This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
Prepare your meeting like you prepare a game
The meeting starts and things immediately go wrong. Someone's camera does not work. Someone else asks if they needed a camera. And a third person wants to know if they had to prepare anything. You have a beautiful presentation ready, but the first ten minutes go to questions that no one asked beforehand.
You probably recognise this. People are actually always a bit lost. And that is because they do not know the rules. If no one provides the rules, everyone makes their own rules. And those are not always in the interest of the group.
In a training on facilitating meetings, I therefore compare a meeting to a game. I use that image as a checklist myself, every time I prepare a meeting. At the bottom of this article you will find a prompt that runs your next meeting through that same checklist. Feel free to copy it.
What you need to play a game
I ask in the training what you need to play a game. The group finds most of it themselves. You need players, those are the participants. You need rules, because otherwise you get chaos. And if there are rules, you also need someone to guard them, a referee. In a meeting, that is the facilitator.
After that, the rest comes naturally. What game are we going to play? Football is different from chess, and a decision meeting is different from an information session. How long does it take, so where is the clock? What material do we use: a whiteboard, a flipchart, Teams with its chat. And where do we play: in a room, online or hybrid.
People almost always forget two things. A scoreboard, so you can see how the game is progressing. In a meeting, that is the report, or the flipchart where you keep track of the most important things. And a goal, because it is quite nice when everyone knows what you are playing towards.
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