The Meeting Canoe works in very different situations

In chapter 1, we identified the different ways people meet—everything from informal chats to formal work sessions. Tables 2.1 through 2.5 show you how these different meetings might look when you apply the Meeting Canoe system.

Chats and Huddles

Chats and huddles (tables 2.1 and 2.2) are informal. In these cases, the Meeting Canoe runs as background in your mind as you participate in these conversations.

Staff Meetings

Regular staff meetings benefit from the Meeting Canoe system because it provides a meeting structure (table 2.3). When you meet regularly, it’s easy to get sloppy because you know people and you know the work. In these cases, many people forget about welcoming, connecting to each other and the task, and attending to the end. In our desire to get to work, we overlook our need to connect and provide closure. Using the Meeting Canoe to create your agenda helps you avoid these pitfalls. As you will learn later, it’s also possible to devote individual meetings to single Meeting Canoe elements so that, over time, you cover the whole system.

Town Halls

Many organizations use town hall meetings as a way for leaders to interact with organization members and share information and dialogue about current issues. While well intended, many town halls become one-way conversations by the leader with little time left for dialogue. Table 2.4 shows what a town hall meeting looks like when you apply the Meeting Canoe system.

Work Sessions

Increasingly, organizations bring important stakeholders together from within and outside the organization to address critical business issues. In these sessions, people from all levels of the organization work together to improve processes and design new products and services. For-profit and not-for-profit organizations use work sessions to create their preferred future. Standard work sessions go by the names of Future Search, Open Space, Whole-Scale Change, the Appreciative Inquiry Summit, and Lift-Off. The Meeting Canoe system works with them all, giving you a way to custom design your work session without holding you prisoner of a specific methodology.

How a Fortune 100 Company Uses the Meeting Canoe to Integrate Different Methodologies

John Bader, the leader of a customer enterprise services organization, had a problem. He was determined to deeply involve his six thousand people in redesigning the organization to improve efficiency and customer service. He also wanted to use what on the surface seemed like two competing concepts: Jay Galbraith’s Star Model and Judith Katz and Fred Miller’s Inclusion Model (Galbraith 2005; Miller and Katz 2002). His consultants were telling him he needed a two-and-a-half-day process to do the design work. That was unacceptable to John. John asked his design team to create a one-day process that would accomplish his goals. Using the Meeting Canoe as their template, John’s design team was able to create a one-day process that was delivered in eighteen different locations. The result: John estimates his return on investment for this work to be in excess of fifteen times, and his organization is providing superior customer service (Bader 2009).

John’s group did not have the benefit of this book, nor were the members formally trained in the Meeting Canoe. They had just heard about the model.

How the Meeting Canoe Accelerates Change

When you walk into the organizational effectiveness (OE) group offices at this same company, what stands out are the meeting rooms. Floor-to-ceiling whiteboards are covered with work in progress. Writing from red, black, blue, and green dry erase markers covers the walls, and in some rooms you will find a hand-drawn Meeting Canoe sketch. “Having the Meeting Canoe graphic on the wall helps keep us on track during meetings. The shape lets us know where we are in the meeting and how much time we should be spending in each part of the canoe. The Meeting Canoe gives us a common language when we are working with each other,” reports Angie Keister, organizational effectiveness consultant.

We are used to driving communications from top to bottom and expecting people to get it. Recently, a seniorleadership team asked us to design a day-and-a-half meeting for the top leaders of the organization. Frontline leaders were to attend a similar session one week later. In all, four hundred people were to attend the first two sessions, and fifteen hundred people needed to receive this important information. When Kim Gallagher Johnson [OE group director] and I met to plan this work, the Meeting Canoe was top of mind. It didn’t matter if we were conducting a planning meeting with senior executives or a workshop with frontline leaders. We even taught the walkthru design team the Meeting Canoe approach. In turn, they used it to design their local sessions.

Our leaders readily take to the Meeting Canoe because it is so easy to understand. We were able to transform a top-down process into a high-engagement set of activities. Along the way, our leaders learned a new way to design and conduct productive meetings.” (Keister 2013)

Just think what you might be able to accomplish.

Work sessions are longer workshop-like sessions designed to address a specific issue. Table 2.5 applies the Meeting Canoe to work sessions.