Meetings are forcing functions

A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects. Many organizations face a common challenge: a complex project that requires effort and perspectives from multiple people, moves through definition and execution phases, and unfolds over weeks, months, or years. But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job. Everyone has other obligations, fires to put out, and emails to answer. It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list. One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting. Whether in person or video, it doesn’t matter. The key to making progress is maintaining an agenda and, critically, opening each meeting by reviewing the to-dos from the previous one. This creates pressure on everyone to make progress. When people know they’ll be asked “what’s the status of X that we talked about last wee?” at an upcoming meeting, it is easier, though not easy, to carve…