50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings

Meeting management is more of an art than a science. The goal of most meetings is to share information or work toward addressing existing issues, but ineffective meetings can create more problems than they solve. If such meetings become chronic, the morale of meeting participants decreases. That's why one of the most important roles of a meeting facilitator is to engage and support participants in their participation. Fostering openness, collaboration, inclusion, and creative problem solving should be at the top of any facilitator's agenda. 50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings is a valuable collection of activities designed to focus participants on the meeting process, helping them set expectations for meeting outcomes. These Group Performance Support (GPS) activities allow participants to reflect and collaborate, generating an optimism that will carry forward into future meetings. These activities were created and compiled by leading trainer and facilitator Dr. Sivasailam "Thiagi" Thiagarajan. Thiagi is a prolific designer of games, simulations, and creative ideas for sparking the imagination in group settings. In this book, Thiagi's easily and freely reproducible activities target a range of outcomes essential to effective meetings, including: Reflecting on the characteristics of effective meetings Generating optimism that meetings can have positive outcomes Identifying and resolving unproductive meeting scenarios Agreeing on rules and conventions for group meetings Fostering inclusion and minimizing bias in diverse meetings Communicating and presenting ideas effectively Collaborating and cooperating to achieve improved meeting outcomes And much more Organizational leaders, facilitators, instructors, and managers would do well to keep a copy of 50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings near at hand. Whether readers need to establish a positive group discussion culture for the first time or to address specific issues within participant groups, this book has an activity to suit every scenario.