Name: Moments of Impact
Author: Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Discover the key to facilitating more productive meetings.

You’re in a bland hotel conference room with someone talking vaguely in your direction, or fiddling with the dry erase markers on a table while waiting for someone to set up the Powerpoint projector. Meanwhile, opportunities are passing by your company and all you can do is grin through your teeth.

No more! There’s a better way to deal with meetings and conferences. Let’s call them strategic conversations and recognize them for what they are: opportunities. These strategic conversations are opportunities for your organization to get its greatest minds together and start tackling problems.

These blinks show how to take advantage of strategic conversations. That means big picture things like figuring out what the purpose of a meeting should be, as well as details, like making an agenda.

This pack will make you a better leader and cause you to shake your head at all the terrible meetings you’ve attended!

After reading these blinks, you’ll know

when meetings shouldn’t occur in the same old conference room;
how to avoid invisible gorillas; and
who to invite in order to have the best meeting.

Key idea 1 of 8

Being able to lead great conversations is the most important leadership skill.

What is the most important quality in a leader? Is it her determination? Her creativity? Or maybe it’s her ability to rally her people together behind a common cause.

Actually, it’s none of the above. A good leader is defined by her ability to design strategic conversations; that is, helping others channel their creativity and finding great solutions to her company’s obstacles.

Among her most useful skills are the ability to plan a meeting and steer conversations.

Have you ever sat in a meeting or a two-day conference that promised to improve your skills, only to find yourself brought down by tedium and boredom?

While those meetings may have been meticulously planned, they missed one crucial thing: they didn’t pay attention to their audiences and didn’t help them work effectively.

As a leader, you want to organize and lead strategic conversations that make everyone’s work as satisfying as possible. It will allow you to guide your employees towards enlightening moments, great problem-solving strategies and newfound creativity.

Unfortunately, many leaders – even well established ones – never learned to properly lead a strategic conversation. Despite its usefulness, you won’t find courses that teach strategic conversations in most universities or other educational institutions.

For example, the authors recall a time when they received a desperate phone call from a senior executive who was planning a two-day conference. He had noticed about eight days before the actual event that, while he had planned the location and the topic, he had no idea how to successfully steer those meetings to generate potent discussions and the effective solutions.

Despite his top-notch education, he felt totally lost, and ended up having the authors fly out to help him prepare. After reading these blinks, you’ll have all the tools you need to design effective strategic conversations – and you won’t have to pay for anyone’s plane tickets.

Key idea 2 of 8

Designing strategic conversations requires you to go above and beyond the basics.

We all know that in order to plan a successful event, we need to get basics right: the venue, the participants, topics and the guests. But what should you be considering beyond those essentials?

To answer this question, we’ll have to look at what defines a strategic conversation in the first place:

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Key idea 3 of 8

Be clear about what you want to achieve.

Your company is faced with a dilemma: one of your competitors is stealing some of your top employees! What do you do?

Your old routine won’t suffice; if it did, your staff wouldn’t be leaving. So, you’ll have to devise new strategies.

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Key idea 4 of 8

Engage different parties and perspectives in your debate.

At this point, you might think you have what it takes to face adaptive challenges. Unfortunately, however, it’s not all about you. If you want to solve adaptive challenges, you’ll need to surround yourself with the right people and perspectives.

This team should be comprised of people from diverse areas of expertise and backgrounds who will help you make the most of your meetings. Strategic conversations are only as good as the people involved, but the people you should involve aren’t always who you might expect.

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Key idea 5 of 8

Frame your conversations so that they focus on the big picture.

Have you ever heard of an invisible gorilla? They exist. Seriously!

At least, that’s how it feels after watching one social experiment in which participants viewed a video of two basketball teams passing a ball back and forth. The participants were told to focus on the number of passes the white team made while ignoring the black team.

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Key idea 6 of 8

Set the scene properly and use your venue to be productive.

Once you’ve assembled your team and set your goals, it’s time to decide where your conversation should take place. Are you content with the same old, dusty conference room? Or is it time to pull people out of their routine and stir their creativity?

The decision is an important one, because your venue of choice offers immediate clues about how your meeting will go.

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Key idea 7 of 8

Your primary goal is to create an experience.

Sometimes people make agendas as if they’re planning a march through the country. But they don’t have to be so over-the-top. If you want to make your meetings memorable, simply find the balance between the content and the attendee’s experience.

Organizers of large events often see the “experience factor” as being a nice bonus – a small side dish to the main course of content. But why? Simply put, they just aren’t used to thinking any other way.

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Key idea 8 of 8

Make your impact.

The goal of all of these strategies is more refined than simply “finding solutions to your problems.” They aim to solve problems in a specific way – by creating moments of impact – that changes a company’s trajectory forever.

Your job, then, is to enable your dream team of professionals to have these life-changing moments of impact – insights that are so compelling that they demand immediate action.

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Moments of Impact summary