CHAPTER 2
THE MEETING CANOE

We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done. We meet because the knowledge and experience needed in a specific situation are not available in one head, but have to be pieced together out of the knowledge and experience of several people.

PETER DRUCKER

You’ve already seen us refer to the Meeting Canoe as a system. This is a great time for us to tell you why we use that language.

The Meeting Canoe (Axelrod et al. 2004) is a complete rethinking of the meeting design, execution, and follow-up; it frames meetings as the factory floor for knowledge workers. Can you imagine getting substantial work done during meetings? It can and does happen in organizations that use the Meeting Canoe. Let’s unpack that “system” claim. The Meeting Canoe is a system because

• The Meeting Canoe’s parts influence each other. How connected people feel directly impacts how they understand the way things are, their ability to dream about the future, and the decisions they make.

• The Meeting Canoe interacts with its environment as the crew adapts to changing conditions.

• No single part is effective without the other parts.

• How well the Meeting Canoe functions depends on how well the parts work together.

Compare the Meeting Canoe with another water vehicle: a wooden raft. As a young Girl Scout, Emily and her fellow scouts made wooden rafts by lashing logs together and then climbed aboard for a lazy drift down the Cape Fear River. Drifting along without a care in the world on a hot, steamy day, Emily and her friends found that scouting for water moccasins, alligators, and the occasional dragonfly made for a great summer. A wooden raft is fine for drifting along when you don’t care where you are going and time is no object. Contrast this with a canoe, where you care where you are going, time matters, and your crewcontrols the direction. We think too many meetings are rafts when they could be canoes.

Using the Meeting Canoe system, you can truly transform meetings, not just tweak them. It is one thing to opine that everyone in the room has responsibility for the outcome, but it’s something else completely to structure and run a meeting entirely on that basis and give participants specific instructions about their role in meetings.

The Meeting Canoe (fig. 2.1) gives order, shape, and flow to your meetings. It represents a conversation that opens and closes. It starts at its narrowest part by welcoming people into the meeting and then connects people to each other and the task. As the conversation widens, so does the Meeting Canoe. It helps people discover the way things are and elicits their dreams for the future. At this point, you are at the widest part of the canoe. When you know the way things are and the future you want to create, the most possibilities exist. The approach supports effective decision making. As you make decisions, you abandon some alternatives, narrowing the conversation and at the same time allowing new possibilities to emerge for how to implement your decisions. The Meeting Canoe narrows further as you attend to the end so that everyone is clear about what you have all decided and learned from the meeting experience.

The Meeting Canoe consists of six parts. They are

• Welcome people. In this part, you greet people and begin to create an atmosphere that is conducive to doing the meeting’s work.

• Connect people to each other and the task. The goal here is to create two levels of connection. The first level is building relationships between meeting participants. The second level is connecting meeting participants to the task at hand.

• Discover the way things are. In this part, you engage people in learning for themselves about the current situation.

• Elicit people’s dreams. The goal here is to have participants imagine their preferred future unencumbered by current reality.

• Decide. In this part, people make decisions about what they want to do based on the way things are and their dreams, in accordance with the decision-making process identified prior to the meeting.

• Attend to the end. The goal here is to bring closure to the meeting by reviewing the decisions made, identifying the next steps, and reflecting on the meeting process.