How to wake up a boring meeting

After reading this article on how to build a better meeting, as recommended by a MIMLister, speaker, futurist, author, and all-around great guy Jim Carroll came up with some ideas of his own.

While turning the chairs around backward and upside down might be a bit extreme for your attendees, some of his ideas are just too good to ignore, such as: "Banish bad phrases. At your first meeting planning meeting, stop the meeting the first time someone says, 'We've always done it that way.' Stop. Pause. Deep breath. Calmly state, 'And your point is?'"

Another good one:

Forget teambuilding, icebreakers, keynotes, spousal programs, breakouts. Think of new words that mean new things. "Startling openers." "10 ideas that will shock you." "Not a keynote -- it's a dramatic wake up call." "A big group talking about big things". Whatever -- the point is to banish words *that mean the same old thing*. Banish the words -- and you are banishing a certain line of thinking.

And he's right, when he says at the end of his post that "The fact that there is an article like this out there *IS NOT A GOOD THING*. This is an industry suffering from a deep malaise. The same programs. The same content. The same table settings. The same stuff. The same places. The same things. The same phrases."

What would/could you do to shake things up and make meetings meaningful again?

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