A Series of Discussions on Conducting Better Meetings - Creating a Strategic Agenda

Creating a Strategic Agenda

The first task in organizing an effective meeting is the creation of a strategic agenda with commonly understood goals and objectives that are meaningful and current to the success of the business.  Even the most skilled facilitator cannot overcome a poor agenda.

An effective strategic agenda clearly lays out the goals and objectives that the team of participants is expected to accomplish.  These may include – questions that need to be answered, decisions required of the team, challenges for which solutions are being sought, assignments that need to be made, or some other such matters.

The goals and objectives reflected in the agenda should be sufficiently meaningful and relevant to the success of the business to justify assembling the team of participants and taking time away from their day-to-day responsibilities.  If the subject of the meeting is deemed by the participants to be less consequential to the success of the business than the activities and responsibilities they have left behind to attend the meeting, they will likely not be fully engaged and the meeting will be unfocused and unproductive.

The goals and objectives for the meeting stated in the objective should be sufficiently meaningful and current to the success of the business to justify assembling the team to discuss them at this time.  Assembling the team of participants required for the contemplated meeting will take time away from the day-to-day responsibilities of the participants.  If the goals and objectives for the meeting are less consequential or immediate than those day-to-day activities to the success of the business, the meeting will only be perceived as a distraction and impediment to accomplishing those activities.  While it is clearly important to address important matters on which the future success of the business depends, managers must be careful to balance intermediate to longer term planning and decision making with the urgent and essential current priorities of the business.

A good strategic agenda should address both meaningful and timely goals and objectives.

We generally use the acronym SMART to describe the characteristics of strategic objectives.  SMART objectives are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely.  Meeting organizers should carefully examine the goals and objectives for a meeting to be sure they meet these criteria.

We like to see action verbs such as the following used to articulate meeting objectives: 

Analyze

Assign

Develop

Identify

Prioritize

Request

Announce

Brainstorm

Decide

Improve

Reevaluate

Review

Appropriate

Categorize

Delegate

Evaluate

Learn

Refine

Summarize

Approve

Clarify

Determine

Explore

Plan

Teach

Choose

Action

Once the meeting objectives have been determined they should be prioritized.  This allows the agenda to effectively deal not only with the relative importance of each objective but also dependencies and potential conflicts amongst the objectives.  Prioritizing the objectives will often help sequence or order the agenda.

It is also important to remember not to overload an agenda with too many objectives.  An overloaded agenda can often result in over long meetings or a failure to accomplish the objectives within the time allotted for the meeting.  It is important that meetings both begin and end in a timely manner so participants can plan their attendance appropriately and make any required accommodations in their schedules to attend.

Generally, we feel that most good meetings should be not more than two hours in length to maintain optimum focus of the participants while achieving meaningful objectives.  Generally, it is difficult to accomplish more than one or at most two significant objectives and two or three small items within such a time period.  We feel it is better to hold multiple meetings on focused agendas than to overload a single agenda.