A Three Hour Tour

October 10, 2011 by Kim.

You may recognize this title from the old Gilligan’s Island TV series. If you haven’t seen it, the show was about seven people who set out on what was supposed to be a three hour tour of some islands. They ended up getting lost and they shipwrecked the boat and never made it back to civilization.

“A Three Hour Tour” tune was going through my head as I sat through my fourth, three-hour meeting this week. OMG, is there ever a need for a three hour meeting? To add insult to injury, when you work for state government, it’s against the rules to provide water or coffee to state employees at these meetings (because you’re using taxpayer money and that’s not an appropriate use of their dollars). So if you forget to bring your own nourishment, it can be a mighty long three hours.

But I digress, so back to my original question. Three hours, oh my. Most meetings, IMHO, can be conducted efficiently and relay the info needed in much less time than you think. You and I, as meeting facilitators, just need to follow a few simple rules to prevent shipwrecking our next meeting.

1. Always publish an agenda. Ideally, you should ask for input to the agenda a few days prior to the meeting and then you decide what makes the cut. Publish the agenda the day before the meeting.

2. Put time limits on each agenda and item and stick to them. If it’s apparent the topic being discussed needs further discussion, you have a couple of options. First, choose to postpone additional agenda items from this meeting to the next, or, table the issue that’s running over time and add it to the next meeting’s agenda. Or, you could set up a separate meeting to discuss this topic if needed. That seems to defeat the purpose of limiting meetings, but sometimes due to the nature of the issue, you’ll have to use this tactic.

3. Curtail rabbit trails. Keep attendees on track and if new topics come up that need addressing, add them to the agenda for the next meeting.

These three easy steps will help you get control and keep control of your meetings going forward and,hopefully, return you all to civilization in short order.

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