id: 1291
title: Meeting agendas and general structure.
date: 2022-08-27

Meeting agendas and general structure.

Meeting agendas are necessary to communicate exoectations to participants—but there’s little evidence that this alone improves quality. Posing this in the form of timeboxed questions further informs what must occur, and what the topical and temporal stopping points are. Parkinson’s law suggests that work expands to take all available resources, so these timeboxes help constrain this. What goes past the allotted time can be set aside for followup. With the timeboxes set, a meeting can be slightly shortened still—groups perform optimally with a little pressure. The agenda should include space at the end to allow participants to transition to their next meetings.rR2

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    Steven G. Rogelberg, The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). (See notes.)