Working your way from the front to the back of the Meeting Canoe
As you work your way from welcome to attend to the end in the Meeting Canoe, it is important to realize that what you do in one section of the Meeting Canoe impacts the others. For example, when people enter the meeting and experience your welcome, that experience becomes the input for the next section. What happens when you connect people to each other and the task becomes the input for discovering the way things are. In each section, you are working with content issues and emotional issues. So what you discuss and your experience discussing it directly impact what happens in the next section of the canoe.
Figure 2.2 gives you a visual of the process, which is summarized below.
• Inputs are the state in which people arrive at a section of the Meeting Canoe.
• Conversations are interactions that take place during the meeting.
• Outputs are the results.
• Purpose is your intent for this section of the canoe.