Help me provide thought provoking interaction in meetings

April 5, 2007 9:35 AM

Help me break my meetings by making them more interactive.

I manage a team of ~25 intranet publishers who have web skills varying from almost non-existent to fairly advanced. Once a quarter we have a meeting where I bring them up to date on what's happening in the business and explain some basic web principles (eg: all about alt text, writing good links).

I'm running a two hour meeting next week that's split between basic SEO principles and some coding "no nos" such as using tables for layout. I'm fine with the basic content of the meeting - I have screen shots, examples, explanations and so on. What I really need to avoid is 25 people sitting down and listening to me talk for almost 2 hours because there's no point in doing this as they'll get bored very quickly and will lose concentration. I need to get them thinking and doing things.

I'm really struggling to think of activities for people to do to get them thinking about the two topics. The coding "no nos" section is going to be based around not using tables for layout, making sure all information conveyed with colour is also available without colour and correct table markup. The SEO section will be on metadata, tags, lists, keywords and so on.

I'm open to almost any ideas but they must involve the people staying in the room (no running around doing treasure hunts, for example). Splitting people into small teams would be best so the stronger people support the weaker ones. Equipment I have at my disposal: one laptop connected to big screen, flip charts, pens, paper, glue, scissors. I'd guess the activity should probably last about 15-20 minutes. Help!

posted by TheDonF to computers & internet (6 answers total)

People like to try to answer questions. This forms the basis of the Socratic Method - the Stimulator of the discussion provides probing, open-ended questions as the nucleus for a discussion.

So whatever you do, give your people some tough questions to chew on.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:33 AM on April 5, 2007

You could put together some quick daft quizzes, e.g. guess the pop song from its mundane keywords, Spot The Unclosed Tag (in a screenful of nested table code), guess whether a search phrase's top Google result will be porn or not, and maybe play a Stroop Effect game?
posted by malevolent at 10:43 AM on April 5, 2007 [1 favorite]

I'd much rather watch a well-composed two-hour presentation than do activities or answer questions. You have the knowledge. I don't. The simplest way to impart it is just to tell me.
posted by futility closet at 11:26 AM on April 5, 2007

Thanks for the comments so far. I'm liking the Socraric Method and the "guess the song from the keywords" so far. What I don't want to do is to delve too deeply into code - some people like it, some people don't.

Something I did before that worked well was when we looked at structuring text into semantic elements. It printed off a paragraph of text onto a large sheet of paper and gave two groups of people scissors and glue and asked them to cut the block of text up and re-arrange it as separate paragraphs, headings and lists. It might sound a bit weird, but the feedback was great and it got them thinking about structure and meaning.
posted by TheDonF at 12:06 PM on April 5, 2007

It may be a little late for this, but in the future you may want to consider the book "Moving Beyond Icebreakers: An Innovative Approach to Group Facilitation, Learning, and Action." It's really designed for use with groups of young people, but I've seen the activities work in groups of adults as well. The best part about this model is that instead of pointless "icebreakers" the activities are designed so that they can be specifically related to the goals of the meeting at hand.
posted by jk252b at 12:24 PM on April 5, 2007

From a meeting-planning perspective there are two ways to deal with this:

1) You can inject an activity solely to provide a break and maybe to do some team-building. The activity doesn't need to have anything to do with the meeting. It's just a "refresh." People do anything from icebreakers to show-and-tell to yoga for this. Popular activities involve making people walk around and interact with other people in an organized way. This usually means telling people to go to the right side of the room for coke and the left side for pepsi [repeat as you please with other either/or pairs]. Or have everyone fill out a set of questions and they have to find someone who is a "match". There is also pictionary, since you already have flipcharts.

2) Then there is an activity that is integrated into the meeting subject. This can be brainstorming in small groups about the future of "X." Or you can assign topics to small groups and each group is to present something. Many people learn best when they have to synthesize and then use material. A lot of people do even better if they also have to teach what they've learned. Tagging is something that can be easily done as a real-life activity with post-its, etc. Maybe people could tag themselves? You could also hand out sample documents/pages and have people work in teams to SEO them or somehow work the concepts of SEO into a game that gets people on their feet. [I keep seeing people working on flipchart pages in various corners of a room and sticking lots of post-its on them]

People tend to develop inertia at meetings and whatever you choose to do there will be some resistance because even the best activities start to feel like kindergarten and people don't like feeling like kindergarteners. You need to be committed to the activity and confident about how it should proceed.

Also note that the set-up of the meeting room will probably be such that whatever you want to do will feel unnatural. A meeting is usually set with everyone facing forward in rows or something. Sometimes they are all facing each other around a large table. A "workshop environment" usually has people seated in groups at round tables. You can split the difference by seating people at tables where they can all face forward or can all gather around the table to work together.

Lastly, all meetings typically address this in a less explicit way. They have a 15 min break where coffee and snacks are served. People interact over coffee and move around. There is nothing at all wrong with doing an activity like you are thinking of doing. But a coffee break takes care of most of it. And the best icebreaker I've ever seen is what happens as people negotiate the use of a single toaster during a breakfast where bagels are served.
posted by Mozzie at 9:45 PM on April 5, 2007