6 steps to prepare for meetings

Posted by adi on Jan 2, 2009 in Default

I’m sure we’ve all been to meetings where little seemed to be achieved and the whole process appeared to be a general waste of everyones time.  Try following these 6 simple steps and your meetings will be transformed into productive decision making exercises.

1. Establish clear objectives prior to the meeting. Most meetings have agendas but you need to make sure that your agenda is very focused on clear tasks and deliverables.
2. Ensure the right people are present. If you need certain personnel in your meeting then make sure they are there.  It is easy now to use tools like Outlook to schedule meetings and alert participants in advance.
3. Make sure that each participant is prepared. Each participant in the meeting is there for a reason, ie to put forward views based on their expertise.  Get them to prepare properly for the meeting so that their input is precise and relevant to the objectives.
4. Use visual aids effectively. Limiting all communications to an A3 piece of paper forces participants to only use what is strictly neccessary and encourages the use of visual aids.
5. Seperate information sharing from decision making. Share information with participants before the meeting as much as possible.  This then frees up the meeting itself for problem solving and decision making.
6. Make sure that the meeting starts and ends on time.
   

Tags: Agenda, decision making, Information sharing, Meeting

Best laid plans go awry again in the credit crunch

Posted by adi on Oct 28, 2008 in Default

The credit crunch has been caused in large part by a series of poor decisions both within the financial sector and the regulatory sector.  I was reading a study today that revealed yet another unintended consequence of a regulatory decision.

The rule in question forces credit card companies to take a minimum sum each month from all accounts with an outstanding balance.  The idea behind the rule is that it stops borrowers from getting too heavily in debt.  However a study by Neil Stewart from Warwick University suggests that it has actually had the opposite effect.  It all revolves around a concept called anchoring whereby people rely too heavily on one particular piece of information to make their decision.  In this instance people were anchoring the minimum amount they had to repay, thus not paying off as much as they otherwise may have done, costing them significantly in the long run.

The anchoring process was famously illustrated in a 1974 study by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.  The study asked participants to estimate the number of UN countries were African, but only after having rolled a roulette wheel.  Those that landed a higher score on the wheel estimated there were more African nations than those that scored lower on the roulette wheel.

Steward does provide salvation however by suggesting that more information would remedy the situation.  He’s set-up a simple calculator on his website that allows people to caculate how much their actions could save (or cost) them.

Tags: Amos Tversky, anchoring, Daniel Kahneman, decision making, Warwick University