Lean Meetings is a one-day course for leaders and change agents to apply Lean and Systems thinking to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings — an unavoidable feature of work-life. For many, meetings are a number one source of frustration because there are too many, they are often ineffective and they require tremendous time and effort to feed, often with no conclusive results or outcomes. 

This course is designed to provide participants with an actionable plan to analyze their meetings ecosystem, identify areas for improvement and build a strategy to ensure the right meetings happen with the right people at the right time – applying continuous improvement techniques to keep meetings under control. 

• The Lean Meetings course is targeted to:

• Leaders who wish to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the meetings that they own, or that they influence.
• Lean/Process Improvement/Transformation practitioners who want to lead improvement events to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings in their organization.

• The learning objectives of this course include:

Equipped with re-usable tools, participants leave the course with:

• Theory and practical knowledge about how to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings.
• A specific, actionable plan to immediately apply the course content to optimize meetings.
• Tools and methodologies to improve meeting systems in the future.

• Topics covered include:

• Why do we have so many meetings?  Why are they so ineffective? Why do they take so much time and effort to prepare for?
• How to analyze meeting systems including:
  • The number and types of meetings
  • Assessing the effectiveness of meetings
  • Assessing the effort required to feed and maintain meetings
  • Identifying ideal content of meetings, the types of recurring issues to address, decisions to take, information to share and input to obtain that need to be considered. 
  • Ranking the “jobs to be done” of meeting items by the value they add.
  • Identifying the required tempo of each meeting item.
• Using this analysis, create an improved meeting system prototype that ranks meeting topics by value added, sorted by optimal tempo
• Find ways, other than meetings, to address issues in a lighter, faster, easier way. 
• Proven strategies to eliminate unnecessary, preventable meetings.
• Meeting hygiene – rules of engagement and tips to improve the conduct of meetings.
• Creating simple systems to sustain improvement gains and ensure that they do not get out of control again.