But you never ever make anything up as you go.

That means you have to think through everything you need to do, create a robust agenda and worry about all the possible contingencies. Because meetings are the living proof of the old 80:20 rule working at its best. Eighty per cent of your meeting and workshop success lies in the preparation. Only 20 per cent rests with what actually happens on the day.

So the old Boy Scouts adage, ‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’ couldn’t be more true for when it comes to getting ...