50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings

Discover how to unleash the full potential of your meetings

Inefficient meetings plague even the most well-run organizations. In 50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings, productivity and games expert Sivasailam Thiagarajan explains how to use fifty tried-and-true methods to get the most out of every meeting.

This book teaches the strategy of employing games, activities, and simulations to facilitate extraordinary meeting productivity and creativity. It teaches meeting planners and organizers how to use games and simulations to enhance all types of meetings:

• Understand organizational opportunities and problems
• Generate alternative ideas
• Transform ideas into decisions
• Translate decisions into actions

Written for managers and executives at all levels of governmental, non-profit, and for-profit organizations, 50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings transforms traditional meetings into engines of creativity and growth. Thiagarajan uses the extensive experience he has gained in consulting for companies like Google and JP Morgan to teach managers of all stripes how to supercharge their next meeting.

1 Memorable Meetings 1

2 Wishes 5

3 Reduction 9

4 Whispers 13

5 Boring and Useless 15

6 Optimism 19

7 The Worst Fear 23

8 Cancel This Meeting 27

9 Dysfunctional Meetings 31

10 Worries 35

11 Ground Rules 39

12 Walk the Talk 51

13 Guaranteed Results 55

14 Explain and Apply 59

15 Arrangement 63

16 Application Examples 69

17 Popular and Unique 73

18 Bias Buster 77

19 Rotating Perspectives 81

20 Number Series 85

21 $20 Auction 89

22 A Sentence About Me 93

23 Remember the Rules 97

24 Combined Tasks 103

25 Seven Sentences 107

26 Trick Questions 111

27 Subjective or Objective 115

28 Unlearn 119

29 Disrupt 123

30 Disruptive Behaviors 127

31 Roles 133

32 Effective Meeting Participant 137

33 Paper Balls 141

34 Nametags 145

35 Finding Partners 149

36 First Touch 153

37 Back to Back 157

38 Co-Creation 161

39 Discuss 165

40 Secret Mentors 169

41 Creativity Collaboration 173

42 Working the Room 177

43 Inclusion 181

44 Who Wrote That? 185

45 Meeting Types 189

46 Agenda Items 193

47 Sarcastic Definitions 197

48 A Historic Meeting 201

49 Behind the Back 207

50 The End 211

Acknowledgments 215

About the Author 217

Index 219

DR. SIVASAILAM "THIAGI" THIAGARAJAN is the Resident Mad Scientist at The Thiagi Group, where he specializes in effective and enjoyable performance improvement. Thiagi's clients have included leading organizations like AT&T, Chevron, and Intel. He is internationally recognized as an expert in multinational collaboration and active learning in organizations.

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.

Infuse creativity, collaboration, and optimism into every meeting

Dr. Sivasailam "Thiagi" Thiagarajan is an internationally recognized expert in effective group communication. He is known for engaging diverse participants at some of the world's leading organizations. In 50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings, Thiagi reveals his most effective "Group Performance Support" tools—tried and tested activities that will get your meeting participants thinking, talking, and collaborating like never before.

We aren't born knowing how to lead and participate effectively in meetings. Our meeting participants want to engage and generate results just as much as we do—but first we need to teach them how. This book's enjoyable activities will help people reach their collaborative potential, and they'll have fun doing it!

Whether you are facilitating meetings with 2 people or 200 people (or more!), and whether you have 2 minutes or 2 hours to fill, this book has an activity to fit. Get your participants engaged and turn them into active stakeholders in all aspects of the meeting process—from morale building and inclusivity to more productive discussions and creative collaboration, 50 Activities to Kickstart Your Meetings covers it all. An indispensable resource for anyone who wants to transform meetings into engines of creativity and growth!