Meetings have three time slices: before, during, and after. This is obvious but each slice represents a different kind of opportunity.

Before. Some people live by OARRs and don’t plan a meeting without communicating the Objective, Agenda, Rules and Roles in advance. OARRs and other methods help make meetings better, but why?

Cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economists, and others interested in how the brain works call this priming. Certain stimuli will shift our attention. Our focused attention is part of what contributes to deeper thinking, more creativity, and solid decisions. When properly primed, we know where we are going and can focus on getting there. Priming materials should contain visual explanations and information graphics that quickly connect people with the core concepts that will be discussed.

During. Meetings are precious and magical things. A group of people with a varied mix of interests, skills, and experience gather together and pool the something very powerful: attention.

Pooled attention creates the opportunity to think together. Thinking together and working collaboratively are your key underlying meeting goals. Having a trained facilitator or someone able to take that role will help you do both. At a minimum, put the core concepts on a large white board or sheet of poster paper. It needs to be large enough that everyone can see it and flexible enough that everyone can add to or change it (there goes PowerPoint and Keynote). Visibility allows people to focus more on analysis, decision making and creativity because they are freed from keeping track of the big picture. Visibility also helps with contentious issues and acts as a way for people to keep track of what’s being done.

Using visual anchors supports meeting-to-action conversion. Tagging a visual with next steps and names means people can see how their portion fits into the whole. Understanding how your actions fit into a larger task makes our work more enjoyable and shows you who and what you’ll need to consider to do the job well.

After. The meeting isn’t over until everyone has a copy of what was accomplished. Meeting summaries are great, but if you’ve used a large visual, take a picture and email it. Having participated in creating the image, each person will have a strong connection to it and the image will trigger additional ideas. Priming is an on going process. People will see things they forgot to mention or new ways of solving problems.

Seeing what the meeting accomplished and having it improve workflow instead of interrupting it makes people happier and more receptive to future meetings. Capture the opportunities represented by meetings’ time slices: before (priming), during (thinking together visually), and after (summary/second priming).