Steps for successful meetings - Step 1: Define the Topic, Purpose, and Output

Hi and welcome to this series of 15 steps to run successful meetings. If you're interested in having a successful meeting at work, there are 15 steps in this series that will help you do that. Let's take a look at step number 1. Step number 1 is define the topic, the purpose, and the output of your meeting. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, the topic, purpose, and output are the 3 key pieces that you need to start and run a successful meeting. If you don't have these, you won't have the foundation of something that will be useful. So what are they? Well, the topic is the main area, theme, or thing that you're going to talk about. For example, you might be talking about a particular project or next month's budget or a customer or a situation you need to deal with, but everything in your meeting relates to one or more specific topics. If you've got a single topic meeting, you'll have a single topic, purpose, and output. If you have a multi-topic meeting, for example, a project update from different teams, there might be different topics which share a common theme and different purposes and different outputs. So the first thing is the topic. This is what we are gathered here to talk about. The second thing here is the purpose. This is why you're having the meeting and what the people in the meeting are going to do. For example, if you're kicking off a new project, the purpose might be to inform a group of stakeholders about the new work, or the purpose might be to identify the people who will work on the project. Purposes can include reviewing things, making decisions, fixing problems. There are lots and lots of different reasons that we come together in meetings, but we must have a very clear purpose. And then the last piece, and the most important piece, is the output. The output is the thing that you will produce in the meeting. It can be written down. It can be printed out. In fact, it's so important, I'm going to highlight it here. The output is the most important piece of these 3. You need them all, but if you don't have this, you can't have a successful meeting. The output is something that you can write down or print out. Even if it's a decision, choosing between 2 different options and you're going— the purpose of the meeting is to decide between 2 options and what you're going to do. The output is the decision about which option to take. And that is something you can write down or print out. Now, if you don't do this, if you don't define topic, purpose, and output before you start your meeting, you can't do the following things. You can't measure progress. You can't keep things on track or keep people focused. And you can't know that the meeting has been Now, what I mean by this is, if you don't know what the specific output you're going to produce is, how can you measure progress towards it? Without an output, you have no idea whether you are making progress towards something. Similarly, you can't keep things on track if you don't know where you're going. Having a topic puts a nice boundary around the meeting. People can't stray outside of it. Having a purpose gives focus, and people know why they're there. And the output— having a very clear output means you can measure the progress towards it, keep people focused on it, and keep on track towards those things. And you know whether the meeting has succeeded or not because you either have or do not have that particular output. So when you're doing this, how do you do it? How do you define what the topic, purpose, and output for your particular meeting are? Well, you can do it by answering 3 questions, and those 3 questions are: What is the main topic or theme? It's not a complicated question, but it's an important one. The second question here is, what is the main purpose? Why are we bringing this group together? What are they going to be doing? And the third question here is, what will the meeting produce? Could be just a couple of words or a sentence to answer each one of these. And if you have them, it will be clear what your meeting is about. Now, as a reminder, the output is something that can be written down or printed out, but it is a decision, a list, a series of actions, And the output is something that you will produce in your meeting. Now, let's take a look at an example. If I wanted to have a meeting in my own business for perhaps next week, here's what I could do to help myself plan. The topic is next month's budget. That's what we're going to be talking about. The reason we're talking about this topic— now we're on to the purpose— the purpose is to revise the plan Because of budget cuts, we have less money than we originally expected. And the output from this meeting is a new plan to fit with the new budget. So throughout that meeting, if we don't come out at the end of it with a new plan, the meeting hasn't been a success. And all the way through, I can measure that progress. So before I even set up the meeting, before I invite people, send out an invitation, I need to know what these 3 things are so that I'm well prepared to invite the right people and do all the other steps that we'll continue talking about in this series. So if you want to run successful meetings, the very first step you should take is this: define the topic, the purpose, and the output.