One of the most helpful frames we’ve found at work for focusing meetings or presentations is:
- Know – What do you want them to know?
- Believe – What do you want them to believe?
- Do – What do you want them to do?
For example, when our patterns & practices team at Microsoft would prepare to give a business review, the team building the slides would brainstorm on the 3 questions above.
I’m a fan of question-driven approaches, and the technique above has proven very effective for focusing a room of passionate people. Really, you can think of it as creating “shared goals”, just with more precision and focus. The goal of course, in our case, was “tell an effective story” about what our group does and why execs or business leaders should care.
Personally, I found the simple frame to work for just about any meeting where I need to “sell” an idea or get folks on board.
Photo by Reinante El Pintor de Fuego.
Be Effective, then Efficient