What if meetings didn't $%#$? What if meetings were more engaging, more productive, more fun, and more aligned with what people need to DO? That's what I've been working on with organizations for the past twenty-five years or so ...
I'm particularly interested in how we can change day-to-day meeting practice - not just the fancy facilitated off-sites - by building capacity for everyone at all levels and in all roles to use some simple designs for engaging participants I call Liberating Structures (pdf).
Recently, I was talking with colleagues about an idea that is taking the education world by storm - the FLIPPED CLASSOOM and I thought, "I should have had a V-8!"
We need to start talking about "flipped" meetings!
The "flipped" classroom is a hot idea - and people seem to "get" it. Here's the basic notion. Typically courses have used classroom time for lectures and (usually didactic) presentation of content. Students are then given homework assignments to go away and grapple with making sense of and applying what they've learned. In the flipped classroom, this is reversed. Lectures and direct instruction is accessed outside of class via video and/or audio. Classroom time is used to engage students - often in collaborative work - to think about the content, raise questions, interact with the instructor and do lots of other things it's hard to get around to doing when you use up so much time on presentations.
