Workshop · Leadership
Meetings that decide
When the same open list reappears week after week, the agenda is not the problem — the meeting has no authority to close anything.
- Duration
- 2 hours
- Delivery
- On site · Virtual
- Participants
- From 8 to 25 participants
- Investment
- Request a quote
Investment depends on scope, number of participants and delivery mode. We prepare a proposal at no obligation.
The problem it solves
There is a quick test for any management meeting: put this week's open list beside the one from a month ago. If they match in substance, the meeting is not deciding anything. It is recording the passage of time with a lot of well-paid people sitting down.
The pattern varies little. The first half goes to each department saying aloud what was already written in a report nobody read. When something that needs deciding finally comes up, a figure is missing, or the person who can authorise it is missing, or both, and the item is deferred with no record of why. Agreements that are reached go down nowhere with an owner and a date, so next week they are argued again from the beginning. Meanwhile the real decisions get made in corridors and messages, between two people, and arrive at the meeting already made.
The cost is paid in two currencies. One is the time of the most expensive people in the company, repeated every week of the year. The other is quieter: anyone not in the corridor stops knowing what is happening, and the meeting, which existed precisely so decisions would be shared, becomes the place where they are announced.
What it covers
The workshop rebuilds the meeting the team actually holds, not a model one. It starts with an uncomfortable question applied to every recurring meeting in the calendar: why does it exist, and what precisely would happen if it stopped next month. Some do not survive that question, and removing them is the first tangible result of the session.
Next comes the separation of three meetings usually crammed into one. Informing, which can almost always be read beforehand and needs no room. Resolving, which needs the people who know the detail. And deciding, which needs whoever holds the authority and enough information to use it. Each calls for different attendance, length and frequency, and mixing them is why all three go badly at once. Participants reclassify the items from their last real meeting against that distinction.
The practical block is a simulation. The group runs a segment of its own meeting under the new rules: material read in advance, items already sorted, and a closing discipline that forces every item to end with a decision, an owner and a date, or with an explicit reason for deferral and a statement of what is needed to pick it up again. They also practise cutting off a discussion that has stopped producing new information, which is the skill most often missing in whoever chairs.
The close works on the record. A one-page note the next meeting can review in a few minutes, always opening with what was committed last time, because that opening review is the only thing that turns an agreement into an obligation. Finally the group adjusts the frequency, length and attendance of each recurring meeting, distinguishing who decides, who contributes information and who simply needs to know the outcome.
What participants learn
- Sort items into inform, resolve and decide, and move out of the meeting the ones that need no meeting.
- Prepare in advance the material that makes deciding possible inside the session.
- Close each item with a decision, an owner and a date, or with an explicit reason for deferral.
- Design a one-page record the next meeting can review in minutes.
- Match frequency, length and attendance to the kind of decision each meeting carries.
Agenda
- Why each meeting exists, and what would happen if it did not
- Inform, resolve, decide: three meetings crammed into one
- Pre-reading: what circulates beforehand and what is never presented
- Closing an item: decision, owner, date
- The record of agreements and the review of last time's commitments
- Attendance: who needs to be there and who only needs the notes
- Meetings that can disappear at no cost
What the organisation leaves with
- A rebuilt agenda for your management meeting, with items sorted into inform, resolve and decide.
- A one-page record format capturing decision, owner and date, reviewed at the start of the next meeting.
- A revised attendance list per meeting, separating who decides, who contributes and who only needs the outcome.
- A list of meetings to be dropped or spaced out, with what replaces each of them.
Programme details
- Format
- Workshop
- Also available as
- Executive talk · Intensive workshop
- Languages
- Español · English
- Includes
- Participant workbook
- Action plan
- Post-training resources
- Facilitation
- ALUD Consulting LLC — Global Business Transformation.
Who it is for
- Management teams with a standing weekly or monthly meeting.
- Directors who chair internal committees and boards.
- Managers who spend much of the week in other people's meetings.
Frequently asked questions
- What if the real problem is that the owner decides everything outside the meeting?
- Then the meeting is not your problem and redesigning it will not fix anything. The workshop makes that visible within the first hour, because items come back sorted and undecidable inside the room, but the underlying correction is a different conversation and deserves its own setting.
- Does it apply to meetings held remotely?
- Yes, and some of the rules matter more there. Advance preparation and explicit closure hold a remote meeting together better than an in-person one, where body language lets everybody pretend an item was settled when it was not.
- How many meetings can be redesigned in one session?
- One thoroughly, and the rest by quick classification. Redesigning a recurring meeting properly means arguing about attendance, preparation and closing discipline with the people who live it, and four calendars at once guarantees surface treatment of all of them.
- Does the whole team that attends the meeting need to come?
- Strongly recommended. Rules about preparation and closure only hold if the people bound by them agreed to them. When one person brings them back from a workshop, they survive about two weeks before the old habit returns.
Request this programme
Tell us the context and we will prepare a proposal tailored to your organisation. No obligation.
Working this inside the organisation
If this challenge will not be settled in one session, ALUD Consulting LLC works it as consulting: management consulting, human resources, strategy, organisational design, leadership development and business transformation.