The only three types of meetings you ever need to run
Some thoughts on types of meetings, so you can learn how to rock them
Published August 22, 2021
There are three types of meetings. Hard to believe, yeah?
It’s performance review time or school’s starting, you’ve got an itch to be a better consultant, and you want to improve your meeting game. A search for “types of meetings” or “how to improve meetings” reveals frameworks with–sometimes–over a score of different types of meetings.
To be a meeting master, you don’t need to learn how to master 15 types of meetings. Because they're aren't 15 types of meetings. There are three. You define a meeting by what you need to do in the meeting. And you can get good at the three reasons people meet.
Meet to inform
The first and easiest type of meeting is where you meet to inform. This is the status, the weather, the traffic. This is what it is.
Yo, Homes. Smell ya later!
Why meet when you can inform via email? Because information isn't real unless everyone agrees. In the Middle Ages, when a ruler died, they'd prop them up in the throne, dead, and leave them there for a couple of weeks, so everyone could come by and look at the dead ruler. Everyone needed to see he was dead before he was really dead.
Sometimes your status, weather, traffic report is like dead royalty. Everyone needs to smell him in person, together. If your news is more like dead cats, then, yeah: Email it. Or better yet, post it somewhere. If you meet to inform, come ready to clearly communicate the information.
Meet to answer a question
The second type of meeting is where you meet to answer a question.
This what you think of when you imagine a well-run meeting. There's a clear agenda. People come prepared with the background info they need. Attendees, in mutual respect, discuss different facets of the issue before making a decision as a group. The king's dead. This is the meeting where you answer: who's king next?
And as the saying goes, when you come for the king, you best come correct. So if you meet to answer a question, come with a well-planned meeting with a clear agenda with well-prepped participants, so you can meet well.
As Omar says on The Wire: “Indeed.”
Meet to figure something out
“Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.”
The third and most difficult type of meeting is where you meet because you don't know what's going on.
This is what you think of when you imagine a poorly run meeting. There's an agenda and people quickly wander from question to question. Nothing gets decided. Not because you didn't have a question, but because you answer the question, but it doesn't resolve the meeting. You want to know who should be king. Two minutes in, everyone agrees it’s Bob, and talk for 30 more minutes because you wander from systems of secession through systems of government, social organization, economic markets, and the needs of Highland shepherds losing entire flocks to mysterious predators every full moon.
For this third meeting, it's easy to think you didn't come correct to the second type of meeting. But that's wrong. Meeting to figure something out isn’t meeting. It’s a workshop, a collaborative working session where the agenda is an external process you follow to work through an issue, so you can figure out what's going on.
Common meetings and their types
If you want to meet well, figure out why you're meeting:
Are you meeting to inform?
Are you meeting to answer a question?
Are you trying to figure something out?
Common meetings to inform
Many meetings are organized as meetings to inform. Few really are.
Status meetings
Project kickoffs
Stand-ups
Critical notion: You may think you’re meeting to inform. However, if you show work, and at the end, you expect someone to say you did it right or to suggest a change, then you’re meeting to answer a question.
Common meetings to answer a question
Most meetings are meant to answer a question. That’s why you need all the people in the room.
Reviews (Did we do this right?)
Sprint reviews (Did we do this right?)
Sprint planning (What do we do next sprint?)
Stand-ups
Critical notion: If you’re in a meeting to answer a question and it goes off the rails, you’ve moved into a meeting to figure things out, so abandon the agenda, temporarily, and pivot to your design thinking facilitation skills.
Common meetings to figure things out
Meetings to figure things out go bad when they’re organized as meeting to answer a question. Get clear ahead of time and prep to run a good workshop.
Backlog grooming
Workshops
Stand-ups
Critical notion: meetings to inform or answer questions have specifically related, topical agendas. Each agenda item is related to the project or area of focus. Meetings to figure things out have agendas that are external processes because part of the problem is you don’t know what specific topics related to the project need to be discussed. Yet. You’re figuring it out.
Bonus question:
How do you run your stand-up?
Thumbnail image of the crown by @markusspiske via Unsplash.
