Strategic Meeting Design
Planned and facilitated a 2-day in-person off-site for the EveryCampus Steering Committee and Operational Partners that resulted in 3 concepts being developed.
It began with: “Would you have some time to lead some discovery meetings in Florida in 2 weeks?”
You have to understand. I live in Madison, Wisconsin and it was late January. I would have gone to Florida even if the job was to be a coffee runner.
So, naturally I calmly said yes.
Context
I would be planning and facilitating the Annual Every Campus Steering Committee & Operational Partner Meetings
Unfortunately, that’s not a very catchy name.
What was the ask?
What is EveryCampus?
Every Campus is a collaborative initiative seeking God for revival by making gospel movements in every corner of every campus a possibility.
What was happening?
The Players
EveryCampus Steering Committee (ECSC) — 2–3 representatives from the main partners, InterVarsity and Cru.
Operational Partners — 2–3 people from each of the 3 vendors who provide web development, marketing, and data services to EveryCampus.
The Context
EveryCampus has gone through a few iterations of its strategy, and it was moving into what is now called “Every Campus 3.0”– shifting its strategy to working more with its network of partners.
In the past, when a new “version” came out, the operational partners would be gathered to talk about the major changes.
Discovery
Meeting Design is Design
While the interior activities are a little bit different, you can follow a similar design arc:
Discover — find out participant needs and goals, learn about prior meetings, etc.
Design — Start building the meeting agenda and exercises.
Develop–produce the slides, materials needed, etc.
Deliver — facilitate the meeting!
Discovery Questions
While I wasn’t able to meet with everyone on the Every Campus Steering Committee (more on that later), with who I was able to meet, I asked questions around these areas:
People– “Who’s in the room? What are they like? What power/gender dynamics are there? How familiar is everyone with each other? What do they care about?”
The journey — “What’s brought you to this moment? What’s next that these meetings need to build towards?”
Success — “At the end, what is the one thing you hope these meetings will accomplish?”
Previous meetings– “What did [previous facilitator] do well? “What has been a flop before? Are there landmines between groups or relationships to be aware of?”
Practical– “Who is getting food? What is the room like that we will be in? How much time do we have?”
Insights
Most of those participating were new to EveryCampus and new to each other — the vendors had switched out some of the persons on this account.
It is not a small thing for these operational partners to come out — one was flying in from Hawaii!
There was a tension to hold that ideas at this meeting wouldn’t necessarily go forward– the next set of meetings would be to gather ideas from field experts and then a third meeting would be held to bring the sets together to form a cohesive plan.
After reviewing, I could see that the the original meeting design–which was to give each operational partner 2 hours to share what was new in their industry, wouldn’t do everything the Steering Committee needed during this valuable (and frankly expensive) time, so we agreed I would totally rewrite the meeting design.
Design
We had a new set of goals that I designed our time against:
Strengthen working relationships
Strengthen the connection to EveryCampus
Hearing about new industry capabilities
Generating ideas and what it would take to execute those ideas from
New Goals
Detailed Agenda
I started putting together a very detailed agenda so that the Steering Committee would know exactly what to expect:
the time for an activity
what the outcome was
who would be leading it
how it worked
what supplies were needed
Overview
I also supplied an overview version to send in advance to the partners
If you’re just starting out on designing strategic interactive meetings. I highly recommend the books Sprint for a recipe to start with and then Gamestorming to expand your set of activities.
Building up my database of activities and their use cases has been probably my single greatest asset as a facilitator.
Deliver
There’s always curve balls.
You know what is true whether you’re creating a mobile app or facilitating a meeting? You will be thrown curve balls. In this case, there were a few:
Last minute adding some remote participants.
The room being booked over during my room prep time.
Hearing feedback too late with one of the members of the steering committee who hadn’t been on my planning meetings — there was a bump of misalignment.
I share all this because if you’re new to planning meetings, it’s always helpful to know what can potentially pop-up that you need to smoothly improvise against.
What makes it worth it
One of the activities was to create a concept for how we might invite more people into prayer walking. The ideation team for this prompt started their presentation by sharing they had decided to just pay people to take RVs around to every campus and prayer walk it. NOT! They explained that as they were playing with an idea that was silly to begin with, they realized what made this idea unsatisfying. The goal of prayer walking isn’t to just check off a campus — the goal is to get people connected to their local campus. So they reframed their own prompt into, “how might we invite more people to prayer walk campuses in their own locality?” This shift spiraled out into more ideas where they would directly contact churches within a certain radius of un-prayerwalked campuses and then….
This is it – when the process brings further insights and starts a snowball of creativity
Next time
Being more firm about meeting with every stakeholder.
Silly me forgot to schedule in 30 minutes for some Florida sunshine ☀️ 😎
“AMAZING job keeping all of us on track!”
“Fun, creative, and centered facilitation.”
“Ran a damn fine workshop. Good content, pacing, confidence, and insights.”
“THANK YOU for leading. We got more done today than in most meetings.”
Final Thoughts
Over the years of facilitating I’ve learned a few pro-tips I want to leave you with:
Encourage them and help them think: Many don’t think of themselves as naturally creative or “ideators” — but they can if given some helpful practical handholds. This is my thinking prompt sheet to help expand the imagination.
Make things clear: Always provide an example of the outcome you’re looking for — if you want people to make a wireframe, show them what it is, and be open to them creating other options like a magazine cover, or a narrative story.
Be ready to improvise: Plan 30-minute breaks every 90 minutes both for your participants to take a breather and more importantly, for you to huddle with a decision maker to get live feedback and make adjustments on the fly. Ask repeatedly, “Is this heading in the right direction? What’s happening in the room?” You may not be able to tell because you’re busy facilitating.