Lucid Meetings Blog

Recently we hosted two online parties where we invited folks to join us in creating a big list of Tip-Top Top Tips for Smarter Meetings. The whole event was an experiment. We wondered:

• Would it work to combine all these different meeting techniques?
• How much real value could a group of random strangers create within an hour?
• Would anyone find this interesting enough to show up?

Much to my great surprise, we were joined by nearly 80 people over the two sessions. The techniques we practiced worked better the second time through, which is a testament to the value of practice. And it turns out that interested, engaged people can quickly create a lot of value when given the opportunity and structure.

In the month since we published a taxonomy of the 16 Types of Business Meetings, we’ve heard from many people who say it’s given them a useful new perspective on how to approach their meetings. We’ve also been asked many times about the chart featured in that post, which has since been shared on social media over a thousand times.

(Admittedly, not as hot as a Beyoncé snapshot, but c’mon! This is a taxonomy of meeting types we’re talking about here.)

The original post is very long and details the process we used to define each type.

Missed the original? If you have an hour, go read it now! Otherwise, here are the high points:

1. A meeting is not a meeting. If you want to run better meetings, you need to know the best way to run the kind of meetings you need to run. Generic best practices won't cut it.
2. You can tell that one meeting is different from another based on these characteristics:
   
   • the intention, or purpose and desired outcomes,
   • the meeting format,
   • and the expected participation profile, or, who normally runs and who normally attends these kind of meetings.
3. We organized and sorted and grouped and examined every kind of meeting we could find, and narrowed them all down to 16 distinct types of meetings.

Throughout that process, we knew that there were important relationships between different kinds of meetings, and that exploring these relationships added yet another layer of usefulness to the taxonomy. When you understand not just the types, but also the relationships between meeting types, it gets much easier to answer the key question: Is this meeting the meeting we need?

The only thing that is constant is change.”

Heraclitus

2015, like all the years before it, was a year of big changes for Lucid Meetings. We've had a very good year. Our platform has become more mature and our customer base has grown. We've met new people and created new cooperative relationships with other companies. Business is good.

But we've all been around long enough to know that these external trappings of success can be fleeting; what we can achieve and how we grow both as a company and as individuals will depend entirely on what we do next.

That's why, when we look back at 2015, we pay special attention to what we've learned. Experience and knowledge gained are the key assets that can't be lost due to a shift in the market or any other whim of fate, and that will inform how we go boldly into 2016.

We asked each member of the Lucid leadership team to reflect on the key lessons they learned in 2015, and share them with you here.

For the past seven years, I've been juggling two careers: technical project manager and freelance writer. The project management part is familiar to most people in tech today; it's a now-common mix of general web skills, organizational ability, and the willingness to do basic calendar math.

The freelance writing bit has more to do with creating narratives and running a business, but functionally there's one big area of overlap: managing time and attention. In both career paths, I work with people and I run projects. So this past year working with Lucid Meetings has put me in an interesting spot as a writer: I'm obsessed with running good meetings, even when they're interviews.