problem solving meeting title

Crafting the Perfect Title for Meeting Success: Techniques and Tips

By Drew Moffitt • January 15, 2024

Welcome to the world of effective meetings! You’ve probably wondered why some meetings are successful, engaging, and productive, while others seem to fall flat. One key element that often gets overlooked is the title of a meeting. A well-crafted title for a meeting can be a game-changer, setting the tone, engaging participants, and conveying the meeting’s purpose effectively.

In today’s remote and hybrid work environments , virtual office software like Kumospace has become crucial, transforming the way teams interact and collaborate. But how can we leverage these tools to enhance the meeting experience? The answer lies in crafting effective titles for meetings. Let’s dive into the importance of titles for meetings and how to create them for maximum impact.

Key takeaways

• Crafting an engaging, clear, and well-crafted meeting title is crucial for setting the right expectations, guiding discussions, and outlining objectives, thereby directly influencing the success of meetings.
• Effective meeting titles blend brevity, clarity, creativity, and professionalism while also being inclusive and respectful , thereby engaging participants and encouraging attendance and active contribution.
• Kumospace enhances virtual meetings by allowing for customized virtual workspaces, fostering collaboration with immersive features, and utilizing advanced people analytics to improve team interaction and optimize virtual experiences.

The importance of meeting titles

A compelling meeting title is pivotal to the success of a meeting . A clear, concise, and well-crafted title can set the right expectations and provide context for what the meeting will entail. This is especially relevant in virtual platforms like Kumospace, where the meeting title significantly shapes the virtual environment.

An effective meeting title is not only informative but also engaging. A title that clearly conveys the purpose of the meeting and the agenda encourages attendance. This holds particular significance in a business meeting, where the title:

• Attracts attendees
• Injects a sense of anticipation into your calendar
• Guides discussions
• Precisely outlines meeting objectives.

However, the importance of meeting titles goes beyond just setting the tone and engaging participants. They also play a significant role in communicating the intent of the meeting. By accurately describing the purpose of a meeting in the title, you set the stage for a focused and productive discussion. This helps attendees grasp the true intent behind the meeting, ensuring that everyone is aligned with the meeting’s objectives right from the start.

So, how do you create an ideal meeting title that establishes the tone, engages participants, and correctly communicates the meeting’s purpose? Here are some effective strategies.

Setting the tone

Setting the tone for a meeting begins with the title. The language you use in your meeting titles can influence participants’ expectations and engagement levels. For instance, a title like ‘Collaboration and Innovation: Unleashing Creativity’ sets a positive and energetic tone, while ‘Strategic Planning: Charting the Course for Success’ has a more focused and goal-oriented tone.

But how can you effectively establish the tone using meeting titles in virtual platforms like Kumospace? It largely depends on the language you use. Here are some tips:

• Use words that convey enthusiasm and engagement
• Maintain clarity and conciseness
• Utilize descriptive language that mirrors the meeting’s aim
• Include keywords or phrases relevant to the meeting’s theme or topic
• Tailor the title to the audience or participants

By following these tips, you can create meeting titles that effectively set the tone and engage participants.

Engaging participants

Engaging participants is another significant element in creating effective meeting titles. An engaging title ensures attendees are interested and invested in the meeting. This can be achieved by:

• Prioritizing topics
• Setting clear agendas
• Using question-based agendas
• Fostering collaboration
• Utilizing asynchronous communication

With Kumospace, you can make your meetings more engaging by crafting titles that capture the group’s attention and foster genuine interest. Remember, an engaged participant is more likely to contribute to the meeting actively, leading to more fruitful discussions and outcomes.

Conveying purpose

Communicating the purpose of a meeting via its title is an art. A well-crafted, focused title sets clear expectations, leading to more effective and engaging conference meetings . When attendees swiftly comprehend the purpose of team meetings, they are empowered to make prompt decisions about their participation in the conference meeting, leading to a more focused and efficient meeting dynamic.

So, whether it’s board meetings or brainstorming sessions, ensure your meeting agenda accurately reflects the meeting’s purpose. This will not only help set clear expectations but also ensure that participants arrive prepared, contribute effectively, and drive the meeting towards its objectives.

Techniques for creating effective meeting titles

Now that we appreciate the significance of meeting titles, let’s examine the methods for creating effective ones. Three key areas to focus on are brevity and clarity, balancing creativity and professionalism, and ensuring inclusivity and respectfulness.

Brevity and clarity in meeting titles are necessary to effectively communicate the purpose of the meeting. A brief and clear title enables potential attendees to swiftly grasp the essential information, empowering them to make informed decisions and save time by declining irrelevant meetings.

While brevity and clarity hold importance, they must be balanced with creativity and professionalism for the greatest impact. A creative yet professional title fosters a combination of engagement and innovation, capturing participants’ attention, and contributing to a positive and productive meeting atmosphere.

Lastly, inclusivity and respectfulness in meeting titles aid in creating a welcoming environment for all attendees. It’s important to consider the diversity of your team and to ensure that your meeting titles are respectful and inclusive, fostering a sense of belonging and collaboration.

Brevity and clarity

Brevity and clarity in meeting titles are imperative. A brief and clear title enables attendees to understand quickly the purpose of the meeting and prioritize their schedules accordingly. This can motivate each attendee to learn more about what will be addressed in future meetings.

To master the art of creating brief and clear meeting titles, follow these tips:

• Keep them short
• Include the meeting purpose
• Grab attention
• Add context

A clear and concise title ensures that everyone understands the purpose and topic of the meeting, preventing them from losing interest or feeling overwhelmed.

Balancing creativity and professionalism

Maintaining a balance between creativity and professionalism in meeting titles can be challenging. However, it’s crucial to capture attention and drive up engagement while upholding the meeting’s relevance and value.

Consider the intent and mood of the meeting and use clear and concise language. And remember, it’s all about striking that delicate balance between personal expression and meeting objectives . With the right balance, you can create titles that are fresh, engaging, and professional, helping you achieve your meeting goals.

Inclusivity and respectfulness

Inclusivity and respectfulness in meeting titles are necessary to cultivate a welcoming environment for all attendees. By creating inclusive and respectful meeting titles, you can create an environment that is inclusive and respectful to all potential attendees.

This means:

• Being clear and concise
• Showing cultural sensitivity
• Engaging your audience
• Understanding your audience

Remember, an inclusive and respectful meeting title not only fosters a sense of belonging but also encourages active participation, leading to more productive and successful meetings. A well-crafted meeting invitation plays a crucial role in achieving this, and selecting the right meeting names is essential. To initiate this process, send out a meeting request to your team members for the next meeting.

Meeting title examples for different scenarios

Now that we’ve discussed the significance of meeting titles and methods to create them, let’s examine some examples tailored to various meeting scenarios. These examples will provide you with inspiration and guidance for crafting effective titles that suit various meeting types and objectives.

Kickoff meetings signify the start of a new project or initiative, and their titles should communicate a feeling of excitement and anticipation. Some engaging kickoff meeting title examples include “Project Launch: Journey to Success”, “New Beginnings: Charting Our Path”, and “Innovation Unleashed: The Dawn of a New Era”.

Team-building business meetings , on the other hand, aim to foster camaraderie and collaboration among team members. Titles for such company meetings should reflect this essence of unity and cooperation, considering the importance of each team member. Some examples of team meeting titles include “Unity Unveil”, “Team Triumph Talk”, and “Cohesion Conference”.

Problem-solving meetings are intended to address specific challenges or issues, and their titles should directly reflect this purpose. Some examples of problem-solving meeting titles include “Solution Summit: Tackling Challenges Head-On”, “Roadblock Resolution: Finding Our Way Forward”, and “Barrier Breakdown: Paving the Path to Progress”. In addition to these meetings, weekly strategy planning sessions can help teams stay focused and aligned on their goals.

These examples are just a starting point, and the possibilities are endless. The key is to keep in mind the principles we’ve discussed earlier - brevity and clarity, a balance of creativity and professionalism, and inclusivity and respectfulness.

Maximizing engagement with Kumospace

Kumospace offers a platform for productive and engaging virtual meetings, but how can we fully utilize its potential to craft a genuinely immersive and collaborative experience? The key lies in utilizing spatial audio , online whiteboard , and team chat .

Boosting team collaboration in Kumospace cultivates a sense of camaraderie and unity, leading to improved productivity and team dynamics. This can be achieved through various features offered by Kumospace, such as immersive virtual workspaces, video conferencing, and instant messaging, which allow for seamless navigation and interaction within virtual environments.

Lastly, using advanced people analytics in Kumospace can offer insightful observations on team interactions and time management, assisting organizations in optimizing their virtual office experiences. By tapping into communication patterns, preferences, and feedback, HR professionals can make data-driven decisions to elevate HR strategies and create a more inspiring and engaging virtual workplace.

Spatial audio

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Spatial audio replicates the way sound behaves in the real world. In Kumospace, as participants move closer to or further away from each other within the virtual space , the volume and clarity of the audio change accordingly. This mimics real-life auditory experiences, making conversations more natural and engaging. It allows users to have private conversations in a public space, just like at an in-person gathering, enhancing the sense of presence and personal connection.

Strengthening team collaboration

Strengthening team collaboration in Kumospace fosters a sense of camaraderie and cohesion, improving productivity and team dynamics. By creating a sense of belonging through virtual team building activities, you can enhance collaboration and trust, ultimately improving workplace culture, employee satisfaction, and strengthening team dynamics.

With Kumospace, you get:

• A realistic virtual office layout
• Video and text chat capabilities
• Screen sharing
• Call recording
• Live subtitles
• Scheduled online meetings

All of these features empower teams to engage and build stronger relationships. Kumospace allows for seamless navigation and interaction within virtual environments, enabling dynamic discussions, workshops, webinars, and seamless collaboration regardless of geographical location.

Advanced people analytics

Advanced people analytics in Kumospace provide valuable insights into team interactions and time management, helping organizations optimize their virtual office experiences. By utilizing advanced people analytics, you can experience:

• Increased workforce qualities
• Enhanced collaboration
• Improved decision-making
• Better resource allocation

This can lead to a significant boost in productivity.

People analytics in Kumospace are designed to enhance HR processes and guide you in making data-driven decisions that are perfectly aligned with your business goals. 

Crafting the perfect meeting title is a skill that can significantly impact the success of your meetings. From setting the tone and engaging participants to conveying the meeting’s purpose, meeting titles play a crucial role in shaping the outcome of a meeting. With the right techniques, such as maintaining brevity and clarity, balancing creativity and professionalism, and ensuring inclusivity and respectfulness, you can create effective titles that foster engagement and productivity.

Leveraging the power of virtual office software like Kumospace, you can take your meetings to the next level. By customizing your virtual workspaces, strengthening team collaboration , and utilizing advanced people analytics, you can create a conducive and engaging environment for successful meetings. So, the next time you schedule a meeting, remember - the right title can make all the difference!

Frequently asked questions

How do you title a general meeting  .

Title a general meeting by creating a concise and descriptive title that clearly explains the purpose of the meeting in just one line. This will help everyone understand the focus of the meeting right from the start.

How do you title a discussion meeting?  

Create a title that accurately describes the purpose of the meeting in one line, focusing on clarity rather than trying to make it interesting. By doing so, participants will know what to expect and the meeting will be more productive.

How do you name a meeting example?  

Name the meeting according to its purpose, for example, "Weekly team-building" or "Weekly priority aligning." Choose a name that reflects the main focus of the meeting.

What is the importance of meeting titles in Kumospace?  

Meeting titles in Kumospace are crucial as they set the tone, engage participants , and convey the purpose of the meeting. A well-crafted title ensures the right expectations and provides context for the meeting. It's essential to make them clear and engaging!

How can I maximize engagement with Kumospace?  

To maximize engagement with Kumospace, strengthen team collaboration and use advanced people analytics to create a conducive and engaging environment for successful meetings. These tools and features are key to enhancing engagement and interaction in Kumospace.

Transform the way your team works from anywhere.

A virtual office in Kumospace lets teams thrive together by doing their best work no matter where they are geographically.

Drew leads marketing at Kumospace. Prior to joining Kumospace, he spent his career founding and operating businesses. His work has been featured in over 50 publications. Outside of work, Drew is an avid skier and sailor. A wholehearted extrovert, he organizes VentureSails, a series of networking events for founders and tech investors.

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How To Create Memorable Meeting Titles That Attract Attendees

Are you hosting unproductive meetings time and time again? Learn how to craft the perfect meeting title to attract your attendees, improve performance, and boost team engagement. 📈

Have fewer, more effective meetings with AI, behavior-driving features, and seamless integrations.

If you're hosting unproductive meetings, chances are it's because you aren’t taking the time to craft creative meeting names. Meeting names should be helpful, informative, and concise, providing attendees with the context necessary to make informed decisions about their involvement. While your meeting names don’t have to be long, they should be impactful and informative.

Crafting meeting names that encompass the purpose of your meeting will do wonders for your meetings moving forward.

In this article, we’ll cover the importance of choosing effective meeting titles. Keep reading to learn about the importance of creative meeting names! 

We’ll be taking a look at the following topics:

• Why are meeting names important? 
• How do you create a meeting title?
• Additional meeting title ideas

Meeting Tools That Elevate Your Meeting Names

Let’s get started.

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Why do meeting names matter?

Just like a meeting agenda, a meeting title is a way of letting attendees know why you’ve called it. 

Instead of making the entire team read through the agenda, the title should give your team members enough of an idea to ensure that they know why they’re attending.

Whether it be a team meeting, weekly meeting , conference meeting, or even a board meeting , you should ensure the meeting’s purpose is suggested by the title. Considering this is something that people often completely skip over when creating a meeting, making sure to name your meeting is a fast way to increase their effectiveness and success. 

Additionally, a meeting’s title could be enough to sway a team member that’s on the fence about going to the meeting to do some more digging. If your title is specific and direct, then you’ll be able to give your workers that little extra push to then open the invite and take a look at the meeting agenda that you’ve attached.

Saying that also assumes that you’re writing an agenda for all of the company meetings that you’re hosting, even cross-functional ones with team members from other departments.. These short documents outline the main purpose and goals of a meeting, which helps to overcome the meeting problem of people feeling that they’re unnecessary. 

Whether you’re hosting virtual meetings or in-person ones, you should always include an agenda attached to your invite. 

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How do you create a business meeting heading? 

When organizations are trying to suggest that their meeting is important, especially when it is an event that invites external figures, they often use pretentious word choice to imply importance.

Have you ever received an invite to one of the following?

• A teleconference
• A keynote seminar
• An exclusive breakfast briefing
• A focus network

While it’s true that meeting might not be the most exciting word, there is no need to turn to grandiose language. 

In fact, the examples listed above are all just pretentious ways to say ‘meeting’. Especially when you’re running team meetings with people that you see everyday, there is no need to roll out the red carpet.

When you create your meeting names, be sure to keep it simple. This straightforward fact will help a lot of team members grasp exactly what you’re offering. Instead of looking for grand titles that suggest a level of significance to your discussion, your title should include information about the content. 

If, when thinking of the content of the discussion, you don’t think you could create an interesting title or one that defines why you’re hosting your discussion, it might be time to reconsider if it’s absolutely necessary. 

Tips for titling business meetings

When you send out a meeting invite, the title is the very first thing someone is going to read. Because of this, it makes sense to try and put yourself in their shoes when you’re crafting the title. 

You’ll want to create a title that accurately describes why the meeting is going to take place. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an interesting name, but it should do its job — which is to explain the meeting’s purpose in one line.

That being said, here are some general tips that you should follow during the process of titling your business meetings:

• Keep them succinct 
• Include concrete goals if possible
• Grasp the group’s attention
• Think about the other person’s perspective 

Creativity has its place

Let’s break these down further.

Keep them succinct

A meeting invite is not the title of your undergraduate dissertation. Yes, it’s important to give a core detail about what the meeting is going to cover, but you don’t need to write absolutely everything that will come up.

Especially if you create a meeting agenda, then a shorter, direct meeting title will be the perfect hook to entice each person to read more about what will be discussed in the meeting.

Include meeting goals

When getting invited to a team meeting , many of your company employees might wonder how necessary this discussion actually is. If you have a very general title, like “Team Meeting”, many people might think that this will be a complete waste of time.

To get around this problem, you should always write one key sentence that explains what goals you expect to hit in the title. This doesn’t have to be complicated, for example:

• Department meeting to discuss finance on project X
• 1-1 performance review of the last three months
• HR: Discussing the recent incident on the 10th of June

Okay, that last one is perhaps a little dramatic. But, it does just enough in one short phrase, letting the reader know exactly what topics you will talk about.

Grasp their attention

One of the easiest ways to gain genuine interest for an important meeting is to use tags like ‘URGENT’, but only when they are absolutely necessary. 

When a meeting invite arrives in your inbox with ‘URGENT’, ‘IMPORTANT’, or ‘CRITICAL’, the gossip inside most people will push them into at least taking a look at what’s going on in the meeting.

Most of the time, no one is going to miss a meeting that’s marked with a tag like this. That being said, be sure to only use an urgent tag if it is actually a critical meeting. If people turn up in droves only to find out that it isn’t actually particularly important, people will start to lose focus and faith in their leaders. 

To avoid being the manager that cried wolf, only use these tags when you need all board members to attend. 

Think about your team’s perspective

As a manager, if you title a meeting “Chat with Jenny,” you’ll probably already know what topic matter you want to talk about. When you open your own calendar and skim through what you’ve got prepared for the day, you’ll instantly know based on your own personal context why you’ve called that meeting.

On the other hand, when a meeting invite arrives in Jenny’s inbox with no information other than ‘chat’, they might be incredibly worried. Will this meeting call for problem solving? Has Jenny caused issues as a team leader ? Or, did Jenny miss a critical due date? It only makes sense that she has these initial concerns. 

The lack of context leaves her completely in the dark, making this an unnerving situation for your team member to be in. Even if they know it's nothing bad, the lack of context from their side of the equation can cause them to feel out of place. 

Additionally, if the topic you want to ‘chat’ about is important or requires some pre-thinking (planning a stage of a project, jotting down key points, or arranging key metrics for example), then making that clear early on will help the team member prepare beforehand. 

You want to ensure that your business meeting is a safe space for your employees to talk about their work progress, problem solving challenges, and concerns. Preparation will make the discussion run a lot smoother, so providing extra context and putting yourself in the employee’s shoes are essential. 

When figuring out how to enliven your meetings , it’s easy to turn to the most creative names you can possibly think of. But catchy names are tricky, as they have the potential to hold significance only because they are catchy. 

Some people in the company might enjoy a funny name, or a more off-the-cuff meeting title. If you are confident that your department is the type of place where funny meeting names will go down well, then go for it.

However, remember that humorous meeting names don’t always come across as the most professional, so keep this in mind depending on who you’re sending out the meeting request to.

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Common meeting names for team meetings and beyond

Now, we’ll be diving into some rapid-fire meeting names, giving you more ideas of what sort of titles might work well for your meeting type. 

Keep in mind the topics you want to talk about, how often the meeting occurs, and which department you will be working with in the process. 

Ideas for one-on-ones:

• Performance Review for the Month of X
• Catch Up of Recent Processes
• Workload Check-In - Are we feeling stressed out?
• Employee Growth Plan - Fostering Future Growth
• Goal Setting For Next Quarter 
• Salary Increase Based On Hard Work and Recent Performance

Team meetings:

• Weekly Strategy Planning for X Project
• Weekly Catch-Up and Project Updates
• Team Goal Focus Meeting - Planning the Next Month’s Progress
• Restructuring Project Goals
• Preparing for Budget Changes Coming to X Project

Project-based meetings:

• Finance Department x Creative Department - Reviewing proposed content plan
• One Week Check-In - How has the project come along?
• Addressing Client’s Review of Project
• Strategy Meeting Moving into Final Sprint
• Introduction to Project X: Context and Goals
• Assigning Project Roles 
• Onboarding Strategy Changing for Future Candidates

Use the examples discussed above, or review them to inspire new ideas for your own meeting names. Whether you’re conducting board meetings, virtual meetings , a one on one, or even a decision making meeting, mastering the art of the meeting title will lead to future success. 

As you practice crafting titles for your different meetings, keep track of the progress of your team members. When incorporating certain word choices, do your employees show up more excited? Or, is the team more open to tackling challenges? By analyzing the success of your title experiments, you’ll be more likely to improve future meetings too. 

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Fellow is the only all-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software for remote and hybrid teams. With AI-suggested talking points, Fellows enable efficient meeting preparation and can help spark ideas for meeting names and creativity. You can even get AI-generated suggested agendas, topics, and talking points right where your meetings happen.

To keep the organization going, Fellow creates a centralized hub where you can find everything meeting related in one centralized hub. This way, there’s no more scrambling to find where you saved your meeting agenda. During meetings, you can remain fully present while your AI assistant is hard at work transcribing, recording, and summarizing the meeting content that way you can connect with your peers and build closer relationships. Learn more about Fellow’s pricing plans !

Avoma is a meeting productivity tool that helps boost meeting productivity by automating tedious tasks, providing valuable insights, facilitating collaboration, and streamlining workflows before, during, and after meetings. By saving time and enabling teams to focus on high-value activities, Avoma helps organizations make the most of their meetings. Avoma pricing is fair, flexible, and affordable and you can try the tool for free with no commitment. When you're ready to upgrade, you can choose from one of five plans including a Free Plan and an enterprise plan for premium use.

Sembly helps boost meeting productivity by providing tools for agenda management, collaborative note taking, action item tracking, integration with productivity tools, meeting analytics, and feedback collection. By streamlining meeting processes and fostering effective collaboration, Sembly empowers teams to maximize the value of their meetings, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately drive better outcomes for the organization. You can get started for free or choose from one of three paid plans ranging from $10/month to $20/month. 

4. Supernormal 

Supernormal is a meeting productivity tool that helps organizations prioritize collaboration in meetings. Supernormal empowers teams to facilitate more productive meetings by facilitating several tasks within the meeting lifecycle including meeting agenda creation, for collaborative note taking, action item tracking, integration with productivity tools, meeting analytics, and automated reminders. Supernormal has a simple pricing structure, offering a “Free Forever plan” or a pro plan for $49/month. 

Make your next business meeting one to remember

The process of titling your meetings can seem like a great challenge. But no matter what meeting type it is, a memorable title is key to its success. 

To inspire your team members and boost engagement, try not to be vague for your next meeting. You want to be simple, but you also need to demonstrate the reasons you’re calling this meeting in the first place. Don’t be afraid to add some more detail into the heading to be clear about your action plan. 

While a catchy name could be an option for your department, make sure to assess the topics of the meeting agenda first. Once you’ve decided on a title, practice crafting new meeting names as they come. What once posed a huge challenge will start to come to you like second nature. 

Not only will this practice help to make your next meeting more effective, but it will also create more genuine human connection within your company. By keeping your title to the point, creative, and informative, your employees will be able to glance at their work week and be enthusiastic about their meeting agenda again. 

Don't let unproductive meetings slow you down

See the impact of fewer, shorter meetings, increased accountability, and enhanced productivity with Fellow.

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400+ Catchy Meeting Names To Boost Employee Engagement

Table of contents:.

Choosing a meeting name might feel like a no-brainer, but picking the right one can make all the difference in your team’s engagement level.

With our massive list of catchy meeting name ideas, you’ll be sure to find a name that excites and inspires your team.

We’ve split our list into easy-to-scroll-through categories. We also provide top tips to help you choose inclusive titles for your future meetings and discuss some of the pros and cons of using creative meeting names.

Quick Summary

• Choosing creative names for your on-site and virtual meetings can create team-building opportunities and boost employee engagement.
• The best meeting names use clear, concise language.
• Avoid using gendered or culturally insensitive terms that could exclude or offend team members.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in.

Catchy Business Meeting Name Ideas

A compelling name for your meeting sets the tone and engages employees from the start. Browse these general business meeting names to capture the essence of your business discussions:

• Growth Guild
• Leaders’ Lab
• Management Exchange
• Gather & Grow
• Visionary Ventures
• Plan for the Pinnacle
• The Productivity Platform
• Corporate Catalyst Convention
• Strategy & Success Session
• Enterprise Enclave
• Blueprint Banter
• Business Blueprints
• Mission Meetup
• Goals & Gains Gathering
• Elevation Exchange
• Boardroom Brainwave
• Opportunity Orbit
• Pathway Planning
• Pursuits & Progress Panel
• Synergy & Systems
• Peak Performances
• Strategy Session Summit
• Enterprise & Elevate
• Corporate Clarity Conference
• Business Beacon Brief
• Operational Odyssey
• Prosperity Panel
• Achievers’ Assembly
• Code Masters
• Summit of Solutions
• Corporate Chronicles
• Operation Optimize
• Business Breakthroughs
• Visions and Voyages
• Blueprint Breakdown
• Project & Progress Planner
• Operational Overviews
• Brief & Blossom
• Innovation Intersection

Catchy Team Meeting Name Ideas

Teamwork is the driving force for innovation and productivity. Amplify team synergy with these engaging meeting names designed to promote collaboration and group cohesion:

• Storyboard Soiree
• Sketch & Sip
• Team Talk Time
• Unity Unveil
• Group Groove Gathering
• Cohesion Conference
• Team Triumph Talk
• Unity Update
• Huddle & Hustle
• Synchronized Session
• Collaboration Club
• Groupthink Gala
• Strategy & Synchronize
• All-Star Assembly
• Collective Convo
• Power Players’ Parley
• Synergy Symposium
• Talk & Tactics
• Dynamic Duo Discussion
• Goal-Getters Gathering
• Team Trailblazers’ Talk
• Synchronicity Summit
• Success Squad
• Visionary Voyage
• Group Up and Gather
• Circle of Strategy
• Summit Squad
• Teamwork Teatime
• Dream Team Debrief
• Strategy Circle
• Project Progress Party
• Collaboration Conclave
• Synchronicity Session
• Collective Catch-up
• Team Tower Talk
• Nexus Night
• Collaboration Carousel

Catchy Names for Hybrid Meetings

Hybrid meetings bridge the gap between remote and traditional office work. These names reflect the fusion of the traditional and virtual, offering the best of both worlds:

• Blended Bytes
• Twinned Teams
• Dual Dialogue Days
• Hybrid Huddle
• Interwoven Interactions
• Mixed Mode Mingle
• Phygital Forum
• Merged Meetup
• Dual Desk Discussions
• Integrated Insights
• Tandem Talks
• Combo Collective
• Mingle Mode Matrix
• Omni Operation Outlines
• Interface Interlink
• Fusion Face-off
• Virtual Meets Viable
• Blended Brainstorms
• Unified Undertakings
• Fusion Forum
• Digital Dual Drive
• Connected Corner
• Synced Up Session
• The Hybrid Roundup
• Dual Domain Dialogues
• Both Worlds Workshop
• Blended Brief Breaks
• Coexist Conclave
• Wired Together Workshop
• The Hybrid Hub
• Virtual-Reality Rendezvous

Catchy Names for Virtual Meetings

• Pixel Pioneers
• Binary Banter
• Digital Dive-In
• Cyber Chats
• Virtual Visions
• E-Talk Tables
• Webinar Work Party
• Synced for Success
• Virtual Volley
• E-Encounter Events
• Online Odyssey
• Web Watercooler
• Cloud Connect
• Streamline Summit
• Synced and Engaged
• Connected by Web
• Digital Dialogues
• Network Nexus
• Cloud Collective
• Silicon Sync-up
• Ether Exchange
• Online Oasis
• Pixel Panel
• The CyberLink
• VirtuTalk Town
• Business Bandwidths
• Silicon Seminars
• Electro Enclave
• Cyber Summit
• Virtual Village
• Online Odyssey Exchange

Catchy Names for a Meet-and-Greet

First impressions matter. Our list of meet-and-greet names can help you set a welcoming, memorable tone, ensuring each introduction starts on the right note.

• Friendly First
• Fresh Face Fest
• Mingle Moment
• Hi & Hello Huddle
• Handshake Haven
• Intro Junction
• Movers & Shakers Meet & Greet
• Newbie Nook
• Connect Corner
• Get-to-Know Gala
• Rapport Rally
• First Impressions Festivity
• Warm Welcome Workshop
• First Glance Gather
• Greetings Gathering
• Acquaintance Arena
• Icebreaker Introduction
• Start & Spark Session
• Face-to-Face Fair
• Meet & Mingle Mixer
• Getting Familiar Forum
• Wave & Welcome Workshop
• First-Time Get Together
• Familiarity Fest
• Cheers & Chats Circle
• Network Nook
• Commence & Connect
• Intros & Insights
• Connections Convention
• New Horizons Hello

Catchy HR Meeting Name Ideas

Human resources are the backbone of any organization. This list of names will help foster HR discussions that resonate with purpose and productivity, ultimately improving employee well-being.

• Staff Sync-up
• Workplace Health Workshop
• HR Harmony Hub
• Employee Experience Exchange
• Talent Talk Time
• Onboarding Odyssey
• Benefit Breakdown
• Training & Tidbits
• Employee Engagement Emporium
• Culture Clinic
• Retention Rendezvous
• Compensation Conversation
• Performance Panel
• Feedback Fiesta
• Development Dialogue
• Resource Roundtable
• Growth Guild Gathering
• Well-being Workshop
• Productivity Parley
• Talent & Training Teatime
• Diversity & Inclusion Discussion
• Leadership Lab
• HR Highlight Hour
• Career Pathway Converse
• Role & Responsibility Review
• Policy & Procedure Parley
• HR Hotspot Huddle
• Employee Elevate Encounter
• Growth & Goals Gab
• Recruitment Rally
• Workforce Wellness Workshop

Catchy Breakfast Meeting Name Ideas

Kickstart your day with dynamic breakfast meetings. Dive into our list to energize morning gatherings and bring fresh perspectives to the table.

• Morning Munch & Meet
• Dawn Discussions
• Bagels & Briefings
• Cereal & Strategy
• Early-Bird Brainstorm
• First Light Insights
• Toast to Triumph
• Pancake Perspectives
• Rise & Reflect
• Breakfast Club
• Eggs & Exploration
• Muffin Meetup
• Dawn & Deliberate
• Early Riser Review
• A.M. Agenda
• Breakfast & Brainpower
• Sunny Side Up Summit
• Business Over Biscuits
• Waffles & Wisdom
• Granola Gatherings
• Porridge & Plans
• Brunch & Briefing
• Strategy Over Scones
• Fruit & Focus
• Rise and Shine
• The Morning Memo
• Cinnamon Circle
• Morning Medley Meet
• Smoothie Session
• Quiche & Queries
• Bagels & Brainwaves

Catchy Coffee Meeting Name Ideas

Bringing together ideas requires the right setting. Here’s a fresh list of catchy coffee-inspired meeting names to awaken your team’s creativity. Stir your workforce’s enthusiasm and caffeinate your discussions.

• Code & Coffee
• Coffee Friday
• Grounds for Discussion
• Steep & Speak
• Black Brew Brief
• Latte Lowdown
• Coffee Corner
• Espresso Elements
• Cappuccino Chats
• Beans & Business
• Meeting Over Mugs
• Brewed Brainstorming
• Fresh Roast Roundup
• Cafe Connect
• Common Grounds
• Mocha Moments
• Java Junction
• Cream, Sugar, & Strategy
• Brewed Beginnings
• Coffee Circle Chats
• Morning Brew Review
• Drip Pot Discussions
• Coffee & Catch-Up
• Brewed Breakouts
• Cafe Conversations
• Engaged By Espresso
• Coffee Council
• Business Over Brew
• Dark Roast Dialogue
• Frappe Forum
• Espresso Exchange

Catchy Lunch Meeting Name Ideas

Lunch can be a great opportunity to have productive exchanges and hearty conversations. Here’s a selection of engaging names to spice up midday meetings:

• Lunch Crunch
• Lunch & Launch
• Midday Meetup
• Sandwich Sessions
• Salad & Strategy
• Business Over a Bite
• Wrap & Rapport
• Midday Mingle
• Soup & Synopsis
• Tacos & Talking Points
• Panini Plans
• Luncheon Learnings
• Chow & Chat
• Deli Discussions
• Pasta & Projects
• Midday Momentum
• Light Lunch & Learn
• Dine and Define
• Network and Nosh
• Burger & Business
• Bowl & Brainwaves
• Entrée Exchanges
• Sushi & Summaries
• Midday Meal & Meet
• Pizza and Planning
• Buffet & Briefings
• Dish & Deliberate
• Gourmet Gather
• Quesadilla Queries
• Lunchtime Lecture
• Midday Motivation Meet

Catchy Weekly Meeting Name Ideas

Weekly catch-ups are essential discussions for many teams. Dive into this list for names that encapsulate the rhythm and routine of weekly reflections, reviews, and resolutions:

• Week-End Wrap-Up
• Friday Triumph
• Weekly Progress Party
• Monday Ideas
• Tuesday Turnaround Talks
• Wednesday Wins
• Midweek Mastery
• Seven-Day Synopsis
• Weekly Wisdom Exchange
• Weekday Workshop
• Seven-Day Debrief
• Weekly Checkpoints
• Start the Week Strategies
• Friday’s Forward Focus
• The Week-End Wind-Down
• Feedback Fridays
• Weekly Weigh-in
• The Weekly Pulse
• Wednesday Whirlwind
• Week Ahead Agenda
• Weekly Wake-Up Call
• Midweek Momentum Meet
• Seven-Day Strategy
• Monday Milestones
• Friday Forecast
• Weekly Window
• Midweek Meet & Mingle
• Monday Momentum
• Wednesday Workshop
• Thursday Think Tank
• Weekly Wind-Up Workshop

Catchy Quarterly Meeting Name Ideas

A quarterly review is a milestone in business progress. Our selection of names brings out the significance of these crucial checkpoints. Reflect, recalibrate, and reignite your team’s goals with these options:

• Quarterly Checkpoint
• Quarterly Quest
• Seasonal Summary
• Three-Month Milestones
• 90-Day Digest
• Seasonal Success Stories
• Seasonal Highlights
• The Quarterly Roundup
• Trimester Triumphs
• Quarterly Convos
• Three-Month Moments
• Seasonal Strategy Session
• 90-Day Debrief
• Quarterly Quality Quest
• Seasonal Stand-up
• Quarterly Insights
• Four-Season Forecast
• 90-Day Discovery Dive
• Quarterly Clarity Conference
• Tri-monthly Meeting
• Quarterly Queries
• Seasonal Success Symposium
• The Seasonal Scope
• Quarterly Questions & Qualities
• Three-Month Mastermind
• Seasonal Sync-up
• Quarter-Year Quandaries
• Trimester Tune-up
• Seasonal Sessions
• 90-Day Details & Decisions
• Quarterly Quest for Quality

Catchy Annual Conference Meeting Names

Celebrate annual achievements and plan for the future . Reflect on the year gone by and inspire your team for the challenges and opportunities ahead with one of the following names:

• Annual Outcomes
• Yearly Yield
• Annual Wins
• Year-End Evaluation
• 365-Day Digest
• Yearly Recap Rally
• 12-Month Milestone Meeting
• Annual Assembly
• Year-in-Review Roundtable
• Calendar Closeout Conference
• Yearly Strategy Session
• Yearly Routine Review
• Annual Agenda Assembly
• Yearlong Synopsis Session
• Annual Achievement Acknowledgment
• Full-Circle Feedback Forum
• Year-End Excellence Exchange
• Annual Update
• 365-Day Discovery Dive
• Once-a-Year Analysis
• Revolution Round-the-Sun Review
• Yearly Success Symposium
• The Annual Affair
• Year’s Highlights Huddle
• Calendar Completion Conference
• 12-Month Momentum Meeting
• Yearly Voyage Voyage
• Annual Advancement Analysis
• Yearly Wrap & Rap
• Annual Odyssey Overview
• Yearly Yields & Yonder

Catchy Motivational Meeting Name Ideas

Ignite passion, drive, and ambition with these motivational meeting names:

• Passion Summit
• Inspiration Meet
• Work for the Best
• Soaring for Success
• Drive & Thrive Dialogue
• Fire-up Forum
• Empower Hour
• Expect the Best
• Elevate & Celebrate Conference
• Rise & Realize Rally
• Motivate and Manifest
• Hopes and Horizons
• Uplift Universe
• Ambition Avenue
• Dreamer’s Den Discussion
• Zeal & Zest Zone
• Spark & Start Session
• Fuel & Fulfill Forum
• Aspire and Achieve
• Triumph and Glory
• Momentum Meetup
• Aspire and Inspire
• Catalyst Conference
• Power-Up Panel
• Visions and Victories
• Peak Potential Panel
• Destiny and Drive
• Soar and Score
• Motivators Meetup
• Aspiration Assembly

How to Choose Inclusive and Respectful Meeting Names

When selecting meeting names, a few rules apply:

• Avoid using gendered language
• Practice cultural sensitivity
• Use clear and concise language
• Request feedback

Language can unintentionally exclude or offend members of your team. To steer clear of pitfalls and overcome generational gaps in the workplace , avoid using language that’s gendered or age-specific. Examples include “Gentlemen’s Gathering” or “Young Innovators.”

Cultural sensitivity means avoiding words such as “powwow” or “tribe,” which are common but can be disrespectful to Indigenous individuals.

Instead, choose universally appealing and neutral terms that resonate with the meeting’s objectives without appropriating or misusing certain words.

Lastly, opt for clear language over too much creativity. Consider the difference between “Bagels & Briefings” vs “Breakfast Brouhaha.”

Almost the same tips apply when choosing meeting room names .

Pros and Cons of Using Catchy Meeting Names at Work

Here’s what you have to gain or lose, depending on how well the name for your meeting works for your workforce:

If executed correctly, catchy meeting names can:

• Create a sense of excitement: A unique name can pique attendees’ curiosity, helping them look forward to the event.
• Result in better-prepared attendees: A memorable name can help attendees recall the purpose and prepare in advance.
• Encourage active participation: A fun name can set a positive tone and drive engagement.

If not executed correctly, catchy meeting names can:

• Cause confusion: If the name is too vague, attendees may not understand the meeting’s purpose.
• Seem unprofessional: Some may see playful names as not serious enough for a meeting.
• Be trivialized: A name that’s too casual might diminish the meeting’s importance./

Set Yourself Up for Workplace Success with OfficeRnD Hybrid

Tweaking your meeting name can be the spark that launches a successful meeting. It could excite your team to prepare and participate.

With 400+ different meeting names at your fingertips, you shouldn’t have a problem finding a great name for your next meeting.

Once you find the perfect name, you’ll want to have all the right tools and tech to make it a success.

With OfficeRnD Hybrid, you can:

• Streamline conference room scheduling and desk booking processes
• Allow employees to reserve desks, meeting rooms, or any other type of space
• Enable hot desking and desk hoteling
• See what the office occupancy is on certain days
• Communicate company events, announcements, and policies

But don’t take our word for it; see for yourself!

Get started for free today with OfficeRnD Hybrid, or book a live demo to find out what it can do for your hybrid team.

What is a Good Title for a Meeting?

A good title for a meeting is clear, concise, and directly reflects the main purpose or topic of discussion. It should capture attendees’ attention, set the right expectations, and provide context for the agenda. An effective title ensures participants understand the meeting’s objective and its relevance to them.

What Should I Name My Meeting Invitation?

The name of your meeting invitation should clearly convey its purpose, be engaging to encourage attendance, and be relevant to the attendees. Consider the main topic, the desired outcome, and the audience when crafting the title. For example, instead of “Team Meeting,” a more specific title like “Q4 Sales Strategy Discussion” provides clarity and context.

What is a Cool Name for an All Hands Meeting?

A cool name for an all-hands meeting could be “Team Unite Summit,” “All-Star Gathering,” or “Company Connect Session.” The name should evoke a sense of unity, inclusivity, and excitement, emphasizing the importance of everyone coming together to align on company goals and updates.

What do you Name Daily Meetings?

For daily meetings, names that emphasize routine, focus, and momentum are ideal. Consider titles like “Daily Sync-Up,” “Morning Momentum,” “Day-Starter Huddle,” or “24-Hour Check-In.” These names convey the regularity and purpose of the gathering, setting the tone for a productive session.

What do you Title a Team Meeting?

For a team meeting, the title should reflect collaboration, purpose, and unity. Consider titles like “Team Collaboration Hour,” “Squad Strategy Session,” “Unit Update,” or “Crew Convergence.” These names emphasize teamwork and the collective effort towards shared objectives.

What Is a Business Meeting?

In a business meeting, multiple team members gather to brainstorm ideas, have discussions, or work toward organizational goals.

What Are the Different Types of Company Meetings?

Meetings are an essential aspect of professional life. They serve various purposes and come in many types, such as kickoff meetings, planning meetings, or team-building meetings.

What Is a Short Meeting?

A short meeting is relative. It’s one that’s shorter than the average meeting time.

Short company meetings can have a variety of purposes, such as providing a quick update, making a brief decision, or sharing information.

What Is an Informal Meeting?

Informal meetings don’t have a set structure or a predetermined agenda. However, they often follow a loose plan. They can be used for quick catch-ups or to clarify earlier discussions.

What Is a Formal Meeting?

A formal meeting is characterized by a set agenda, assigned roles (such as leader, notetaker, or facilitator), and sticking to a specific meeting etiquette or protocol.

Asen Stoyanchev

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How to Name Your Next Work Meeting for Maximum Effectiveness

If you’ve been in the workforce for more than five minutes you probably have heard a lot of meeting advice , such as “set a clear agenda” or “determine if the meeting can be an email instead.” But people who give advice on better meetings often overlook the lowly meeting name. This is a huge miss! A great meeting name can dramatically improve the chances that your invitees will arrive prepared and ready to engage.

This post will walk you through why you should pay attention to meeting names, how to determine the purpose of each meeting, and how to replace the default meeting name with one that conveys the purpose of the meeting. We’ll also briefly cover how to write an excellent meeting description.

Let’s get started!

The underrated power of great meeting names 

You want your meeting to stand out as obviously worth your invitees’ precious time. In a competition for limited time, “Marketing sync” isn’t super compelling.

So before you whip up a meeting invite or send out your scheduling link , take a beat and consider your meeting title carefully.

Here are five key benefits to naming your meeting well:

1. Less guessing

No one likes seeing a meeting invite and having to guess what the meeting is about. It can provoke anxiety and irritation. A great meeting name makes it clear what the purpose of the meeting is.

2. Better attendees

A well-named meeting lets invitees quickly ascertain whether they should be at your meeting. Not only does this save time for those who don’t need to be there (benefitting the organization as a whole), but it also can lead to smaller meetings, which research shows are generally more effective.

3. More preparedness

Invitees who choose to attend your well-named meeting have an easier time preparing for the meeting, and are thus more likely to show up prepared.

4. Shorter meetings

When everyone shows up prepared and informed about the meeting’s objective, you can get straight to business, resulting in a shorter meeting.

5. More interesting calendars

Well-named meetings make for much more interesting calendars! It gives attendees the chance to look forward to interesting discussions and a greater sense of accomplishment.

Sounds pretty good, right? Now let’s talk about the first step to better meeting names: figuring out your meeting’s purpose. 

Aligning on the purpose of your meeting

If nothing else, a great meeting name answers the question "Why are we meeting?" It should be actionable and contain a verb.

Everyone reading the meeting name should know why the meeting is happening, why they were invited, and why they should attend. Not only does that help you come up with a better title, but it also helps you ensure that you really need to have the meeting. Not every meeting should be an email, but not every email should be a meeting.

If you want to share project updates, sitting around a table or on a Zoom call may not be the best use of everyone’s time. There are other ways to update a team. Dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channels can serve as the catchall for status updates on a predetermined cadence – daily, weekly, monthly, etc. You can also make better use of project management apps to house all the information anyone on the team needs – and refer teammates to it regularly to help encourage a routine of seeking information first and asking questions second.

Here’s one way to nail down your next meeting’s purpose. Just fill in the blank.

We must meet in order to _________.

• Decide whether to move forward with a particular candidate
• Decide whether to adjust a deadline
• Brainstorm marketing ideas
• Finalize the sprint plan

Naming the different types of meetings 

There are many types of meetings, but here are five types of meetings that are actually worth having :

1. Weekly team syncs

Well-run weekly team meetings offer at least three vital benefits. They can:

• Clarify every team member’s roles and top priorities
• Offer a place to communicate complicated or controversial ideas ill-suited for email or Slack
• Provide a place to offer public praise to team members, in real-time

However, “Weekly team sync” is a pretty terrible name for a meeting. Remember, the purpose isn’t to share status updates. That’s better suited to project management software or Slack. Instead, these should be team-building meetings. Your agenda should include things like clarifying roles and priorities, talking through questions that aren’t suited to asynchronous communication channels, and/or boosting morale and team cohesion.

To give this meeting a better name, tie it to the purpose of the meeting. Maybe you could call it “Weekly team-building,” “Weekly priority aligning,” “Weekly issue clarification,” or “Weekly team shout-outs.” Or “Weekly team priority setting and shout-outs.”

2. Manager one-on-ones

One-on-one meetings offer many important benefits. In fact, CEO and investor Ben Horowitz thinks one-on-ones are so important that he once threatened to fire a senior leader unless he started holding them. When managers and direct reports meet regularly workers feel confident that they’re on the right track. It boosts employee engagement and offers you both a place to give each other feedback. A performance review should never come as a surprise. Regular one-on-ones, utilized correctly, help ensure that never happens.

As such, you could call your one-on-one “[Manager name]/[report name] priority setting and feedback.” 

3. Decision-making and problem-solving meetings

Decision-making meetings help everyone feel heard and included in the decision-making process rather than feeling like they’re just taking orders. Tons of research links a feeling of autonomy with job satisfaction, and job satisfaction with higher performance. A well-run decision-making meeting can be a huge win for both morale and productivity.

Name this meeting with the word “Decision” and a few words to refer to the decision that needs to be made.  

4. Brainstorming sessions

According to professional development thought leader Brian Tracy, “Brainstorming builds involvement, commitment, loyalty, and enthusiasm.” He writes that brainstorming meetings unlock people’s creative talents, build self-esteem, and help create a better climate for cooperation and teamwork. “The most important payoff is that you will come up with lots of good ideas and sometimes ideas that change the direction of the business.”

Instead of just calling a meeting a “Brainstorming session” or something equally vague, get your invitees’ creative juices flowing by including what kind of ideas you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for ideas for a big marketing project to tackle in Q2, consider naming the meeting something like, “Q2 big marketing project brainstorm.”

5. Project kickoffs

A great project kickoff can improve the working relationship between stakeholders while increasing the likelihood that a project will stay under-budget and on-time. This kind of planning meeting is a great way to decrease the likelihood of missed deadlines, issues, scope creep , and change orders.

Again, the goal of the meeting is to understand and align on the following about a project as much as possible before getting started:

• Likely effort
• Technology requirements
• Key dates and deliverables
• Assumptions

Use the name of the project in the meeting name, and include a verb. Example, “Q2 marketing project needs alignment.”

Finding the ideal title for your meeting

Let’s take another look at the examples of meeting goals from the meeting purpose section.

How are they named now, and how we might be able to improve their names?

Let’s say the purpose of the “Interview Debrief” is to decide whether to move forward with a particular candidate. “Debrief” isn’t really the goal or purpose of the meeting, but rather something that will happen during the meeting. To make the name refer to the purpose, you could instead call that meeting “Candidate decision” or “Hiring decision.” Similarly, if you’re holding a meeting to decide whether to adjust a deadline, you could call that meeting “Deadline shift decision.” 

If you’re meeting to brainstorm marketing ideas, a good name might be “Marketing ideas brainstorm.” If you’re looking to finalize a sprint plan, you might call that meeting “Sprint finalization.” 

Another idea from Lucid Meetings: Design your meeting names to convey your cultural values. They offer examples like “The Huddle, the Adrenaline call, the Council, the Braintrust, the Conclave, the Tsunami, the Tiger, the Bullpen, the Dory.” It’s true that they don’t reveal the purpose of the meeting to outsiders. But once you're on the inside, you feel like part of the team because you know what these words mean in this context. 

Pro-tip: Go through and rename all your existing meetings as practice and to get the benefits mentioned above. While you’re doing this, audit your meetings to be sure every meeting on your calendar really is necessary. Another tool that can help you is Clockwise ’s 1:1 dashboard where you can see, evaluate, and move all your 1:1 meetings at a glance. 

Writing an excellent meeting description 

When describing your meeting, the goals are similar to naming. You want to get, and keep, the invitee’s attention. You want to let them know why they were invited and why they should attend. You want them to know how to prepare for the meeting and what’s going to be expected of them during the meeting. And you want them to know what the group needs to accomplish before the meeting can end. Keep it concise to help them feel reassured that you’re being judicious with their time. 

Going forward

First step to an effective meeting? Giving it an effective name. A meeting’s title might seem inconsequential, but when done right, it actually offers tons of benefits.

Next, make sure you’re scheduling the meeting at an effective time for everyone involved. Clockwise is a meeting scheduling tool that does more than look at open blocks of time on your team’s calendar; it suggests best meeting times based on time zones, Focus Time holds, preferences, and more! Click here to try Clockwise for free.

About the author

Cathy Reisenwitz is the former Head of Content at Clockwise. She has covered business software for six years and has been published in Newsweek, Forbes, the Daily Beast, VICE Motherboard, Reason magazine, Talking Points Memo and other publications.

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How to Crack the Code of Your Problems with a Problem Solving Meeting?

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Imagine a scenario where your car broke down unexpectedly. Stranded and frustrated, you call a few friends. Together, you identify the problem, come up with a solution, and get back on the road. This is the essence of a problem-solving meeting at work.

When an issue arises, whether it’s a tight deadline, a project bottleneck, or a team conflict, it’s like that car breaking down. The situation is unsettling and stressful. But instead of facing it alone, you can bring your team together to tackle the problem head-on with a problem-solving meeting .

In this article, we’ll show you how you can utilize problem-solving sessions to engage your team, streamline discussions, and achieve real solutions.

Stay with us—you’ll find this incredibly useful!

What is a Problem Solving Meeting?

A problem-solving meeting is like a team huddle where everyone comes together to tackle a tough puzzle. Whether it’s a big problem affecting the whole company or a smaller hiccup in a project, these types of meetings are all about finding answers.

Consider it a brainstorming session mixed with a strategy game plan. The goal? To figure out what’s going wrong, toss around ideas, and decide on the best way forward.

What is an Example of a Problem Solving Meeting in the Workplace?

A perfect example of a problem-solving session would be a scenario where a company’s marketing team notices a sudden drop in website traffic, resulting in a decline in sales. To tackle this, they decided to have a problem-solving meeting.

The team members gather to identify the root of the problem. They look at recent website changes, marketing strategies, and competitor activities. In order to resolve the issue, they brainstorm ideas such as better website optimization and targeted ads.

They pick a plan, assign tasks, set deadlines, and plan how to measure progress. Feeling positive, they leave the meeting with a clear plan and are ready to act. This is how a problem-solving meeting unfolds!

Who Would Benefit from a Problem Solving Meeting?

The purpose of problem-solving meetings is to fix problems preventing the team from accomplishing its goals. Meetings in this format are led by a leader/project manager . This person usually knows a lot about the issue or is responsible for fixing it.

The team includes members who know how the problem started and those who will be affected by the solution. When everyone has heard each other’s ideas, they can collectively come up with the best solution.

A Fail-Proof Problem Solving Meeting Agenda

Here’s a ready-to-use agenda for your next problem-solving meeting. Customize it as needed to match the unique requirements of your company and the specific challenge you’re facing.

Best Practices to Hold a Successful Problem Solving Meeting

Now that you have a perfect problem-solving meeting agenda ready, integrate it with the best practices for the most effective approach to any challenge.

Keep it Small and Focused

Only invite the key people directly involved or affected by the problem. Getting the right people in the room makes it easier for everyone to speak up and stay on track, avoiding unnecessary distractions.

FluentBooking can help you to keep the meeting focused by inviting only those directly involved or impacted by the issue.

Make Sure Everyone Participates

Set some ground rules at the start so everyone feels comfortable sharing their thoughts. Assign someone to jot down notes so you don’t repeat yourselves and can keep track of everyone’s input. If possible, bring in a facilitator to guide your problem-solving meeting, ensuring practical and impactful solutions are developed.

Decide on the Best Solution Collaboratively

Have a problem-solving meeting where every team member is looking forward to throwing out ideas. Then, compare them to see which ones make the most sense and are feasible. Talk it out until you all agree on the best way forward. Take into account the pros and cons of each option and make sure everyone’s voice is heard.

Keep Your Focus Outward

Remember, you’re here to solve a problem, not create new ones among yourselves. Stay focused on helping someone outside the meeting, whether it’s a customer, a colleague, or the company as a whole. Groups focusing on solving an outside problem stay united and productive. They see ideas as helpful, not personal attacks. This reduces defensiveness, making it easier to work together and improve ideas.

Be Clear about Tasks

Make sure everyone knows what they need to do after the meeting. Keep it simple and practical, with clear deadlines and responsibilities. Know what’s expected of you, what you expect from your team, and how the meeting will go down. This helps everyone work together smoothly and reduces confusion.

Follow Up and Keep Track

After the meeting, make sure everyone knows what they need to do next. Keep track of what was decided and check in later to see how things are going. Verify that progress is made towards solving the problem.

Transform Your Troubles into Triumphs!

Ever heard the saying, “a well-oiled machine”? Well, think of your problem-solving meeting as just that! It’s like the well-oiled engine that drives your team toward solutions. 

A problem-solving meeting with a well-organized agenda will keep everyone on track and ensure your meetings lead to real solutions. By sticking to a clear plan and using the smart practices discussed above, your team can tackle challenges effectively and keep improving. 

So, get ready with a solid agenda and turn your problem-solving sessions into engines of progress!

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Lead an Effective Problem-Solving Meeting

There’s nothing worse than getting a group of smart people together to solve a problem and having the discussion devolve into chaos. This usually happens when people are at different stages of the problem-solving process. To get everyone on the same page, take a methodical approach and conquer one step at a time. First, ask: […]

There’s nothing worse than getting a group of smart people together to solve a problem and having the discussion devolve into chaos. This usually happens when people are at different stages of the problem-solving process. To get everyone on the same page, take a methodical approach and conquer one step at a time. First, ask: Does the team genuinely understand the problem it’s trying to solve? If you can’t clearly articulate it, draft a succinct problem statement. If the group understands the problem, but hasn’t yet produced a set of potential solutions, concentrate on generating as many quality options as possible. If you already have solutions, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and develop a list of pros and cons. Then you can use your time together to do the often difficult work of choosing a solution — and make sure that the final decision is in writing. The last stage, once you’ve selected the solution, is to develop an implementation plan. While conquering just one problem-solving stage at a time may feel a bit underwhelming at first, this methodical approach will often help the group leapfrog ahead, sometimes to the end of the problem-solving cycle.

Source: This tip is adapted from “Why Groups Struggle to Solve Problems Together,” by Al Pittampalli

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The 16 Types of Business Meetings (and Why They Matter)

It’s not that the advice is wrong, per se. It’s just not specific enough.

• Introduction
• Background: The thinking behind the taxonomy
• Cadence Meetings
• Catalyst Meetings
• Meetings to Evaluate and Influence
• Table: Summary of Types
• Example: How Different Types of Meetings Work Together

For example, it’s not wrong to tell people they need an agenda with clear outcomes listed for every topic. It just doesn’t apply to a lot of situations. An exquisitely detailed agenda for the one-on-one with my boss? For the sales demo? For our morning huddle? Yeah, I don’t think so. For the board meeting or the requirements analysis meeting? Absolutely.

Sometimes an organization has a pervasive problem with meetings. People complain that there are too many meetings, nothing gets done, it’s wasted time, it’s all power and politics instead of productivity—and they start to look for solutions. They find lots of generic advice, and they find lots of this kind of drivel:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted. by Simon Jenkins for the Guardian September 2017

This article is wildly popular. Over 1000 people who hate having their time wasted in meetings paradoxically had extra time they could spend commenting here to express their agreement and outrage.

Mr. Jenkins has clearly struck a nerve. It’s the kind of pandering that drives clicks and sells ads, which makes that a job well done for the Guardian. But it’s also nonsense.

There’s no proof that organizations benefit from meetings? You can only say something like that when you’re speaking too generally for anyone to know what you’re talking about. Because otherwise – did you hear that, sales teams? There’s no proof those client meetings help your company. Go ahead and cancel them! Hospital workers, stop wasting your time in those shift-change meetings! You should know what to do without talking to each other so much – go heal people already! Boards? Board meetings are for losers. Just use chat and email to manage all your governance duties.

When you get specific about the kind of meeting you’re talking about, the generic “meetings waste time” or “you must have 5 people or less” statements become ridiculous, and people who complain about meetings in general sound like childish whingers.

A meeting is not a meeting.

Want to skip the background information? Jump ahead to the taxonomy.

This doesn’t mean that meetings in general work great and that there’s no problem to solve here. It just means that there isn’t a singular meeting problem that has a simple meeting solution .

This is a challenge for us!

At Lucid, we work to help our clients get meaningful business results from their meetings, and to do this, we have to get specific. The coaching we provide for our committee clients is not the same advice we give to leadership teams .

Mr. Jenkins correctly points out that when you invite 20 people to a meeting designed for 5, it doesn’t work anymore. Well, duh. His conclusion is that meetings don’t work. A more useful conclusion is that if you’re going to invite 20 people, you should run a meeting designed to work for 20 people. That’s entirely doable, but it’s also a very different meeting.

In brief: the solution to a meeting problem depends on the kind of meeting.

Which raises the question: what are the different kinds of meetings? If it isn’t useful to provide guidelines for all meetings, is it at least possible to establish useful guidelines for a certain type of meeting? Or do we really need to look at each and every single meeting as if it was totally unique and special?

This question has driven much of our work over the past 10 years.

We found that there is a core structure underlying all successful meetings , acting as a kind of skeleton. Every meeting needs bones, but after that, the kind of animal you get on top of those bones can vary wildly. A fish is not a bird is not a kangaroo, despite the fact that they all have a head and a tail.

We found that meetings work together , and that looking at individual meetings in isolation leads to misunderstandings. It’s like studying a single bee; the drone’s dance doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you know that there are other bees watching. Meetings are designed to beget action that is evaluated and built upon in subsequent meetings, and the sequence and cadence at which these meetings occur drives the momentum of that action. Looking only at a single meeting means you miss the clues that lead to the honey.

We work with facilitators and experts to design agendas and guidebooks for running specific meetings . We’ve seen where the structures look the same, and where they differ. There are lots of specific ways to run a status meeting, but even though there’s a lot of variety between them, every status meeting still looks way more like every other status meeting than it does like any strategic planning session. Mammals are more like other mammals than any of them are like an insect.

And of course we work with clients and hear concerns about all those things that the experts don’t talk about, like how to lead a decent meeting when the group thinks meetings aren’t cool, or how to prepare in advance when your goal is to “wow” everyone during the meeting. We know people worry about how to walk those fine lines between inclusiveness and efficiency, and between appropriate framing and facilitation on the one hand, and manipulation on the other. We hear how they experience specific meetings in the context of getting real work done and can see how priorities shift between getting the content right and getting people connected.

A Taxonomy for Meetings

From all of this, we’ve developed a taxonomy for meetings that we use to help answer these questions:

• Assessing Meeting Performance Maturity : Which kind of meetings does an organization run, and which ones does it need to know how to run well? How well does it run those meetings?
• Meeting Design : If I need to design a new meeting, is there a core pattern I can build on? What factors of the design have the greatest impact on the success of this kind of meeting?
• Meeting Problem Diagnoses: If there is a problem with a meeting, are there common requirements for that kind of meeting that I can check first? Are there things going on in that meeting that might work in other meetings, but are incompatible with success in this one?
• B.S. Filter: Is the advice I’m hearing or reading relevant to the success of this meeting, or is it meant for another sort? Or worse, is it generic B.S.?

Background Work: Forming the Hypothesis

We’re not the first to propose a meeting taxonomy. If you search for “types of meetings” and if you read any books on meetings, you’ll find many ways to break down meetings by type. Most lists include between 4 and 6 different types; things like Issue Resolution meetings and Decision Making meetings.

To build our taxonomy, we started with a set of 6 types and a list of all the different kinds of meetings we could think of, then tried to match them up.

This was frustrating. No matter which list we started with, within a few minutes we always found an example that didn’t fit.

For example, Google used this list of the 6 Types of Meetings from MeetingSift as the definitive list for years. It’s very similar to many other lists out there.

• Status Update Meetings
• Information Sharing Meetings
• Decision Making Meetings
• Problem Solving Meetings
• Innovation Meetings
• Team Building Meetings

So – you tell me. Which one of those does the board meeting fit into? How about the project retrospective? The answer is that meetings like the ones that you might actually find on your calendar can fit into several of these types.

Whenever we found a meeting that didn’t fit, we set it aside and asked “Why?” What is it about that meeting which meant it should be treated differently than these others?

Because we are focused on driving tangible business results, we found we needed to get more specific. In the end, we found that there were three major factors that impact how to approach a meeting.

• The Meeting Intention
• The Meeting Format

The Expected Participation Profile

Our current taxonomy uses these factors to describe 16 distinct meeting types and gives a nod to a significant 17th that falls outside of our scope.

The Differentiators: Intention, Format and Participation Profile

Before we dive into the specific types, let’s take a look at the factors that make them distinct in more detail.

Meeting Intention

The intention behind a meeting is most often expressed as the meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes. In other words, why do people run this kind of meeting? What is it meant to create?

There are two major outcomes for any meeting: a human connection and a work product. We found that many attempts to categorize meetings dealt only with the work product, which often led to bad advice.

For example, the intention of a decision-making meeting is:

• A decision (the work product) and
• Commitment to that decision from the people in the room (a human connection outcome)

It is very easy to run a decision-making meeting that achieves 1 (a decision) but fails to achieve 2 (commitment), and therefore will fail to deliver the expected business result. If you have ever been in a meeting where you’re discussing a decision you thought had already been made, you know this to be true.

Our taxonomy attempts to look at both kinds of outcomes when describing the meeting intention.

When we first started looking at meeting format, we used a standard breakdown of “formal” and “informal” to help distinguish between the board meetings and the team meetings, but we abandoned that pretty quickly because it didn’t hold up in practice.

In practice, we found that while boards have rules that they must follow by law, and they do, this didn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the meeting followed any very strict structure. Many board meetings actually include lots of free-form conversation, which is then briefly formalized to address the legal requirements.

By contrast, we would have considered an Agile team’s daily stand-up meeting to be an informal meeting. Heck, we run those and I don’t always wear shoes. But despite this casual, social informality, the daily stand-up runs according to a very clear set of rules. Every update includes just three things, each one is no longer than 2 minutes, and we never ever ever problem solve during the meeting.

It turns out that formal and informal told us more about a participant’s perception of social anxiety in a meeting than it did about the type or format of a meeting. I experience stand-ups and interviews as informal, largely because I’m in charge and am confident of my role in these meetings. I doubt everyone I interview considers it an informal chat, though, and I imagine our stand-up may feel pretty uptight to someone who wasn’t used to it.

Instead of formal and informal, we found that the strength of the governing rituals and rules had a clearer impact on the meeting’s success. By this measure, the daily stand-up is highly ritualistic, board meetings and brainstorming sessions abide by governing rules but not rigidly so, and initial sales calls and team meetings have very few prescribed boundaries.

This still didn’t quite explain all the variation we saw in meeting formats, however. When we looked at the project status update meeting, we realized it shared some characteristics with the board meeting, but these project meetings aren’t governed by rules and laws in the same way. And while the intention for project updates is always the same—to share information about project work status and manage emerging change—there’s a ton of variation in how people run project status updates. Some teams are very formal and rigid, while others are nearly structure-free. This means our “governing rituals” criteria didn’t work here.

The format characteristic all project status update meetings do share, and that you’ll also see with board meetings, is a dislike of surprises. No project manager wants to show up to the weekly update and get surprised by how far off track the team is, or how they’ve decided to take the project in some new direction. Board members hate this too. For these meetings, surprises are bad bad bad!

Surprises are bad for project updates, but other meetings are held expressly for the purpose of finding something new. The innovation meeting, the get-to-know-you meeting, the problem-solving meeting all hope for serendipity. Going into those meetings, people don’t know what they’ll get, but they try to run the meeting to maximize their chances of something great showing up by the time they’re done.

So, when categorizing meetings based on the meeting format, we looked at both:

• The strength of governing rules or rituals
• The role of serendipity and tolerance for surprise

Last but not least, we felt that who was expected to be at a meeting and how they were meant to interact had a major impact on what needed to happen for the meeting to succeed.

The question behind these criteria is: what kind of reasonable assumptions can we make about how well these people will work together to achieve the desired goal?

Remember: every meeting has both a human connection outcome and a work outcome.

This has many significant design impacts. For example, in meetings with group members that know each other already, you can spend less meeting time on building connections. We don’t do introductions in the daily huddle; we assume the team handled that outside the meeting.

In meetings where the work product is arguably far more important than the human connection, it’s not always necessary for people to like one another or even remember each others’ names as long as the meeting gets them all to the desired goal efficiently. A formal incident investigation meeting does not need the person under investigation to know and like the people on the review board to achieve its goal.

By contrast, some meetings only go well after the team establishes mutual respect and healthy working relationships. The design of these meetings must nurture and enhance those relationships if they are to achieve the desired outcomes. Weekly team meetings often fail because people run them like project status updates instead of team meetings, focusing too heavily on content at the expense of connection, and their teams are weaker for it.

After much slotting and wrangling, we found there were three ways our assumptions about the people in the room influenced the meeting type.

• A known set of people all familiar with one another. Team meetings fit here.
• A group of people brought together to fit a need. Kickoffs, ideation sessions, and workshops all fit here.
• Two distinct groups, with a clear us-them or me-them dynamic, who meet in response to an event. Interviews fit here, as do broadcast meetings and negotiations.
• The expected leadership and participation styles. Every type of meeting has a “default” leader responsible for the meeting design; usually the boss or manager, a facilitator, or the person who requested the meeting. Most also have an expected interaction style for participants that, when encouraged, gets the best results. Some meetings are collaborative, some very conversational, like one-on-ones, and some are very formal – almost hostile. Still others, like the All-Hands broadcast meeting , don’t require any active participation at all.
• The centrality of relationships. Finally, we looked at whether the meeting’s success depended on the group working well together. Nearly every meeting that teams repeat as part of their day-to-day operations works best when team members get along, and becomes torturous when they don’t. Outside of regular team meetings, there are also meetings designed explicitly to establish positive relationships, such as the first introduction, interviews, and team chartering workshops. In all these cases, a successful meeting design must take relationships into account.

Criteria We Considered and Rejected

There are lots of other factors that influence how you plan and run any given meeting, but we felt that they didn’t warrant creating a whole new type. Here are some of the criteria that impact meeting design, but that we didn’t use when defining types.

Location and Resources

Face-to-face or remote, walking or sitting, sticky notes or electronic documents; there’s no question that the meeting logistics have an impact. They don’t, however, change the underlying goals or core structure for a meeting. They simply modify how you execute it.

A design workshop for creating a new logo will deal with different content than one for developing a new country-sponsored health plan or one for creating a nuclear submarine. At the human level, however, each of these design workshops needs to accomplish the same thing by engaging the creative and collaborative genius of the participants in generating innovative solutions. Similarly, project meetings in every field look at time, progress, and budget. The content changes, but the core goals and format do not.

This one is like logistics. You absolutely have to change how you run a meeting with 20 people from how you led the same meeting with 5. But again, the goals, the sequence of steps, the governing rituals – none of that changes. In general, smaller meetings are easier to run and more successful on a day-to-day basis. But if you legitimately need 20 people involved in that decision, and sometimes you do, that is an issue of scale rather than kind.

Operating Context

What comes before the meeting and what’s happening in the larger ecosystem can have a huge impact on how a team approaches a meeting. A decision-making meeting held in times of abundance feels radically different than one you run to try and figure out how to save a sinking ship . Even so, the underlying principles for sound decision-making remain the same. Some situations absolutely make it much harder to succeed, but they don’t, in our opinion, make it a fundamentally different kind of meeting.

Now, given that extended lead-up, what types did we end up with?

The 16 (+1) Types of Meetings

I’ve broken our list into three main groupings below and provided details for each type. Then, at the end, you’ll find a table with all the meeting types listed for easy comparison and a spreadsheet you can download.

Quickly, here’s the list. Details are below.

Team Cadence Meetings

• Progress Updates

One-on-Ones

• Action Review Meetings

Governance Cadence Meetings

• Idea Generation Meetings

Planning Meetings

• Decision Making Meeting

Sensemaking

• Introductions

Issue Resolution Meetings

• Community of Practice Meetings

Training Sessions

Broadcast meetings.

Want to learn more about this chart? See the follow-up post on the Periodic Table of Meetings .  

Cadence Meetings We Review, Renew, Refine – Meetings with Known Participants and Predictable Patterns

As we do the work of our organizations, we learn. The plans we made on day one may work out the way we expected, but maybe not. New stuff comes up and before too long it becomes obvious that we need to adjust course.

Organizations use these meetings to review performance, renew team connections, and refine their approach based on what they’ve learned.

All of these meetings involve an established group of people, with perhaps the occasional guest. Most happen at regular and predictable intervals, making up the strategic and operational cadence of the organization.

These meetings all follow a regularized pattern; each meeting works basically like the last one and teams know what to expect. Because the participants and the format are predicatable, these meetings often require less up-front planning and less specialized facilitation expertise to succeed.

The meeting types in this group are:

• Ensure group cohesion
• Drive execution
• the Weekly Team Meeting
• the Daily Huddle
• the Shift-Change Meeting
• a Regular Committee Meeting
• the Sales Team Check-In Meeting

Expected Participation Profile

These meetings are typically led by the “boss” or manager, but they can be effectively led by any team member. The best results happen when everyone invited engages collaboratively. Healthy relationships are important to meeting success.

Meeting Format

Team cadence meetings follow a regular pattern or standard agenda, which can be very ritualistic. Team meetings should surface new information and challenges, but big surprises are not welcome here. (Unless they’re super awesome!) These meetings are about keeping an established team personally connected and moving towards a common goal, and not about inspiring major change.

To learn more, visit our Team Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

Back to the list of types ⇧

Progress Checks

• Maintain project momentum
• Ensure mutual accountability
• the Project Status Meeting
• the Client Check-In

Project managers and account managers lead these meetings, and everyone else participates in a fairly structured way. In many ways, these meetings are designed to inform and reassure people that everyone else on the team is doing what they said they’d do, or if not, to figure out what they all need to do to get back on track. Functional relationships matter, but it’s not as important to the overall result that these people enjoy each other’s company. Because these meetings are mostly designed to “make sure everything is still working”, which matters to project success and the organization’s ability to plan, they can often be very boring for the individual contributors who already know what’s going on with their work.

Project updates follow a regular pattern. Some are very strict, others less so; this varies by the team and the kind of work they do. Surprises are entirely unwelcome. Any major surprise will cause a meeting failure and derail the planned agenda.

To learn more, visit our Progress Check Meetings Resource Center.

• Career and personal development
• Individual accountability
• Relationship maintenance
• the Manager-Employee One-on-One
• a Coaching Session
• a Mentorship Meeting
• the “Check In” with an Important Stakeholder

These meetings involve two people with an established relationship. The quality of that relationship is critical to success in these meetings, and leadership may alternate between the participants based on their individual goals. While these meetings may follow an agenda, the style is entirely conversational. In some instances, the only distinction between a one-on-one and a plain ol’ conversation is the fact that the meeting was scheduled in advance to address a specific topic.

One-on-ones are the loosey goosiest meetings in this set. Experienced and dedicated leaders will develop an approach to one-on-ones that they use often, but the intimate nature of these meetings defies rigid structure. People tend not to enjoy surprises in one-on-ones, but they infinitely prefer to learn surprising news in these meetings rather than in a team or governance cadence meeting. If you’re going to quit or fly to the moon or you’ve just invented the cure to aging, you’re way better off telling your manager privately before you share that with the board.

To learn more, visit our One-on-One Meetings Resource Center.

Action Reviews

• Learning: gain insight
• Develop confidence
• Generate recommendations for change
• Project and Agile Retrospectives
• After Action Reviews and Before Action Reviews (Military)
• Pre-Surgery Meetings (Healthcare)
• Win/Loss Review (Sales)

These meetings are led by a designated person from the team. When run well, action reviews demand highly engaged and structured participation from everyone present. Because action reviews are so structured, they don’t require the individuals involved to be great friends. They do, however, require professionalism, focus, a commitment to building psychological safety, and strong engagement. Action reviews that happen too infrequently or too far away in time from the action tend to become more conversational and less powerful.

Action reviews are highly ritualistic; these are the kind of meetings that inspire the use of the word “ritual”. The action review is a tool for continuous learning; the more frequently these are run and the tighter the team gets, the faster they learn and improve. Teams can and will change how they run these meetings over time based on what they’ve learned, and this avid pursuit of change for the better is itself part of the ritual. Action reviews take surprise in stride. The whole point is to learn and then refine future action, so while huge surprises may cause chagrin, they are embraced as lessons and used accordingly.

Can you tell these are some of my favorite meetings?

To learn more, visit our Action Review Meetings Resource Center.

• Strategic definition and oversight
• Regulatory compliance and monitoring
• Board Meetings
• Quarterly Strategic Reviews
• QBR (a quarterly review between a vendor and client)

The teams involved in governance meetings are known in advance but don’t necessarily work together often. Nor do they need to; these aren’t the kind of meetings where everyone has to be pals to get good results. These meetings are led by a chair or official company representative, and participation is structured. This means that while there are often times for free conversation during a governance meeting, much of the participation falls into prescribed patterns. These are often the kind of meetings that warrant nicer shoes.

Governance cadence meetings are highly structured. When run professionally, there is always an agenda, it is always shared in advance, and minutes get recorded. Governance meetings are NOT the time for surprises. In fact, best practice for important board meetings includes making sure everyone coming to that meeting gets a personal briefing in advance (see Investigative or One-on-Ones) to ensure no one is surprised in the meeting. A surprise in a governance cadence meeting means someone screwed up.

To learn more, visit our Governance Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

Catalyst Meetings The Right Group to Create Change – Meetings with Participants and Patterns Customized to Fit the Need

New ideas, new plans, projects to start, problems to solve, and decisions to make—these meetings change an organization’s work.

These meetings are all scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals. They succeed when following a thoughtful meeting design and regularly fail when people “wing it”.

Because these meetings are scheduled as needed with whomever is needed, there is a lot more variation in format between meetings. This is the realm of participatory engagement, decision and sense-making activities, and when the group gets larger, trained facilitation.

Idea Generation

• Create a whole bunch of ideas
• Ad Campaign Brainstorming Session
• User Story Brainstorming
• Fundraiser Brainstorming

Idea generation meetings often include participants from an established team, but not always. These meetings are led by a facilitator and participants contribute new ideas in a structured way. While it’s always nice to meet with people you know and like, established relationships don’t necessarily improve outcomes for these meetings. Instead, leaders who want to get the widest variety of ideas possible are better off including participants with diverse perspectives and identities. Relationships are not central here; ideas are.

These meetings start with the presentation of a central premise or challenge, then jump into some form of idea generation. There are loads of idea-generation techniques, all of which involve a way for participants to respond to a central challenge with as many individual ideas as possible. Unlike workshops or problem-solving meetings, the group may not attempt to coalesce or refine their ideas in the meeting. Here, idea volume matters more than anything else. Organizations run these meetings when they aren’t sure what to do yet; the whole meeting is an entreaty to serendipity. As such, there are few governing principles beyond the rule to never interfere with anyone else’s enthusiasm.

To learn more, visit our Idea Generation Meetings Resource Center.

• Create plans
• Secure commitment to implementing the plans
• Project Planning
• Campaign Planning (Marketing)
• Product Roadmap Planning
• and so on. Every group that makes things has a planning meeting.

Planning meetings often involve an existing team, but also involve other people as needed. Depending on the size and scope of the plans under development, these meetings are led by the project owner or by an outside facilitator. Participants are expected to actively collaborate on the work product. They may or may not have established relationships; if not, some time needs to be spent helping people get to know each other and understand what each of them can contribute. That said, these meetings are about getting a job done, so relationships don’t get central focus.

Planning meetings vary depending on the kind of plan they’re creating, but generally start with an explanation of the overall goal, an analysis of the current situation, and then work through planning details. Planning meetings end with a review and confirmation of the plan created. Planning meetings are not governed by rules nor do they follow specific rituals; the meeting format is dictated more by the planning format than anything else. Because planning meetings happen very early in an endeavor’s life cycle, successful meetings design for serendipity. Anything you can learn during this meeting that makes the plan better is a good thing!

To learn more, visit our Planning Meetings Resource Center.

• Group formation
• Commitment and clarity on execution
• One or more tangible results; real work product comes out of workshops
• Project, Program and Product Kickoffs
• Team Chartering
• Design Workshops
• Value Stream Mapping
• Strategy Workshops
• Team Building workshops

Groups are assembled specifically for these meetings and guided by a designated facilitator. These meetings put future work into motion, so the focus may be split equally between the creation of a shared work product (such as a value stream map or charter document) and team formation since successful team relationships make all the future work easier. Workshops often incorporate many of the elements you find in other types of meetings. For example, a workshop may include information gathering, idea generation, problem solving, and planning altogether.

Because they attempt to achieve so much more than other meetings, workshops take longer to run and way longer to plan and set up. Most workshops expect participants to actively engage and collaborate in the creation of a tangible shared result, and a lot of effort goes into planning very structured ways to ensure that engagement. When it comes to business meetings, these are also often as close to a working party as it gets.

Smaller kickoffs may follow a simple pattern and be held in the team’s regular meeting space, but many workshops take place in a special location; somewhere off-site, outside, or otherwise distinct from the normal work environment. All these meetings start with introductions and level-setting of some kind: a group exercise, a review of the project goals, and perhaps a motivational speech from the sponsor. Then, the team engages in a series of exercises or activities in pursuit of the work product. Since these meetings are long, coffee and cookies may be expected. Workshops conclude with a review of the work product, and often a reflective exercise. That said, while the basic pattern for a workshop is fairly standard, these are bespoke meetings that do not adhere to any particular rituals. The people who plan and facilitate the meeting work hard to create opportunities for serendipity; they want the team to discover things about each other and the work that inspires and engages them.

To learn more, visit our Workshops Resource Center.

Problem Solving

• Find a solution to a problem
• Secure commitment to enact the solution
• Incident Response
• Strategic Issue Resolution
• Major Project Change Resolution

These meetings involve anyone who may have information that helps the group find a solution and anyone who will need to implement the solution. Depending on the urgency of the situation, the meeting will be led by the person in charge (the responsible leader) or a facilitator. Everyone present is expected to collaborate actively, answering all questions and diligently offering assistance. Tight working relationships can help these meetings go more easily, and participants who establish trust can put more energy into finding solutions since they worry less about blame and personal repercussions. That said, these meetings need the participation of the people with the best expertise, and these people may not know each other well. When this happens, the meeting leader should put extra effort into creating safety in the group if they want everyone’s best effort.

Problem solving meetings begin with a situation analysis (what happened, what resources do we have), then a review of options. After the team discusses and selects an option, they create an action plan. We’ve all seen the shortest version of this meeting in movies when the police gather outside of the building full of hostages and collaborate to create their plan. Problem solving meetings follow this basic structure, which can be heavily ritualized in first responder and other teams devoted to quickly solving problems. These strict governing procedures get looser when problems aren’t so urgent, but the basic pattern remains.

In a problem solving meeting, the ugly surprise already happened. Now the team welcomes serendipity, hoping a brilliant solution will emerge.

To learn more, visit our Problem Solving Meetings Resource Center.

Decision Making

• A documented decision
• Commitment to act on that decision
• New Hire Decision
• Go/No-Go Decision
• Logo Selection
• Final Approval of a Standard

Often a decision-making meeting involves a standing team, but like problem solving meetings, not always. These meetings may also include people who will be impacted by the decision or have expertise to share, even if they aren’t directly responsible for implementing the decision. Decision making meetings may be led by a designated facilitator, but more often the senior leader or chair runs them. People participate in decision making meetings as either advisers or decision makers. If the decision under discussion is largely a formality, this participation will be highly structured. If, on the other hand, the group is truly weighing multiple options, the participation style will be much more collaborative. Established relationships are not central to decision making meetings, but the perceived fairness and equanimity of the discussion is. When the group behaves in a way that makes it unsafe to voice concerns, these concerns go unaddressed which then weakens commitment to the decision.

Decision making meetings involve the consideration of options and the selection of a final option. Unlike problem solving meetings that include a search for good options, all that work to figure out the possible options happens before the decision making meeting. In many cases, these meetings are largely a formality intended to finalize and secure commitment to a decision that’s already been made. Ritual is high, and surprises unwelcome. In other situations, the group is weighing multiple options and seeking to make a selection in the meeting. There still shouldn’t be any big surprises, but there’s a whole lot more flexibility. For example, corporate leadership teams run decision-making meetings when faced with unexpected strategic challenges. Many of these teams revert to a structure-free conversational meeting approach; just “talking it out” until they reach a decision. Unfortunately for them, teams make the best decisions when their meetings follow a formal decision-making methodology .

To learn more, visit our Decision Making Meetings Resource Center.

Context Meetings Efforts to Evaluate and Influence – Meetings Between Us and Them, with Info to Share and Questions to Answer

These meetings are all designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another. They are scheduled by the person who wants something with the people they want to influence or get something from.

At the surface, that sounds Machiavellian, but the intention here is rarely nefarious. Instead, these meetings often indicate a genuine interest in learning, sharing, and finding ways to come together for mutual benefit.

Because each of these meetings involves some form of social evaluation, the format and rituals have more to do with etiquette and interpersonal skills than regulations or work product, although this is not always the case.

• To learn things that you can use to inform later action
• To gain an understanding of the current state of a project, organization, or system
• Peer Consults (aka Braintrusts)
• Project Discovery Meetings
• Incident Investigations
• Market Research Panels

Expected Participant Profile

These meetings may be led by an interviewer or facilitator. Participants include the people being interviewed and sometimes a set of observers. Engagement in sensemaking meetings may feel conversational, but it always follows a clear question-response structure. Most interviewers work to develop a rapport with the people they’re interviewing, since people often share more freely with people they perceive as friendly and trustworthy. That said, many sensemaking meetings work fine without rapport, because the person sharing information is expecting to benefit from it in the future. For example, if a doctor asks a patient to describe his symptoms, the patient does so willingly because he expects the doctor will use that information to help him feel better.

Many interviews are governed by rules regarding privacy, non-disclosure, and discretion. These formalities may be addressed at the beginning or end of the session. Otherwise, there are no strong patterns for a sensemaking session. Instead, people regularly working in these meetings focus on asking better questions. Like idea generation meetings, information gathering meetings delight in serendipity. Unlike idea generation meetings, however, the goal is not to invent new solutions but rather to uncover existing facts and perspectives.

To learn more, visit our Sensemaking Meetings Resource Center.

• Learn about each other
• Decide whether to continue the relationship
• a Job Interview
• the First Meeting Between Professionals
• the Sales Pitch
• the First Meeting with a Potential Vendor
• the Investor Pitch

Introduction meetings are led by the person who asked for the meeting. The person or people invited to the meeting may also work to lead the discussion, or they may remain largely passive; they get to engage however they see fit because they’re under no obligation to spend any more time here than they feel necessary. People attempt to engage conversationally in most introductions, but when the social stakes increase or the prospect of mutual benefit is significantly imbalanced, the engagement becomes increasingly one-sided.

There are no strict rules for meetings of this type as a whole, but that doesn’t make them ad-hoc informal events. On the contrary, sales teams, company founders, and young professionals spend many long hours working to “hone their pitch”. They hope this careful preparation will reduce the influence of luck and the chances of an unhappy surprise. The flow of the conversation will vary depending on the situation. These meeting can go long, get cut short, and quickly veer into tangents. It’s up to the person who asked for the meeting to ensure the conversation ends with a clear next step.

To learn more, visit our Introduction Meetings Resource Center.

• A new agreement
• Commitment to further the relationship
• Support Team Escalation
• Contract Negotiations and Renewals
• Neighbor Dispute

These meetings are led by a designated negotiator or moderator or, if a neutral party isn’t available, by whoever cares about winning more. All parties are expected to engage in the discussion, although how they engage will depend entirely on the current state of their relationship. If the negotiation is tense, the engagement will be highly structured to prevent any outright breakdown. If the relationship is sound, the negotiation may be conducted in a very conversational style. Obviously, relationship quality plays a central role in the success of a negotiation or issue resolution meeting.

The format for these meetings is entirely dependent on the situation. Formal treaty negotiations between countries follow a very structured and ritualistic format. Negotiations between individual leaders, however, may be hashed out on the golf course. These meetings are a dance, so while surprises may not be welcome, they are expected.

To learn more, visit our Issue Resolution Meetings Resource Center.

Community of Practice Gatherings

• Topic-focused exchange of ideas
• Relationship development
• The Monthly Safety Committee Meeting
• The Project Manager’s Meetup
• The Lunch-n-Learn

The people at these meetings volunteer to be there because they’re interested in the topic. An organizer or chair opens the meeting and introduces any presenters. Participants are expected to engage convivially, ask questions, engage in exercises when appropriate, and network when there isn’t a presentation going. These meetings are part social, part content, and the style is relaxed.

Most of these meetings begin with mingling and light conversation. Then, the organizers will call for the group’s attention and begin the prepared part of the meeting. This could follow a traditional agenda, as they do in a Toastmaster’s meeting, or it may include a group exercise or a presentation by an invited speaker. There’s time for questions, and then more time at the end to resume the casual conversations begun at the meeting start. People in attendance are there to learn about the topic, but also to make connections with others that create opportunities. Many hope for serendipity.

To learn more, visit our Community of Practice Meetings Resource Center.

• To transfer knowledge and skills
• Client Training on a New Product
• New Employee On-Boarding
• Safety Training

The trainer leads training sessions, and participants follow instructions. Participants may be there by choice, or they may be required to attend training by their employer. There is no expectation of collaboration between the trainer and the participants; these are pure transfers of information from one group to the next.

Training session formats vary widely. In the simplest form, the session involves the trainer telling participants what they believe they need to learn, and then participants ask questions. Instructional designers and training professionals can make training sessions way more engaging than that.

To learn more, visit our Training Meetings Resource Center.

• To share information that inspires (or prevents) action
• the All-Hands Meeting

Broadcast meetings are led by the meeting organizer. This person officially starts the meeting and then either runs the presentation or introduces the presenters. People invited to the meeting may have an opportunity to ask questions, but for the most part, they are expected to listen attentively. While they include presentations in the same way a Community of Practice meeting does, they do not provide an opportunity for participants to engage in casual conversation and networking. These are not collaborative events.

Broadcast meetings start and end on time. They begin with brief introductions which are followed by the presentation. Questions may be answered periodically, or held until the last few minutes. Because these meetings include announcements or information intended to inform later action, participants often receive follow-up communication: a copy of the slides, a special offer or invitation, or in the case of an all-hands meeting, a follow-up meeting with the manager to talk about how the big announcement impacts their team. The people leading a broadcast meeting do not expect and do not welcome surprises. The people participating often don’t know what to expect.

To learn more, visit our Broadcast Meetings Resource Center.

That said, I have heard people call broadcasts and training sessions “meetings” on multiple occasions. The all-staff meeting is often just announcements, but people call it a meeting. Project folks will schedule a “meeting to go over the new system” with a client, and that’s basically a lightweight training session.

And if we look at meetings as a tool we use to move information through our organizations, create connections between the people in our organizations, and drive work momentum, broadcast meetings and training sessions certainly fit that bill (as we’ll see in the story below).

Table: All 16 Meeting Types in the Taxonomy of Business Meetings

Now that you’ve seen the details, download this table as a spreadsheet .

Why a spreadsheet?

I expect people to use the taxonomy in one of these ways.

• Take inventory of your organization’s meetings. Which of these do you run, and which should you run? If you’re running one of these kinds of meetings and it isn’t working, what can you see here that may point to a better way?
• Make the taxonomy better. At the end of the day, our list of 16 types is just as arbitrary as MeetingSift’s list of 6 types. What did we miss? What doesn’t work? Let us know. Comments are welcome.

Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity. George Box in 1976 Journal of the American Statistical Association

Or, stated more economically, “ All models are wrong, but some are useful. ” We’ve tried to hit a mark that’s useful in a way that simpler lists were not. We invite your feedback to tell us how we did.

The 17th Type: BIG Meetings and Conferences

Just when you think you’ve really broadened your horizons and been very thoroughly inclusive, you meet someone who sets you straight. I recently had the pleasure of meeting  Maarten Vanneste , who is also a dedicated advocate for meeting design and the meeting design profession . It turns out that while we are using the same words, Maarten works in a very different world where a “meeting” might be a multi-day conference with dozens of sessions and a highly paid keynote speaker or 10. In that world, meeting planners handle logistics, room reservations, lighting requirements, branding, promotions… a wealth of detail that far exceeds anything we might worry about for even the most involved strategic planning workshop.

This is so different, why even mention it?

Because it’s another example of how using a generic word like “meeting” leads to bad assumptions . In case it isn’t clear, in this article when we talk about meetings and meeting design, we’re talking about the 16 types of day-to-day business meetings listed above. Professional meeting planning is a whole different kettle of fish.

How Different Types of Meetings Work Together: A Tale of 25 Meetings

To illustrate how the different kinds of meetings work together, let’s look at a typical sequence of meetings that you might expect to see in the first year of a company’s relationship with a major new client.

This is the story of two companies: ACME, makers of awesome products, and ABC Corp, a company that needs what ACME makes, and all the people working in these two companies that make their business flow.

Sam likes what he saw in the webinar.

Peter calls Sam and they schedule a demo meeting.

Peter tells Jill and the sales team about the upcoming demo with Sam at ABC.

Peter, Jill and Henri prepare before the demo with Sam at ABC.

Peter and Henri give a demo to Sam and Ellen. Ellen is impressed and asks for a quote.

Jill tells the CEO and the rest of the leadership team about the big ABC deal her sales team is working so everyone can prepare.

Peter goes over all the requests in his meeting with Ellen to make sure he understands them, but he’s in no position to authorize those changes. After the meeting, he takes the requests back to Jill.

Peter discusses the contract with Ellen. Ellen wants a better contract.

The leadership team meets to decide how to respond to Ellen’s contract demands. And they do!

Several more negotiation meetings and a security review later, and the deal is signed! Meeting 9: The Sales Handoff (Type: Introduction ) Now that the contract is signed, it’s time to get the project team involved. Peter arranges a meeting between Ellen and Sam and the customer team from ACME: Gary the project manager, Henri the solutions analyst, and Esme the account manager. Going forward, Gary, Henri and Esme will handle all the communication with Sam from ABC Corp. Before the meeting ends, the ACME team schedules a trip to visit ABC Corp the following week.

Peter introduces Sam and Ellen to the ACME team: Gary, Henri, and Esme.

Jill, Peter and the sales review the lessons they learned closing the ABC deal.

Sam escorts Gary, Henri, and Esme through a day of discovery meetings at ABC Corp.

With the background set, everyone works together to draft the project plan. People from the implementation team suggest ways they can easily handle some requirements, and identify items that will require extra time and creativity. They begin a list of issues to solve and one of risks to manage. Starting from the desired end date and working backwards, they work together to build out a draft timeline that shows the critical path, times when they’ll need committed resources from ABC, and places where they just aren’t sure yet what they’ll find. When they feel they understand how the project will go as best they can, they review their draft plan and assign action items. Gary will work on the project timeline, matching their draft plan with available resources and factoring in holidays. Henri will contact Sam to go over questions from the implementation team, and Esme will schedule the kickoff meeting with the client team.

Gary, Henri, and Esme meet with the implementation team members to draft a project plan.

Next, both teams dig into the details. They go over the project plan ACME created and suggest changes. They establish performance goals for how they expect to use the product, making it clear what a successful implementation will look like. They talk about how they’ll communicate during the project and schedule a series of project update meetings. They take breaks and get to know each other, and share cookies. Then they get serious and talk about what might go wrong, and outline what they can do now to increase their odds of success.

At the end, Ellen rejoins them and the group shares their updated project plan with her. They explain changes they made and concerns they still have, and ask a few questions. Finally, they go over exactly who does what next, and set clear expectations about how and when everyone will see progress. With the kickoff complete, they all adjourn to the local pub to relax and continue getting acquainted.

Esme and Ellen lead team members from both companies through the project kickoff

Happily for Gary, the ABC project is right on schedule. For now.

Gary, the other ACME PMs, and the ACME implementation team discuss project progress every week.

Surprise, Gary! Gary hates surprises.

Sam tells Gary there’s been a major shake-up at ABC, and the project is on hold. Oh no! What will Gary do?

Belinda can’t answer those questions, but she helps Gary relax and promises to get a team together who can give him the guidance he needs.

Gary meets one-on-one with his boss Belinda, and they make a plan.

Belinda, Gary, and the leadership team meet find a solution to the problems with the ABC project.

When Gary, Esme, and Sam meet, they each share their constraints and goals, then focus on those places where they seem to be at an impasse. 90 minutes of back and forth, and they reach a deal. The project deadline will move out 2 weeks because of the delay at ABC, but in recompense for the missed deadline, ACME will provide 4 additional training sessions at no charge for all the people at ABC that were just reassigned and need to be brought up to speed. It’s not perfect, but it works and the project gets back on track.

Esme and Gary meet with Sam to negotiate how they’ll finish the project.

ACME trainers teach the ABC team how to use the product.

Gary, Esme and the ACME team, along with Sam and the ABC team, meet with the ABC leadership group. They present their progress, sharing slides with graphs of tasks complete and milestones met. The leadership team asks questions along the way, making sure they understand the implications of the upcoming product launch. When everyone is satisfied, they turn to the CEO who is the decision maker in this meeting.

The launch is approved, and the new system goes live.

Gary, Esme, Sam and their teams ask the new ABC CEO to approve the project. She does!

Everyone agrees that, for the most part, this was a successful project. The client is happy, the product works well, and they made money. Still, there are lessons to learn. Peter and Henri realize that they saw signs that the situation at ABC wasn’t stable in those first few conversations, but they were so eager to win the client that they dismissed them. In the future, they’ll know to pay attention more closely. Gary and the implementation team discovered ways they could keep the project running even when the client isn’t responding, and they’ll build that into their next project plan. At the end of the meeting, the group walks away with a dozen key lessons and ideas for experiments they can try to make future projects even better.

The ACME team meets to discuss what they learned from the ABC project.

The ACME CEO talks about the ABC project with the ACME Board, and gets approval to pursue a new market.

Esme reviews how the product is working out for the ABC team with Sam in the Quarterly Business Review.

This case study becomes a central piece of content in the new marketing campaign approved earlier by ACME’s board.

The ACME marketing team interviews Sam about his experience with their products for a case study.

Sam tells Esme she’ll need to renew the contract with the new head of procurement. Esme gets ready.

Phew! What a journey.

We’ve talked about why it’s important to get specific about the kind of meeting you’re in, and then we looked at our taxonomy for classifying those meetings. Then, we explored how different types of meetings all work together to keep people connected and move work forward in the story of ACME and ABC.

In many ways, the story of Gary, Sam, Esme and the gang is just a story of people doing their jobs. A lot of people work on projects that run like the one described here. Sometimes everything works fine, other times they freak out; nothing unusual there. What you may not have paid much attention to before, and what the story works to highlight, is how often what happens on that journey is determined by the outcome of a meeting. The other thing we can see is that, while those folks on the implementation team may have thought the few meetings they attended were a waste of time, their contributions during meetings helped make the ABC project a success and had a major impact on the direction of the company. When we show up and participate in meetings, we connect with people who will then go on to different types of meetings with other people, connecting the dots across our organization and beyond.

With that in mind, let’s close by revisiting Simon Jenkins’ gripping headline:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted.

Is it possible to run meetings that crush morale and kill productivity? Yes, of course it is. That doesn’t mean, however, that meetings are simply a useless addiction we can’t kick.

It means that some people are running the wrong kind of meetings, and others are running the right meetings in the wrong way. Not everyone does everything well. Have you ever eaten a sandwich from a vending machine? If so, you know that people are capable of producing all kinds of crap that does not reflect well on them or on the larger body of work their offering represents.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity.

Seems like a pretty nice benefit to me, and hopefully this taxonomy helps us all get there. 

General FAQ

Why do meeting types matter.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity. But if you’re running the wrong meeting, you’re pushing a heavy rock up a tall mountain.

What are the three main categories of meetings?

• Cadence Meetings – the regularly repeated meetings that make up the vast majority of the meetings held in the modern workplace.
• Catalyst Meetings – scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals.
• Learn and Influence Meetings – designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another.

What are examples of Cadence Meetings?

• Team cadence meetings
• Progress check meetings
• One-on-One meetings
• Action review meetings
• Governance cadence meetings

What are examples of Catalyst Meetings?

• Idea generation meetings
• Planning meetings
• Problem solving meetings
• Decision making meetings

What are examples of Learn and Influence Meetings?

• Sensemaking meetings
• Issue resolution meetings
• Community of Practice meetings
• Training meetings
• Broadcast meetings

To explore each of the 16 Meeting Types in more detail, visit our Interactive Chart of Meeting Types

Want More? Check out our Online Meeting  School!

Categories: meeting design

Elise Keith

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By Ted Skinner

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Effective Meetings

One of the easiest changes to your meeting is to attempt to solve at least one problem per week. Not just any problem, you should pick the most important problem facing your team each and every week. Think of all of the additional productivity you, your team, and your company could gain if you were able to put the team together and solve at least one problem per week. That’s an additional 52 problems you could solve each and every year, clearly putting you on the path to out-execute your competition and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

At Rhythm Systems, our business KPI and OKR dashboards allow you to quickly and easily find the most important problems each week to solve. Since all of our key performance indicators (KPIs) and projects (Quarterly Priorities) have clear Red, Yellow, Green success criteria and are updated weekly by the owner, the team has a clear visual indicator of the business problems they are facing. Our clients can easily determine where there are problems, find the most important ones (as all KPIs and priorities/OKRs are ranked in order of importance), and brainstorm together on how to get back on track during their weekly adjustment meetings. 

As you can see in our KPI dashboard below, we have a clear issue with our sales pipeline - a leading indicator for revenue. As this is a leading indicator, it helps the team predict revenue in the future; it gives us the added bonus of fixing the revenue problem BEFORE it shows up in the bottom line. To take your KPIs to the next level, follow these  five tips to make sure your team is tracking the right KPIs - both leading and results indicators - successfully.  It is extremely important to define the problem properly, so that you can get to the root cause of the issue.

Now that you have identified the problem to focus on, you can work deeply on the problem until you are able to devise and execute a complete game plan to solve it. If you follow our problem-solving meeting template below, you'll have the proper meeting agenda to help you break through any challenges you face. Use this as a primary agenda, but remember to allow team members to add an agenda item.

4-Step Process for a Problem Solving Meeting Agenda with This Problem-Solving Session Template (or Agenda).

Step One: List and brainstorm every potential cause for the problem or challenge.

• We want to make sure that we solve any structural issues first. These might be open sales positions, known bugs in the software, issues with a supplier - internal or external, known production issues, and those types of challenges. Do we have a standard and complete understanding of the problem? Is the meeting goal clear to everyone? This root cause analysis is an essential part of the process. If you don't find the root of the problem, it will feel like groundhog day as you'll solve the symptoms repeatedly.

Step Two: Brainstorm possible resources to help.

• During this step, think of the people and resources that might help you solve the problem. Are the resources in the room? Are they in the company? What are the budget constraints for a solution? In the sales pipeline example, the sales and marketing leader would likely need to be involved in solving the issue. This is critical to group problem solving: knowing where to get the necessary resources. You'll need to think of resources that might be outside the room. There needs to be a shared understanding of the root cause of the issue and all possible solutions to solve the problem.

Step Three: List and brainstorm every potential solution or approach.

• Think of as many ideas as you can. You might list an email blast to all of your prospects, a sales promotion to help with a sales pipeline issue, contracting an outside expert for search engine optimization, investing in more outbound sales representatives to schedule more meetings, and any other potential approach that is likely to solve the problem. This is where the team comes to a final decision on the recommended course of action or potentially two teams trying two different approaches.

Step Four: Recommendation for action.

• Discuss, Debate, and Agree on the course of action and execute against that plan. Discuss the plans entirely with the person who suggested them, taking the lead to explain their approach to the solution. Allow the team to debate the positive and negative merits of the proposal and repeat the process until all ideas have been presented. The team should be able to reach a consensus on the best course of action. Now the team can agree on the most likely solution (or two - if they are different resources) and create a game plan to execute against. Make sure that everybody on the team can answer the question "what is my role in the solution?"  This action planning process ensures that you have an execution plan to solve the problem.

Move forward with your action plan and keep a constant and deliberate eye on your metrics and KPIs. If that isn't doing enough to move the needle to correct the problem, run through the process again, and determine additional steps to take to alleviate the issue. Keep working until you solve the problem. You can read more about different applications for the process  here  and download our free and handy Breakthrough to Green tool  here .   

However, many of you reading this post don't have a business dashboard solution already, so what can you do?  

• Ask for any issues from the team when setting the agenda for your weekly meeting.
• If you are a manager, bring one of your problems to your team to have them help solve it with you. Making yourself human and vulnerable will encourage them to do the same with any issues they face.
• Work on solving problems, rather than placing blame, when discussing issues. Creating a safe environment for healthy discussions about things that are off track is crucial in solving problems in your business.
• Monitor your KPIs weekly and make sure significant projects get frequent (and honest) updates. If you wait too long between updates, you lose the ability to make the necessary adjustments if issues arise.
• Create a shared spreadsheet to start tracking your most important metrics and projects as a place to start. However, you might find that you'll  outgrow your spreadsheet  quickly; it is a place to get started and organize your thoughts.  
• You're likely to have conflicting opinions, so ensure you set the proper ground rules for conduct and respect.
• Creative problem-solving isn't an event; it is a state of mind. You might not get it 100% right the first time, but with this problem-solving framework, you'll have the correct process to get to the desired solution.

Good luck taking your weekly staff meetings back and making them more productive! Download the free Breakthrough to Green tool to help you properly frame your problem and create an action plan to solve it. Thousands of teams have used this problem-solving process and can help yours too!

Additional Rhythm Systems Weekly Staff Meeting Resources:

How To Have Effective Weekly Staff Meetings (With Sample Agenda Template)

4 Easy Steps to Fix Your Weekly Staff Meetings [Video]

Download our weekly meeting agenda

Supercharge Your Meetings with This Effective Weekly Meeting Agenda

8 Ways to Make Weekly Meetings Strategic vs. Tactical (Video)

Weekly Adjustment Meetings vs. Weekly Status Meetings (Infographic)

Consider using   Rhythm Software to run your weekly meeting , where the status and agenda are automatically created weekly to keep you on track!

Photo Credit:   iStock  by Getty Images 

Ted Skinner

Photo Credit: iStock by Getty Images

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Are your problem-solving meetings a waste of time? Make them more effective

Last Updated on December 9, 2022 by

Let’s face it: we’ve all been to business meetings, where at one moment we were lost and a bit ‘off’.

Poorly planned, badly timed and generally disorganized meetings can waste a team’s time and make a leader look unprofessional.

Having a predesigned business meeting template comes handy in such situations. You can adapt it to your meeting rules, and meeting topic checklist, to ensure effective flow of the meeting.

Based on my experience as a trainer and team leader, together with our chief designer, we created this Problem-solving Meeting Presentation Template for meetings with a goal to solve a specific challenge. The meetings that include brainstorming or another way of creative problem solving and that evaluate the new solution ideas.

Let’s go over and create your presentation for a productive business meeting together. (click on pictures below to see the source graphics).

1. Starting with a Meeting Title

2. Introduce Meeting Overview with Agenda Slide

The agenda provides an overview of the meeting’s platform and lends structure to your planned discourse. An effective meeting agenda sets clear expectations for the meeting and helps your team members prepare their questions ahead of time.

Especially in the case of long meetings, it’s good to provide such an overview. For simple meeting structures with fewer than 4 points, this slide can be omitted. Or you can write the agenda on a flipchart only.

3. Show Meeting Goals and Key Focus Areas

Zig Ziglar, a famous American author, and motivational speaker. once said: “A goal properly set is halfway reached “. Without setting goals it is hard to see where the meeting is going. Those pre-designed slides will help you with this question.

4. Define What’s Your Problem to be Solved

5. Finding and Selecting Solutions

6. Present an Implementation Plan

You can check other ways to create a timeline here.

7. Don’t Forget Meeting Summary

Vivid colors do not suit your style? See Monochrome Version

Why use this meeting template:

• Transform your usual meetings into effective ones by visualizing goals, problems, key focus areas, and solutions
• Keep track of your business meetings with an easily editable ppt template
• Show meeting structure and flow, outline what topics will be discussed and in what order
• Create lists, agendas, timelines, and outcome diagrams. Brainstorm, evaluate, and find solutions together with your team
• Focus listeners’ attention by pointing to the key problems and attach attention to finding the best solutions
• Make slides minutes before the meeting – template doesn’t require putting huge effort and time

Use only PowerPoint and your creativity 🙂 Alter the business meeting template as you want, everything depends on the meeting’s purpose and the needs of your business team.

The problem-solving meetings template includes editable PPT graphics:

• 22 slide layouts (meeting agenda, challenge definition, brainstorming section, meeting outcomes)
• 2 color versions – vivid colors and a decent monochromatic version
• 14 icons on meeting management: agenda, challenge, idea evaluation, strategy, plan

To get our Problem Solving Meeting Template presented above:

See the Slide-deck

Do you miss any important parts of this problem-solving meetings presentation? Please, let me know in the comments.

Published by

Chief Diagram Designer, infoDiagram co-founder View all posts by Peter Z

2 thoughts on “Are your problem-solving meetings a waste of time? Make them more effective”

Thank you very much for sharing the step by step information about how to prepare for the meeting and your information matters me a lot. Keep up the work.

thanks, we appreciate your feedback:) Wishing you great presentations!

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How to Run Problem Solving Meetings

Problem Solving Meetings are oriented around solving either a specific or general problem, and are perhaps the most complex and varied type of meetings.

At problem solving meetings the outcome is often an important decision and thus these meetings can be crucial to the development of a team or product. If the wrong action is chosen, it could be hugely damaging. To make sure that this doesn’t happen at your next problem solving meeting, follow the tips provided here.

Primary Goals in Problem Solving Meetings

The goal underlying these meetings is to leave with a new strategy designed to counter a current issue preventing or hindering the team’s progress.

The key objective for problem solving meetings is to find the most optimal solution or reach the best compromise that can resolve an issue facing the group or organization. In order to do this the group first has to identify possible solutions, and then evaluate these based on relevant requirements and criteria.

Agreeing on the most optimal solution

What truly is the most optimal solution can vary a lot, depending on the setting and situation. It is important to clearly define what the problem is, as well as agree on key criteria for the solution, in order to start identifying possible options.

Sometimes the best solution is the quickest one, other times it is the one that requires the least resources, while other times the solution that brings the most long term benefits is the best alternative. If all planning decisions were made by one person, not only would the choices be uninformed, there would also be little unity around team goals and direction.

Key Roles in Problem Solving Meetings

Problem solving meetings should be oriented around issues that affect and are only resolvable by the team. If a problem is the responsibility of, or can be fixed by one person, a group meeting is likely a waste of time. However, when a singular person’s decision affects that of the entire team, it may be worth it.

The significance of a problem and the amount of group time spent solving it should be considered before calling forth any group problem solving meeting. The participant roles found in a problem solving meeting tend to vary more than most other meeting types. This is because problem solving meetings exist across such a large variety of contexts and group.

Meeting leader

Just as with decision making meetings, there is a need for direction and authority in the process of problem solving. The person in charge should either be the person with the deepest understanding of the situation or someone with the most responsibility over the outcome (i.e. the highest ranking member of the team). The leader should be able to provide the team with a general overview of the situation. They should then lead the team through the guided process.

Meeting participants

All other attendees of the meeting should be people who fall under two categories. The first is of participants who may have been involved in the events leading up to the problem. This group is not there to be blamed or criticized, but rather to provide information about how the situation was reached. In addition, this group has unique insights on how potential solutions may or may not fit with the current approach.

The second group of people who should be invited are those who will be impacted by the solution. If, for example, one subgroup of a company has to restructure the timing of their releases, representatives from other groups who will have to adapt their schedule as a result should be included.

Common Challenges in Problem Solving Meetings

Often the most successful problem solving meetings are ones that happen before a major issue arises. Taking time to identify potential future problems allows a team to have solutions immediately ready. Unfortunately, problem solving meetings are all too often done only after a problem occurs, adding a variety of challenges that would not exist in other meeting types.

Problem solving can be a particularly stressful type of group strategizing. For instance, the urgency and decisiveness that is necessary in this meeting type can lead to disagreements that wouldn’t happen if teammates were not strained.

Identifying the real problem

Identifying the true problem to be addressed can on the surface seem like a very simple task. However, different meeting participants are likely to have slightly different perspectives of what they are gathered to address. Without a common understanding of what problem they are aiming to solve, the problem solving meeting is not going to yield any productive solutions.

Intra-group conflicts

With any problem solving or decision making meeting there is bound to be some conflicting opinions on how to go forward. Because problem solving meetings are often high strung, and because of the importance of selecting a correct plan, resolving these conflicts effectively is crucial. When making group decisions, a number of different strategies can be used to reach a compromise.

Defensiveness

When any type of group decision needs to be made, participants in the process can become too attached to their own suggestion to truly consider other options. While this leads to a lot of passionate and potentially productive conversation, it can also lead members to feel personally offended when their solutions are rejected.

Time pressure

Often problem meetings are extremely time-constrained. This can be because the problem is an approaching deadline or because there was simply no time scheduled in the initial plan for a problem to arise

How to Host Successful Problem Solving Meetings

The best way to approach a problem solving meeting is to first properly define the problem and the restrictions of potential solutions. Before brainstorming solutions, evaluate them, and decide on the best one.

Identify the problem to be addressed

The first key step to solving any problem is to identify the issue at hand. Problem solving meetings are designed to address any type of situation specific to the group. Determining what the problem is may be easier if it has already become a pressing issue. However, problem solving meetings can also be designed to generate preemptive solutions to problematic situations that may arise in the future. Regardless, any problem solving meeting should begin with a discussion of the specific issues that need to be changed or resolved by the end of the meeting.

Often, when a pervasive issue exists within a group, .some members are more aware of it than others. Beginning a problem solving meeting by explicitly identifying the issue not only makes clear what the meeting goals are, but also puts all team members on the same page about the state of the group or project. Identifying this problem early on also gives the team the ability to modify the topics or members involved in reaching a solution.

Define solution requirements and restraints

Once a problem has been identified, the group should propose all possible ways to approach and resolve the issue. The reason why problem solving is often easier said than done is because of existing restraints that withhold many of the ideal options available. For example, these restrictions could involve a lack of time or a lack of corporate resources. These restraints are important to consider because problems often result as a lack of consideration for them in the first place.

Brainstorm possible solutions

To choose among feasible solutions, it is important to define not only the possible limitations but also where group priorities lie. The most effective choices are made once the team’s understanding of the most urgent aspects of a future decision have been defined. Without a realistic idea of which aspects are most important, the solutions proposed will either be unrealistic or oriented around personal opinions. This step in the problem solving methodology allows for the most important and realistic strategies to be the ones most discussed.

Evaluate top solutions

After the feasible solutions to a problem have been isolated, the group must come to a collective conclusion about the best approach. This process should involve group consideration and evaluation of proposed options. It can be important to highlight and compare potential options against each other. For example, depending on the priorities of the group, an option which extends the timeline might be preferable to one that sacrifices quality or vice versa.

Agree on a solution

The best and most appropriate options that are generated during this meeting should be approached in the same way as options within a decision making meeting. Feedback, opinions and questions about each strategy should be considered and everyone involved in the meeting should feel free to voice their opinions. The final decision should be one that is not only realistic but that puts the entire team on the same page going forward.

Better Problem Solving Meetings with MeetingSift

MeetingSift’s brainstorm activity can help determine the problem, identify restrictions, and come up with ideas for possible solutions. The polling and ranking activities can then give an overview of where the group’s opinions lie. Using these tools can relieve not only the above mentioned problems but many others that are associated with problem solving meetings.

Gather honest opinions through anonymous feedback

The anonymous contribution platform that MeetingSift provides allows for more candid feedback, as well as helping the group to focus on the issue rather than the person.

Not only does this lead participants to be less upset when their ideas are not chosen, but also to not feel like they must support one particular solution or plan just because it was proposed by someone with authority in the group. In short, MeetingSift allows for the group to focus on the problem solving process rather than office politics.

Cut meeting time with parallel input

With MeetingSift, group polls can be conducted and decisions made in a fraction of the time that it usually takes to collect that amount of information. Additionally, MeetingSift allows facilitators to time the duration of their slides and activities in order to cut down and condense unnecessary aspects of the conversation.

Efficiently identify solutions or acceptable compromises

With problem solving meetings we suggest using an empirical voting tool such as ranking or voting to choose a winner, rather than trying to find a compromise between the two. In the face of a problem at hand, it is often best to choose and stick with one dominant strategy.

Easily record and share the final solution

While these opinions should be incorporated in the process, MeetingSift reports serve as a useful tool to share the solution decisions with as many other people as possible.

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Problem Solve with MeetingSift

The best way to approach a problem solving meeting is to follow the simple steps outlined in this article.

MeetingSift  brainstorm activity can help determine the problem and opportunities, and identify restrictions related to possible solutions. The evaluate , polling, and ranking activities can quickly reveal where the group’s opinions lie.

Using these tools can relieve common challenges like time pressure, intra-group conflicts, defensiveness, and many others that are associated with the stressful nature of problem solving meetings.

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Solving the Problem with Problem-Solving Meetings

Leadership development expert Jonathan Levene shares an effective tool for facilitating productive problem-solving meetings.

Jonathan Levene

Your team is facing a complex problem. So you gather everyone for a meeting, only to spend hours disagreeing on the ideal solution — with no progress toward consensus.

Facilitating productive problem-solving meetings can be challenging. You want to foster an open dialogue and gain buy-in while working toward an ideal solution. To do this effectively, it helps to understand one very important aspect of human nature: how we reason.

A Tool for Better Group Reasoning

In my work with clients, I have found that the ladder of inference* is an essential framework for understanding human reasoning, identifying opportunities, and keeping group reasoning on track. It is especially helpful when your challenge involves ambiguity or complexity.

The ladder of inference lays out the mental steps in our reasoning — from receiving data to drawing a conclusion. It also explains how we adopt certain beliefs about the world.

While our reasoning process may feel logical, our analysis at every step is always based on past experience. And everyone’s experience is different.

Here is how the ladder of inference reveals our reasoning process:

• We begin with the pool of information available to us — the observable data and experiences.
• We then select some of the information — typically that which grabs our attention or seems particularly significant — and ignore the rest.
• Then, we interpret the information, drawing on personal/cultural meanings and making assumptions based on those meanings.
• Finally, we draw a conclusion based on that interpretation. Over time, these conclusions inform our beliefs and drive our actions.

Our beliefs might be founded on faulty selection or interpretation of data. For example, if you have a number of memorable interactions with a few customers, you might focus on and generalize from those experiences. This leads you to certain conclusions about the entire marketplace. We all proceed through these mental steps, often subconsciously. And we’re not always aware of our assumptions.

By using the ladder of inference as a tool to expose chains of reasoning, we are better able to understand ourselves and our colleagues, find the best solutions, and overcome resistance to change.

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Your Role in Meetings of the Minds

As the moderator, your job is to:

• Listen carefully to the views expressed.
• Figure out what type of contribution each person is offering: belief, assumption, or interpretation.
• Bring hidden reasoning into the open by asking questions.

For example, if a person makes an assertion about what should be done, you might ask him or her to describe the chain of reasoning that led to that conclusion.

If two people have reached very different conclusions, one or both may be missing a key subset of data. Or perhaps they are missing an interpretive lens that would lead to a new set of possibilities.

The only way to know is to ask open-ended questions, such as:

• Can you help me understand your thinking?
• What was your chain of reasoning?
• What assumptions are you making?
• What data are you basing your recommendation on?

In asking these questions, you are not challenging people or judging them. You don’t want to put anyone on the defensive. Instead, you want to bring their reasoning to light so that it becomes part of the group’s thinking.

To do so, you can reflect back on what you’re hearing: “It sounds like we’re talking about assumptions here.” Or, if someone has difficulty articulating a chain of reasoning, you might say, “Think about it, and we’ll come back to you.”

At the same time, you should consider what is  not  being said. Keep in mind that silence does not imply agreement — or that a person has nothing to say. Your goal is to understand what’s happening in people’s heads and surface ideas that have not been articulated.

Better learning and decision-making result from staying low on the ladder. By slowing down the conversation — focusing on selecting and interpreting data — you encourage the group to avoid reaching conclusions prematurely. Using the ladder of inference, you can invite more contributions. Think about the ideas that might come to light when you ask questions like:

• Does anyone else have data that bears on this?
• Does anyone think something different might happen if we did this?
• Did anyone else arrive at a different conclusion?
• Did anyone make different assumptions?

The Ladder of Inference in Your Toolbox

As a manager, you can use the ladder of inference in multiple ways. You might start by employing it yourself as a framework for structuring your  own  thinking and interactions. Then, as you become more familiar with the approach, you can introduce the ladder as an explicit standard tool in team meetings.

Once you have introduced the concept, your team will begin to take on ownership of the process. They’ll develop better habits of mind and follow your lead by probing one another’s reasoning in meetings.

Over time, the ladder can become an integral part of how you think and work. Along the way, you’ll be encouraging open-mindedness, building more effective teams—and coming up with better solutions.

*The ladder of inference was initially developed by the late Chris Argyris, former professor at Harvard Business School, and elaborated on in numerous publications including The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (Peter Senge, Richard Ross, Bryan Smith, Charlotte Roberts, Art Kleiner).

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About the Author

Levene is a leadership coach and facilitator at Harvard Business School with over 15 years experience leading teams in product development organizations.

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Seven Best Practices for Problem-Solving Meetings

Oh Ye Gods and Monsters, not another <groan> meeting .

Admit it. You’ve said that. Or some version of it, only NSFW.

In Leader Effectiveness Training , Dr. Thomas Gordon dedicates 28 jam-packed pages to “How to Make Your Management Team Meetings More Effective.” Unsurprisingly, in an environment already using the No-Lose Method of conflict resolution, this approach will build trust and consensus. It’s a surefire basis to make meetings more productive .

Leaders can help ensure the teams they assemble to solve tricky workplace problems function optimally (and maybe even have fun while they’re at it—it’s science! ) by following these guidelines, amalgamated and abstracted from Dr. Gordon’s original 17 guidelines for problem-solving management teams.

• Frequency and Duration: While new groups will have to meet more often, and frequency will be dictated by the number and complexity of the problems the group is working on, consistency is key. Meet at the same time on the same day , even if the group leader can’t be there. And never, ever meet for more than two hours at a time. Enforce that limit, because brains fry.
• Get the Right People in the Room: The problems a group will be working on should dictate group membership (never more than 15 people; more voices than that become unworkable). Does each member have access to critical data that will be important to solving the problem or represent an organizational group that will be directly affected by the group’s decision? Then they’re in. Also, each member will need to a delegate an alternate with full participatory and decision-making authority should he or she not be able to make it to a meeting.
• Agendas and Priorities: The group, not the leader, develops the agenda, either ahead of time or at the beginning of the meeting, with a means for adding items at the last minute if needed. The group prioritizes items at meeting kickoff.
• Discussion Ground Rules: Surprise! In a functional autonomous group of adults entrusted with solving important workplace problems, they should also be trusted to come up with their own ground rules. The group leader’s main role is to stay out of the way of productive discussion.
• Right Problem/Wrong Problem : The Polish proverb “ Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys ” is as good a guideline as any to help a problem-solving group decide what is an appropriate problem to tackle and what is not. If group members agree a problem affects them and is within their span of authority and scope of responsibility, it’s the right problem. If not, they can and should delegate up, down, or out.
• Reaching Consensus : Like a jury, a problem-solving group must strive for unanimous consensus. This means a member with a very strong opinion needs to be willing to let it go when she’s greatly outnumbered; conversely, members without strong feelings should always be willing to go with the majority. And in some cases (highly technical software purchasing decisions, for example), the group should be willing to defer to members with the greatest responsibility for implementation or expertise in the area under consideration.
• Follow-up: Agenda items should be marked resolved in one of several ways: Resolved; Delegated (inside or outside the group); Deferred to a future agenda; Removed by the submitter; or Redefined in other terms. Meeting notes should be sent to members as soon as possible after the meeting (record only decisions, task assignments, future agenda items, and follow-up items—not discussion details). Finally, the group itself should set up a mechanism to periodically evaluate its own effectiveness.

And there you have it. A seven-point prescription for more productivity and less pain in meetings. A kind of analgesic, or acupuncture (depending on your painkiller preference) for getting people together and focused on getting stuff done— which, after all, is the purpose for work team meetings in the first place: to collaborate on problems that can’t be solved alone .

Try it. (If you want to read the full 28 pages—well worth your time—get a copy of Leader Effectiveness Training .)

Leadership Strategies

The ultimate problem solving template for meetings.

At Engagement Multiplier, we have extremely productive meetings – Stefan Wissenbach has made a science out of it! One thing we do that makes our meetings especially effective for creative problem solving is the “IDS” method, which stands for: Identify, Discuss, Solve.

Identify the real issue & the ‘Five Whys’ approach

Before the meeting, each team member keeps track of any problems they encounter that might require input from the larger group to solve.

But there’s an extra step that makes ‘identification’ even more efficient: Root-cause analysis that helps us dig down into the problem we’ve observed to find out whether it’s a symptom of an underlying issue.

We do this by using the ‘ 5 Whys ’ approach. It’s easy to mistake a symptom for the problem, but when you just treat the symptom without addressing the root cause, other symptoms will emerge! ‘Five Whys’ is a root cause analysis that’s really simple: Just ask “why?” five times.

5 Whys, Root Cause Analysis, Source: LeanMan

Do you have to have 5 Whys? No. That’s an arbitrary number. But the point is to not stop asking Why? before you actually reach the source of the problem.

Discuss the problem

Each team member who has identified a problem, and the root cause of the problem, presents their problem to the team in the meeting to discuss it.

This part should be quick and structured. Everyone asks questions, then suggests actions, and the person who brought the problem to the table says what they’ll do.

Then they write that action down on their personal To-Do list – to be done by the next meeting.

Solve the problem

Hopefully, the action will solve the problem. But, if the action taken doesn’t work, the problem can go back on the issue list for more discussion, and another attempt to solve it.

But, if the team member fails to do the action they committed to – that team member goes on the issue list!

(Nobody wants to become the issue!)

Our go-to approach for weekly meetings

Yes, IDS involves serious accountability – and it really works. The most challenging part is finding the root issue behind each symptom, and we’re not perfect at it. But that’s where discussion with other team members becomes so helpful.

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• Problem Solving Meeting

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What is a Problem Solving Meeting?

Teams use Problem Solving Meetings to analyze a situation and its causes, assess what direction to take, then create an action plan to resolve the problem.

You can find an introduction to Problem Solving Meetings in Chapter 25 of our book, Where the Action Is . You may also want to visit the Learn More link, below, for resources to help you plan, run, and troubleshoot the specific meetings your team needs.

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Example of Problem solving meeting - title slide from deck Problem-Solving Meeting Template (PPT graphics)

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Usage example, meeting title, slide content.

The slide appears to be a cover slide for a presentation about a meeting. The main title suggests that it is customizable for different meeting topics. Below the title, there's a placeholder for additional information about the meeting, such as the organizer and date, which conveys basic details about the meeting at a glance.

Graphical Look

• The background of the slide shows a blurred photograph featuring individuals working with a laptop and writing notes.
• Across the center of the slide is a large, bold, dark blue banner with the words "Meeting Title" in white, capitalized font for high contrast and visibility.
• A smaller, slightly darker blue ribbon overlaps the bottom right of the larger banner, giving a sense of depth.
• Below the banners is an icon of three figures, suggesting a meeting or a group of people, offering a visual representation of the meeting concept.
• Text below the icon serves as a placeholder for meeting details, displayed in a white, sans-serif font that is easy to read against the darker background.
• The overall layout is clean with the use of geometric shapes and lines directing the viewer's attention to the central title and supporting information.

The slide's design is professional with a modern aesthetic, using overlapping geometric shapes to create a sense of dimension. The choice of colors and bold typography ensures that the key information stands out.

• To introduce the agenda at the start of a corporate meeting or conference.
• As the initial slide in a webinar presentation to set the stage for the discussion.
• For educational or training seminars to briefly introduce the session's topic and details.
• In a team briefing to highlight the main subject matter and logistical information.

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Meetings running overtime or never landing on a solution? Here are meeting challenges and the solution that can help your team.

Meetings are meant to be a time for productivity. They’re useful for brainstorming, organizing projects, deciding goals, and presenting new ideas. 

If your meetings aren’t productive, you’re likely facing meeting challenges.

But don’t worry! Meeting challenges are common and easily identifiable, and there are many available solutions.

What are meeting challenges?

13 types of meeting challenges and how to overcome them .

Meeting challenges are the misaligned, unprepared, or ineffective actions that make meetings, well, challenging .

Many factors contribute to ineffective meetings , like the level of preparedness, how time is spent during the meeting, and the technical aspects of the meeting. However, at the root of all meetings are people. Understanding how people plan, execute, communicate, and function around other aspects of their work environment will help you understand why common meeting challenges occur. 

We’re here to share 13 of the top meeting challenges that people most often face in meetings, and some quick solutions to help bring the next meeting into alignment.

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• Meeting length
• Lack of preparation
• Technical difficulties
• Lack of clarity or purpose
• Too many talking points
• Too many meetings
• Various time zones 
• Lack of employee participation 
• Off-topic discussions
• Late start and end times
• Poor communication between meeting attendees
• Lack of accountability 
• Ignored meeting agenda

1 Meeting length

Challenge: Whether it’s a collaborative meeting or a presentation, long meetings mean participants will eventually lose focus, energy, or ideas. Especially in our virtual working world, it can be easy for participants to get distracted by other tasks when they lose interest, and eventually they may tune out of the meeting entirely. On top of that, long meetings take away from valuable deep work time.

Solution: Shorten meetings to under an hour (in most cases, preferably less). Some strategies to reduce meeting length include setting a clear agenda, identifying roles ahead of time, and allotting time slots for each topic. Giving the meeting 45 minutes instead of the typical 60 goes a long way to making time feel shorter without actually cutting much out.

2 Lack of preparation

Challenge: We’ve all heard (and probably said) it: “Which meeting is this for again?” It’s the undeniable way to know that your meeting is going to be filled with people who either don’t know what’s going on or don’t care, and this indifference makes it quite difficult to land on new ideas and solutions.

Solution : Preparing meeting materials ahead of time spreads participant awareness for the topic, generates interest, and builds confidence at decision-making time. A quick way to get employees engaged is by building a meeting agenda and sharing it with the team for feedback ahead of the call.

3 Technical difficulties

Challenge: Cameras, keyboards, mice, monitors, Wi-Fi, laptop, VPN … there are a lot of places where difficulties could happen when it comes to your hardware or software. From your monitor not being plugged in right to your laptop needing an hour-long update, these technical difficulties all take precious time away from your productive meetings.

Solution: While there’s not much you can do about the power going out or the Wi-Fi needing a quick restart, you can do a few things to stay prepared. Get into the habit of checking your audio and video before the meeting starts (and adding that screen background if you’d like one). Also, regularly update your computer as soon as it’s required, not just before your important call. 

4 Lack of clarity or purpose

Challenge: Not knowing how to clearly define your meeting’s goals ; this lack of clarity will take away from your team’s productivity. Teams need a meeting plan with a specific goal or purpose that answers why the meeting is happening and what needs to be determined by the end of the call. This purpose provides direction and helps keep meeting conversations on track.

Solution: Remember, no agenda, no attenda . In other words, cancel any meetings with no agenda! It’s not worth your team’s time to join a meeting that doesn’t have a goal or structure. With no way to make meaningful progress through the call, you’re better off using your time on another measurable, productive task.

5 Too many talking points

Challenge: We only have 24 hours in a day, and the time for so many talking points in a meeting. A common challenge in meetings is that leaders underestimate the time it takes to thoroughly cover a topic point. Beyond the initial topics, leaders also forget to consider leaving time for subtopics, for clarification questions, and for planning next steps.

Solution: Keep the focus of each meeting simple. Break bigger topics into multiple meetings or narrow in on the important talking points. Ensure that you leave enough time to fully present, discuss, and close out each topic. Group size matters, too. Smaller meetings may be able to progress through points quicker, while larger groups may need more time to pass ideas around for each topic point.

6 Too many meetings

Challenge: Contrary to popular belief, meetings aren’t always needed. Too many meetings can actually decrease productivity by taking up excessive space in employees’ calendars and failing to allow opportunities for deep work. 

Solution : Meetings are best used for complex topics that otherwise couldn’t be discussed over the phone or by email. Project feedback meetings, new topic presentations, and employee reviews are great examples. But updates for minimal progress on existing projects could be better covered in an email or chat message.

With too many meetings, making room for deep work and execution can be hard. Fellow helps ensure that meeting attendees with 20+ hours worth of meetings per week can still find time to get work done with the Meeting Guidelines feature set. With this feature, when a meeting is being created with an attendee who has 20+ hours of meeting that week, the meeting organizer is automatically reminded that the attendee is already highly booked.

7 Various time zones 

Challenge: Remote working trends now have employees from the same team stationed across countries, if not across continents. As a manager, it can be difficult to manage employees across multiple time zones . There is an added challenge when employees working in different cultures have differing working days, lunch breaks, or dinner times. 

Solution: Try an asynchronous approach to meetings! While working remotely, team members can benefit from asynchronous meetings, which allow them to attend at their own pace, at a time that is convenient for them. This approach is also great for busy teams that struggle to find open meeting time slots that work for everyone. 

8 Lack of employee participation 

Challenge: Lack of participation from attendees makes meetings boring. In presentation sessions, it can be difficult to generate feedback or questions about new topics. In brainstorming sessions, unengaged employees won’t contribute and ultimately will drain the creative energy in the session. 

Solution: Send an agenda in advance so participants can better prepare for the meeting. Engage a more senior employee by allowing them to take ownership over preparing the agenda and collecting this feedback, and engage a more junior employee by asking them for their feedback.

9 Off-topic discussions

Challenge: Mentioned previously, bigger topics need time to be broken down and discussed as each relevant sub-topic. When discussing these sub-topics, participants may unintentionally go off on tangents or redirect the conversation away from the meeting’s primary goal. This ultimately leads to a less effective use of time for all involved.

Solution: Following your agenda will help remind you what your priorities are for the meeting. Assign one participant as a time-keeper to manage the schedule you set out in your agenda. If important side topics arise, table them for another time using a parking lot .

10 Late start and end times

Challenge: This one seems like a no-brainer, but happens way too often . Technical issues, poor planning, and schedule overload can all contribute to a late start. Often, these disruptions can cause late endings, too!

Solution: Respect that everyone has a busy day ahead, and do your best to follow the schedule set out in your meeting agenda. Update and test your technical equipment ahead of time to limit likelihood of failures, and try to book 5-10 free minutes before your meeting time to get a glass of water and prepare for the call. 

11 Poor communication between meeting attendees

Challenge : It’s fair to say that not everyone will have the same approach to brainstorming, solving issues, or communicating. However, not aligning on the meeting purpose and schedule is an issue that’s harder to get around, and this can completely slow productivity.

Solution : Create a safe environment and foster healthy work relationships. If you have a new team or you’re having trouble deciding how to approach a meeting, try testing different methods each meeting until you learn what works best for your team.

12 Lack of accountability 

Challenge: It’s easy to stand back and point fingers when something falls through the cracks. Unfortunately, doing so leads to missed deadlines, unmeasured Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and miscommunication across teams. A lack of accountability comes from meetings that don’t have established action items or assigned ownership over each task.

Solution: Assign clear action items to project participants and establish clear guidelines for reporting KPIs (ensure they are doable, measurable, and relevant!) Beyond keeping projects on track, making participants accountable also keeps them engaged, which is another solution to #8 on this list.

13 Ignored meeting agenda

Challenge: While making the agenda gives your meeting purpose and structure, actually following the agenda is what keeps you on track and keeps employees aligned. Not following the meeting agenda can create confusion on meeting purpose, presents opportunity for distractions, and ultimately means that any pre-meeting planning (like agenda planning) was mostly done for nothing.

Solution: Understanding how to use a meeting agenda template can help guide your team in the right direction, especially if you’re new to building meeting agendas. Try out several templates with your team (in different meetings) to see which one works best.

Parting advice 

If you’re new to managing meetings or you’re trying to change bad meeting habits, we’re here to help! The golden rule here is to plan, plan, plan . 

And when you get these basics down pat, try looking at meeting contingency planning for when things don’t seem to go your way ( despite all the planning). 

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Title: applying multi-agent negotiation to solve the production routing problem with privacy preserving.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to address the Production Routing Problem with Privacy Preserving (PRPPP) in supply chain optimization. The integrated optimization of production, inventory, distribution, and routing decisions in real-world industry applications poses several challenges, including increased complexity, discrepancies between planning and execution, and constraints on information sharing. To mitigate these challenges, this paper proposes the use of intelligent agent negotiation within a hybrid Multi-Agent System (MAS) integrated with optimization algorithms. The MAS facilitates communication and coordination among entities, encapsulates private information, and enables negotiation. This, along with optimization algorithms, makes it a compelling framework for establishing optimal solutions. The approach is supported by real-world applications and synergies between MAS and optimization methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing complex supply chain optimization problems.

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