On Wednesday, Slaughter Development presented the third session in the 2010 Productivity Series. The program for this month was “Escaping Death By Meeting - How and Why to Meet.” If you were unable to attend or would like to simply refresh your memory, the slides from this presentation are now available here on The Methodology Blog.

Wednesday’s presentation acknowledges the existing reputation unproductive meetings have, but speaks moreso about the progression of concepts that can be just the right way to create successful, efficient meetings.  Take a look and see what improvement suggestions were made (direct link):

Besides the usual complaints that meetings are just too long and waste too much time, there are other factors that affect a meeting’s environment such as forced collaboration, lack of agenda or direction, power struggles, absence of a plan or outcome, and stress derived from loss of productiveness. Experiencing one or a combination of these issues in a meeting is the reason why it fails. Yet, as was presented on Wednesday, identifying types of meetings and the ways in which they fail can assist in determining not only their value, but can help highlight tools for making them worthwhile.

A good rule of thumb when calling a meeting should be to ask yourself the question, “what is the purpose?” If it is something other than brainstorming ideas or making decisions, then its time to rethink the meeting altogether. After all, time wasted equivalates to more than just wasted money. It can result in loss of direction, creativity or even motivation; three areas that empower stakeholders and assist in achieving productivity and innovation.

The next program in the Productivity Series is Introduction to Workflow Diagrams. The event takes place Wednesday, April 7th at 2:00PM. Register today!