How to Create the Perfect Meeting Agenda - Steven G. Rogelberg, HBR

This resource first appeared in issue #17 on 29 Mar 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Meetings

The title oversells the blogpost here, but Rogelberg suggests one useful and relatively easy thing to do to improve agendas, and it ties into one of bullet points from above about covering the goal of the discussion clearly.

The article suggests that instead of having vague agenda items like “Revisiting performance of data ingest module” or “New system uptime” they should instead be clear, focussed questions “What changes could drop data ingest times from 1hr to 10min like Prof X needs?” or “What are acceptable, feasible uptime requirements for the incoming data-analysis cluster?”. This takes more thought, but starts the conversation off in the right direction — and has the advantage that it’s clear when the agenda item is finished (when you have answers to the questions.)