meeting-designlisted

# Meeting Design Most bad meetings were bad before anyone walked in. The agenda named topics rather than a decision, nobody said how the decision would be made, and the one person who could actually make it was not in the room. The failure this exists to prevent: **a meeting that ends with "let's take this offline" and reconvenes three weeks later having lost the thread.** That is not a facilitation problem. It is a design problem, and it is fixed before the invite goes out. --- ## What this needs **Minimum: what the meeting is about and roughly who is coming.** It will produce the agenda, the decision rule and the attendee cut from that, and mark what it had to assume. **Better with** the decision you are actually trying to reach, the names and roles of attendees, and what happened last time if this is recurring. **Best with** the pre-read or the document under discussion, so the agenda can be built around what people will have already seen. --- ## Step 0: Decide whether to hold it at all Run this first. A meeting held out of habit costs more than the hour, because it teaches people that your meetings are optional. **Do not hold a meeting when:** - There is no decision and no disagreement. Send the document - One person has all the information and everyone else is receiving it. Send the document - The decision-maker cannot attend and the point was to reach them. Move it - It is a status round-robin where each person speaks to the leader and nobody speaks to each