Let’s bring you to a scenario that you are probably familiar with. You and five people are invited to a meeting to evaluate a few ideas and discuss how to move forward with the project. You’d like to take advantage of the meeting to really solidify initial ideas and work together, avoiding the need to go back and forth between ideas for the next month. The meeting starts and the presenter is at the front of the boardroom presenting a PowerPoint. Forty-five minutes into the meeting, and you still haven’t contributed or learned something new.

— “Couldn’t they’ve just sent an email? Why was I even there?”

Team members’ knowledge, potential and expertise wasn’t used, and if someone did decide to share an idea, the presenter would normally respond with a fixed idea in mind. If you are bringing all these people together, wouldn’t you exchange ideas and take advantage of their expertise?

How can you take advantage of your collective intelligence during meetings and provide an innovation space so you can bring your organization to the next level?

Nova supports collaborative meetings:

• Work session (also known as a “silent meeting”.) Work sessions use a portion of the time to discuss things that can’t be easily explained with a comment or quick fix on a google doc, with the remaining time is spent working individually in silence. This idea can be traced back to Amazon with Jeff Bezos and his “silent meetings” where he would read a 6-page memo at the beginning of a meeting. From this, a movement grew to make meetings more productive to be used as a space for creation instead of as a place for one-way communication much like the one-way teaching method.
• Discussion session. These meetings are well organized, everyone does their homework, and the meeting facilitator follows a process. This method guides the discussion and helps the team collaboratively make the best decision for the team and the client.
• You also have other types of meetings like; group rapport, coaching meetings, team building sessions, daily stand up, etc

All our sessions follow a framework to help you stay creative and reach your goals. Follow these tips to ultimately take advantage of your collective intelligence while being productive and efficient during your discussion, work session, and other meetings.

What should you do?

1. Choose a ‘Facilitator’

A good facilitator guides the conversation and acts as a mediator. A facilitator is a good active listener, feels comfortable with silence, embrace curiosity, practice empathy, empower others, and make people feel comfortable, provide feedback and help others get better at creative abrasion. Learn more leading collaborative meetings and good facilitation.

The facilitator can use Nova to lead the discussion, ensuring the team reaches a consensus at the end of the meeting.

2. Choose the right tool

Our tools will guide your team through the process and ensures you have a clear metric and decision-making process so everyone is in sync. The objective is that you can close your meeting with a final decision. Nova provides the necessary evaluation and discussion tools that will help you have a transparent and goal-oriented decision-making process.

You can use our “I want to…” search bar.

3.Provide the session instructions and the goal of the session

Prepare and specify the goal of the meeting. Add your session goal and instructions on the Nova session. This must be clear and understood by the team for you to be productive.

4. Provide reading resources

If preparing a discussion session, provide resources for your team to read and understand ahead of the meeting, ensuring you’re able to take advantage of your collective intelligence. If in a work session (silent meeting) the team should read these resources together and work towards their goal together. For both meeting types, Nova helps you structure the discussion session, provide a single repository for information, and allow the team to gather all of their ideas in a single place.

All our sessions on Nova are goal oriented. All sessions include the instructions and goals of the session, the resources list, the process (trackable processes are included with all our tool) and the virtual and interactive resources so you and your team can have a virtual space to work towards your goals and bring the best ideas to life.

Other resources:

Francesca Gino, December 2019 — Harvard Business Review Cracking the code of sustained collaboration

David Gasca, The silent meeting manifesto.

HBR, 2019 — How to ask good questions