Make Your Next Meeting a Success With This Simple Checklist

Everything you need to plan for.

Nowadays our work lives are more and more cluttered by endless meetings. We find ourselves in a room full of people, not knowing why we’re here or even why they are here. The session runs late, people spend most of it at each other’s throats, for unclear reasons.

The organizer throws in the towel, not knowing what to do. And we often wonder if they really planned for this meeting, or if they just sent the invite and hoped for the best.

So you just feel like you lost one hour of your time — if you’re lucky. Two, three hours if you’re unlucky. You walk out of the room, angry. Besides the time you lost in there, you need twenty minutes to cool off and take a breather.

Worst of all? That meeting accomplished nothing, and everyone had just an hour robed from their life, one hour that they can never get back!

Sadly, I speak from experience. This is what my own meetings used to look like. But I was fortunate enough to discover the 7P Framework, and it helped me fix the way I was doing this. It helped me get better.

The 7P Framework was created by James Macanufo. Its goal is to help you plan for your meeting. How you’re going to make it work, what you need to think about. It is a planning process.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything — Dwight D. Eisenhower

A lot can happen in a meeting. There will be things that you didn’t account for. Maybe the participants will have some bits of knowledge that put your plan into question, or perhaps some participants won’t be able to attend. The idea here is to go through the planning process so that you can be as ready as possible.

This framework consists of seven points. It’s called the 7P because you have to plan for seven things: purpose, product, process, people, prep, practical concerns, pitfalls

Take a sheet of paper, or a text document on your computer, whichever you prefer, and try to fill every one of these points ahead of the meeting you’re organizing.

Purpose

Before making your meeting a success, there is a fundamental question to ask: what does success mean for a meeting?

I remember I once attended a project management training, and the trainer asked a very subtle question. He said, “Why do we have meetings ?”. Everyone started giving specific answers to explain why you have meetings in general.

That really made an impression on me. I realized that we’ve gotten so used to having meetings for the sake of it, that we have forgotten why we even do it.

“Why meetings?” would be like saying “why bikes?” or “why cars?”. Maybe you like driving around the neighborhood, and that’s okay. But most of the time you will take your car because you have somewhere to get to. Cars are a tool. Meetings are a tool too. You use them to achieve something, not the other way around.

Tool (noun): a means to an end (Merriam-Webster)

So, the question you need to ask yourself is, what do you want? What are you trying to accomplish? Not just what you’re trying to achieve with your meeting, but what are your goals in your current situation?

Maybe you work on a project, and you need to pick on brains to find an answer to some questions you have, so you want to get the right people together to get to a good solution.

Maybe you want to find a solution to a problem. Or find ways to improve a product or a process. Maybe it’s about making sure your project goes in the right direction. Or resolve internal conflicts.

The list can go on for a long time. But what you need to remember is that when you have a goal, the right way to achieve that goal can be through the use of meetings.

Always keep that in mind. What are you trying to accomplish? Does your approach really move your situation towards your goal?

You will need to be able to state this clearly to your invitees. If you can’t, it’s still time to rethink your plan. Sometimes the best thing that can happen when planning for a meeting is realizing we actually didn’t need to have it.

Product

Now that you have your purpose in mind, you have to think of what will be the actual product of it. What will be produced during the meeting?

If you wanted to have a solution to a problem you were facing — whatever your field of expertise might be —how is it going to materialize in the end? Maybe it’s a plan for what’s next, a list of actions to take. Maybe it’s a diagram of the actual solution.

Whatever it is, it has to be clear in your mind. Remember, you will be leading people to make this product come true, and this product will serve your ultimate goal.

Simply make a list of the things you want to hold in your hands at the end of your meeting. Make it detailed enough that there can be no doubt about the outcome.

You’ll want to have realistic goals. Detailed enough that you can work towards it without getting lost, but with enough breathing room so that people can innovate during the meeting.

People

You have a goal, you know how it materializes because you stated the end product. Your next stop is the list of invitees.

Who is the most capable of helping you get to your goal? I can’t stress this enough, but throughout your planning, you have to keep this in mind. You are trying to accomplish something, and every step of the planning process is supposed to make sure you get there.

With your objective in mind, you have to find the best combination of people. Who has the right skillset? Who will be able to work as a team? Who will want to be there? Let’s be real, not everyone will want to help you. You have to think of that and make sure you get the right people together. Better be one step ahead on this.

If you’re not sure whom to invite, you can follow these simple steps. Take a piece of paper, write the names of all the people you can think of who might be a good fit. Also, write why you thought of them. Once you have enough people that you’re confident you could get to your goal with them, get the list down to a manageable number of people. Ten people are almost an absolute maximum unless you really have enough experience handling bigger groups.

Don’t be afraid to choose people who you think will disagree a lot. You don’t want people to be in agreement with each other all the time. Otherwise, there is no need for inviting them all. You want people to confront their ideas and experience so that your goal can be better reached.

Process

Now that you have selected a shortlist of people, and you know where you want to work towards with them, you have to think about how you will get there.

This step is crucial in preparing your battle plan. You’ll have to start your meeting by reminding people why they’re here — hopefully, you will have given them a big hint in the invite. But then you will have to explain what the plan is.

You are a leader now. People need to understand what you’re planning for them if they’re going to go there with you. Remember, you know what you plan on producing, and you know why everyone in the room is there. Use that knowledge to establish a detailed plan.

Your plan needs to be a step by step procedure that tells everyone how the group is going to proceed. For each stage, there is a series of questions you need to be able to answer.

How long is it? Each step can last a different amount of time. It needs to be long enough to produce something, but not too long to lose the dynamic. Usually, I will have each step last no longer than thirty minutes, and no shorter than fifteen.

What will be produced? The best way to make sure your meeting was useful, even if you don’t reach the originally thought goal, is to have each step of your program produce something tangible, something concrete. That way, if you have four steps to go through in your meeting, and you only succeed at finishing three of them, you will have something to show for it. You’ll have something you can use. That way you never get out of a meeting empty-handed.

What is supposed to happen? That’s where you need to tell people what you expect of them. Maybe they’ll have to form small groups and work on one or multiple subjects. Maybe it’s the brainstorming part of the meeting. Maybe you need to know who is going to take action after the meeting. Try giving people a detailed explanation of how they’re supposed to contribute.

Remember that you got these people together because you thought they could work through the situation. Sometimes they won’t get on with your program. Try and listen to what they have to say. Be open-minded about what they can bring. And then decide what you want to do, what makes sense, be it what you had thought of or something completely different that someone brought to the table.

Prep

Now that you have selected a shortlist of people and established a process. You need to tell them if you need something from them in advance. Do they just come to your meeting, or do you need them to be ready in some way?

Being ready in advance can simply be having read some documents, which you will provide to — physically or electronically. Or you might ask people to prepare something, like writing reports or think of solutions in advance.

Be careful though, we live in a world where everyone is busy, so they might not appreciate it if you add too much to their workload, in addition to keeping them with you during your meeting.

I usually prefer trying to show as much respect as I can for people’s timetables. I will only ask them to do work beforehand when I feel it’s absolutely necessary. Otherwise, I will just include everything in the process of the meeting.

Practical concerns

This one might seem obvious, but it is the most easily forgotten. This is an easy one but, when mishandled, it really tends to give a bad start to your plans.

Your meeting needs to have somewhere to take place. Maybe you’ll book a room in your company quarters, maybe you’ll bring people to a restaurant, it doesn’t matter. But you have to have something ready, and you need to communicate with your invitees about it.

Make sure you have a start and end time for your meeting. You’ll have to be careful about sticking to it. Nothing more frustrating for people than a meeting that starts late and ends late. Try to be respectful and don’t keep people for longer than they had agreed on.

If you need any kind of hardware or physical tools, check in advance and try and go in a little early and prepare the room. Avoid spending fifteen minutes of your time trying to make it work while people wait. Having everything ready can go a long way towards setting a good mood in the room.

Pitfalls

No matter how much you prepared, there are still a million things that can go wrong.

“Hope for the best, plan for the worst”

Remember, you’re trying to reach an objective, you have something that you want to be done through this meeting. And planning for some of the obstacles that can arise on the big day can really help you.

One thing that can pose an issue might be as simple as a problem with the room, or the projector, or the air-conditioning. If the meeting is important enough, I sometimes have some backup hardware ready in case of emergency.

Another issue might be that once you’re with everyone and you start working along with your plan, you realize it’s not going to be viable. Try beforehand to imagine one or two situations where that could be the case, and how you would react.

The last frequent situation is when there are people with a strong personality with you. Or people who have a propensity to stray away from the core subject and end up digressing for half your meeting. It happens so often, one way or another, that you really have to think about it beforehand. Being mentally ready and having a plan to handle the situation really can save your meeting.

It works!

I had the opportunity to help a few people prepare the meetings using the 7P Framework, and it really made a difference for them.

As long as you remember that you have a goal in mind and that it’s pretty much all that matters, then the rest will make sense. Never forget your meeting’s objective.

Try it, really write down the seven P’s: purpose, product, process, people, prep, practical concerns, pitfalls. Don’t just think about it in your head. Writing it down makes a vast difference. You will ask yourself more questions and be better prepared.

If you’ve ever tried this framework or have another way to prepare your meetings, please share with us in the comments below!