21st century meetings.
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Ideas are just ideas. On itself, the value of an idea is nil. If you have a great idea but you don’t execute it, then nothing happens. The world just goes on as it went. And you’ve not made the change you wanted (did you really want to change the world or were you just struck by a nice thought?).

Scott Belsky, author of ‘Making Ideas Happen’, states that organising is key in making ideas happen. Listening to his key-note at the Creativity World Forum, he proposed the following formula:

Creativity x Organisation = Impact

It nicely shows that people generating great ideas with no organising skills have zero impact. So you’re better off having fewer ideas and some organising skills to be sure your creative energy isn’t disappearing in the black hole of unused ideas.
 
This leads us to meetings. In every endeavour involving more than two persons, meetings are held to organise and execute ideas. But by definition meetings are unproductive because they draw people away from their productive tasks. Management guru Peter Drucker defines meetings as a concession to deficient organisations. A perfect organisation would have no meetings.
 

Ai... I have a meeting

Therefore Belsky advocates meetings with a bias to actions. Make the most out of your unproductive meetings by creating a culture that captures ‘action steps’. In his extensive toolbox are a few nice ideas I’d like to share 3 of theme with you. And I’ll relate them to my ‘2 Rules and 7 habits for Creative and Engaging meetings’.
 

Have standing meetings

Stand instead of sit! Standing is an active posture and will help making decisions instead of postponing them. For a strategy meeting, I once advocated two different rooms: one for the discussion (where seats were available, no tables) and one for the decisions (where no seats would be available). This is habit n3: Create an inspiring space.
 

Separate actions from other stuff

Any meeting will lead to different results. Next to the concrete actions there will also be interesting ideas with no direct action needed (called ‘backburners’ by Belsky) and references such as flip-charts, graphics etc… By dividing it in different categories you get a clear idea on what needs to be done now. This is actually a stepping stone for habit n6: Make few but lasting decisions and habit n7: Follow-up immediately
 

Prioritise

Prioritise! It will help keeping your projects up to speed. The brain is like the RAM of your computer. If you do too many things at the same time then everything slows down. And this is quintessentially habit n6 and habit n7.
 

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