Paul Sloane shares two methods that transformed his corporate meetings: Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, which speeds up decisions by separating viewpoints, and the Disney Method, which generates and critiques ideas systematically. Both cut through rambling discussions and dominant personalities to make meetings faster and more inclusive.
Chapters
I've had quite a long career in the corporate world, and I've been to many meetings. And in my early days, I found meetings very frustrating. When I went along there as an attendee, I would often find that they were rambling, ineffective. People argue, get distracted, go down sidetracks. And even when I was a marketing director and then a managing director running the meetings, I very often found they weren't productive. And that we didn't get the full range of views. And in some meetings there were too many arguments, not enough progress, especially if there were 2 big personalities in there. And in other meetings there wasn't enough discussion. I remember one meeting when I was vice president of a US software company, and we had a meeting of the senior executives, and the CEO, who was a very forceful character, came up with an idea which it turned out was a very bad idea, but nobody would contradict him. Nobody would go against him. They wanted to be supportive, and we went ahead with that idea, and it was disastrous. So I carried on like this, and then I started to train people in lateral thinking and creativity and leadership, and I came across de Bono's 6 Thinking Hats, something which had been around for a while. I'd known about, other people had known about, but I'd never really tried it properly. And then I tried it and I read the book, I tried it properly with a group, and the results were remarkable. We covered the issue in significant detail from all points of view and came to good decisions quite rapidly. So I was very impressed with the effectiveness of that method and how it speeded up meetings and made them more effective, more decisive. And then a German company said to me, Paul, can you train us in the Disney Method? And to be honest, at the time I'd never heard of the Disney Method, but of course, being a professional trainer, I said, yes, I can. And then I set out to find out about it. I read up all about it, and I discovered this was another very powerful meeting tool, a very powerful management tool for running meetings, especially if you're looking for creative ideas and you want to review them supportively but critically. And then when I was giving a workshop on these 2 methods, somebody else mentioned the the NHS method which they had used in the National Health Service in England and found it very effective. So I've put all of these methods into this course which is called Powerful Thinking Methods for Better Meetings and Better Decisions, and I think you'll find that these are very, very useful, powerful tools. They're, they're secret weapons in the corporate battlefield in terms of getting more things done more quickly and having more effective meetings. I think you'll find them terrific tools that you can use every day at work.
