Making Meetings Work: Better Meetings Through Structure, Process and Facilitation

THREE 2-HOUR VIDEO CONFERENCE SESSIONS

Making Meetings Work is a training for everyone who plans, facilitates or participates in meetings. Learn and practice skills and strategies to help you improve your organization’s meetings and decision-making from wherever you sit.

Use what you learn to:

  • end endless meetings—get through your agenda items without going overtime

  • always know what to do next

  • propel work between meetings—and know when you need to meet and when you don't

  • make sharp group decisions

  • know when you've made a decision and how to move forward

  • end being volunteered for things

  • turn meeting dread and avoidance into enthusiasm, energy, creativity and collaboration

Making Meetings Work is more than a collection of tools for meeting management. It is a system propelled by an underlying commitment to applying the wisdom and best thinking of all participants to the shared purposes that bring organizations together in the first place. The system generates efficiency, enthusiasm, commitment and coordinated action by focusing on these shared aims, establishing clear and predictable processes, and employing strategies for expanding participation and consensus.

This approach is equally useful for corporate teams, government task forces, nonprofit boards and membership and other formal organizations as it is for less formally structured groups like religious congregations, neighborhood groups, classrooms or families.

In Making Meetings Work, you will learn:

  • How to diagnose common meeting maladies

  • Agenda-setting and how to use agendas to super-charge meeting productivity

  • Six rules to cultivate decisions that are understood, shared and widely supported

  • How to proposals to propel decision-making

  • Meeting roles to broaden participation and build leadership capacity

  • How to adapt the process for large, small, formal and informal groups

  • Ways of working with both conflict and agreement

  • How to help facilitate, no matter what your role is in the meeting

  • Record-keeping strategies for a functioning group memory

  

Who is this for?

Group process and meeting facilitators • Extension & community development professionals • Cooperatives • Transition communities • State and local government agencies and task forces • Arts and cultural organizations • Place-based & conservation organizations • Community leaders • Religious organizations • Teachers and youth program leaders • Neighborhood associations • Startups • Companies large and small • Teams, departments and working groups

 

Course Instructors

Howard D Terry took a deep dive into consensus decision-making 30 years ago, as a women's economic development nonprofit adopted the formal consensus decision-making process. Howard has deeply explored the fundamentals of Consensus That Works, working with government agencies, companies, nonprofit boards, cooperatives, incubators, and community economic development organizations.

Michele Archie's experience with formal consensus began when a start-up community nonprofit she was part of adopted it as their decision-making model. Michele has trained organization members, boards and facilitators in a variety of democratic discussion and decision-making processes for more than 25 years.

Session Dates and Times

Three 2-hour weekly video conference sessions

Inquire about future offerings

 

Fees and Details

  • Registration includes up to 30 minutes of one-on-one coaching after the course wraps up.

  • $400 regular course fee/$320 early registration discount

  • Group rates for two or more participants from the same organization or community — $325 per person regular group rate/$275 early registration discount

  • Organizational and other special discount codes offer a discount in addition to early registration and group rates.

  • If you or someone you would like to include needs a full and partial scholarship, please inquire. We will make every effort to make sure anyone who is interested can learn this process.

  • Register for both Making Meetings Work and the in-depth facilitator training for an additional discount — $675 for both courses/$595 early registration or $595 group rate/$545 early registration

  • Please inquire about tailoring custom training programs, workshops, presentations or private consultation to your organization.

 

Sessions

Three, two-hour live webinars plus one-on-one coaching. All sessions are recorded and available for replay in case you miss a session or want to listen again.

Session 1 – Making Meetings Work Basics

  • How your meetings work and don’t work

  • Common meeting maladies

  • Underlying principles of the Making Meetings Work system

  • Making decisions with a common purpose

  • Six decision-making rules

  • Meeting roles to broaden participation and leadership

  • Agenda planning—the backbone of meetings that work

 

Session 2 - Facilitating Meetings That Work

  • The flow of a productive meeting

  • How to use meeting roles to help the process

  • Using the agenda

  • The role of proposals in clear decision-making

  • Moving proposals through a process from introduction to decision and beyond

  • Changing decisions

  • Words that work—and don’t work—for facilitators

 

Session 3 - Fine Tuning and Adapting the System

  • How to propel work between meetings

  • Using the system to support equitable participation

  • Maintaining meeting agendas for consistent progress

  • What kinds of meeting records to keep and why

  • Leveraging both conflict and cooperation

  • Troubleshooting common problems, including power dynamics, too little input, and old meeting habits

  • Applying this in your own situation