Ohio Watershed Academy 2009

Choose this assignment if you feel that you have a good grasp on planning and conducting meetings, and if you would like to ask a different set of questions about what makes meetings work. This assignment will encourage you to explore the ways that we make meaning, communicate, and come to decisions at meetings. It will challenge you to pay attention to details that might often go by unnoticed. Because of these objectives, this assignment requires you to prepare and participate in an actual meeting.

Effective meetings are purposeful, have well-defined objectives, a structured agenda, and prepared participants. But these meetings also affect, and are affected by, the ways we see ourselves and others, the ways in which we communicate, the stories we tell, and what our stories tell about us. In other words, while effective meetings are well thought-out, have structure, and are purposeful, they also “happen” in a way that is fluid and unpredictable. Dr. John Forester writes about what happens as we meet together to make decisions and plan for our common future.* Seeing meetings as deliberative and participatory processes, he argues that, “…groups learn in a great many ways…” and “…we must be wary of focusing so much on argumentative learning that we fail to appreciate participants’ learning of skills, confidence, appreciation of and respect of others” (p.151). While preparation for a meeting - whether that means setting the agenda or being prepared as an attendee – helps make a safe space for productive communication, we “begin [such] deliberative processes with agendas and suspicions, with complex cares, sets of interests, and senses of possibilities – all informed by yesterday’s, but not yet informed by today’s, experience” (p.144).

What might this mean for you at your meetings? One way of looking at this is to see meetings as involving two aspects occurring at the same time. The first aspect includes the planned: the meeting location, those in attendance, the agenda, and discussion of the relevant issues and related facts. The second aspect is not entirely planned, but it is arguably equally as important. Here is an exercise to try while leading or attending your next meeting. You can begin answering the following questions before the meeting, continue thinking about them while moving through the agenda, and then reflect after the meeting. Ask yourself:

·What is the same in this meeting as in past meetings? What is happening that I expected to happen?

·What is new in this meeting? What is happening that I did not anticipate happening?

·What issues are important (or more important) now that weren’t important before this meeting? What makes those issues important? How did they become important?

·What issues are unimportant (or less important) now that weren’t before? What makes them unimportant? How did they become unimportant?

·Who has credibility at the meeting? What leads me to conclude that they are credible?

·What stories are being shared? What does the sharing of those stories accomplish?

·Did anything in the meeting change the way I see myself? If so, explain.

·Did anything in the meeting change the way I see someone else? If so, explain.

To receive credit for this assignment, type your responses to these questions in a Word document and submit it below.

*Forester, J. (1999). The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.