Meetings drift from their original plan, so you need to set a clear target output, watch for deviations, decide whether to redirect or pivot to a new goal, then tell everyone what changed. This keeps the group aligned and on track.
Hi, and welcome to the 15 Steps for Meeting Success series. This is step number 9, adjust your meeting to stay on track. Now, why? Well, meetings rarely stay on track. There are all sorts of things that get in the way. We start a few minutes late, new topics come up, we go in different directions. It is very rare that things stay on track all the way through a meeting exactly as we planned right up front. And that assumes you've done the planning up How many meetings do we go to where there's no planning and it's not obvious whether we're on any kind of track at all? So meetings rarely stay on track, and during meetings, changes are often needed to the focus, to refocus people on the output that we want, to refocus their attention on the topic at hand. We need to make changes to the progress. Are we moving too slowly towards that output that we want? Do we need to move faster? And we might need to change the approach. Quite often, the plan that we have to deliver an outcome or an output from a meeting doesn't quite deliver what we want, so we need to change the approach. Maybe the activities and the progress isn't, isn't working for that group of people, and you need to make a tweak so that you can deliver what you need. These are regular things that need changing in meetings, and if you don't change them, if you don't make changes and adjust during your meetings, What's going to happen? Well, there's a 99% chance that your meetings will fail. I don't know if this is a completely accurate statistic, but all the meetings that I've been to that didn't adjust, that rigidly stuck towards what the original plan was with no deviation at all, did not succeed. Either they didn't produce the output they wanted, or they really annoyed the people that were in the meetings because it was so rigidly held to a structure, there was no opportunity to deliver something better or different than the original planned output. So don't let your meetings fail. Do allow them to adjust. But the thing is, how do you do it? How can you adjust and successfully adjust your own meetings? Well, I'd like you to visualize your meetings in this way. First of all, your meeting is a group of people trying to get to a particular output. And the very first thing you have to do is set that target output. Without a target, how do you know you're making progress towards it? And how do you know what to adjust? So step 1 is set that output, as we've covered in some of the previous steps. The 2nd step is to observe changes in direction. Conversations naturally move around, and they— the topics weave and change as the progress is made. But you need to observe that, and you need to observe it while thinking about, is the conversation still heading towards the output that we want at the end of this meeting? And if it's not, you have to ask yourself, is there a new output? Are we heading towards something different? You want to go over here, but actually you find yourself coming to this new place in the middle. And this is a critical decision point. You need to decide, do we continue to the original output or do we settle on the new output that's arisen and come to light during the discussion? If you don't adjust your meetings, you don't have this option. If you're aware of the need to adjust your meetings, you can spot when these moments happen. And what do you do? Well, if you need to continue to that meeting over the sort of the original output, need to continue to the original output, refocus the conversation on the original output. You can say to people, hey, we were heading over in that direction. Can we please continue back to produce the thing that we need to? That is an adjustment that you can only do when you recognize the conversation has gone off track, and then you allow the meeting and guide the meeting to its conclusion to produce the output that you want. Now, there's an alternative, which is you identify the new output and then you decide, yes, we're going to do something different, and at that point you adjust the focus in the meeting to the new output. Let everybody know and make it clear that there's a change. You're no longer going to produce what you originally set out to do, and if everyone is okay with that and it is more valuable to use the time for the new output, if you go through this and you decide, okay, we're going to go to a new place, that's okay, but do make sure that everybody understands so you don't have a room where some people are heading towards an original output and other people are heading towards something new. And if you do this, you will have successfully done step 9, which is adjusting your meetings to stay on track.
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