Meeting Systems

An experiential coaching workshop to help you redesign your meeting systems and culture.

Each company has a meeting culture that is filled with different meeting systems. And like any system, it has bugs. In this fun, fast-paced, hands-on class, you’ll sharpen your facilitation skills through practice and peer feedback and also understand the different components that make up a healthy meeting culture. You will learn how to design and engineer better meeting systems. Our facilitators will lead you through various virtual facilitation methods and meeting culture design, teaching why and how they work.

You’ll end the workshop with a new way of looking at gathering online and the confidence to approach it with renewed energy and optimism. It’s not just about a bigger toolbox, but developing internal resources and cultural mantras so that more people at your organization can be master facilitators.



Date

October 2, 2020

Time

11am - 3pm CDT​

Location

Live Online

Interested in hearing when this workshop will occur next?

Interested in a private cohort for your team?

What to expect

What to expect

Facilitating effective meetings is hard enough in person. In a virtual context, it requires even more attention to detail. It requires meeting systems that are designed thoughtfully to fit your context so you can do the work in the meeting. How do you keep all participants engaged during virtual meetings? It takes a pro-level toolkit and mindset to leave virtual meeting participants excited about the next virtual meeting. In this workshop, you will rethink the way you gather distributed participants by looking at it through a systematic lens.

What You'll Learn

Understand what different meeting systems look like. Experience a handful of battle-tested meeting mantras. Audit your own meeting culture and redesign system components. Learn how to use workshops and meetings that get you out of momentum loss. A great meeting culture requires more than an agendas and Zoom. We will coach you how to leverage new paradigms for when and why you meet. It is applying design-thinking in a meta-focus - your actual meeting culture. Lastly, we will show you new ways to capture feedback so that your meeting culture is always leveling up.

How You'll Learn

The class will be activity-based with facilitation simulations and collaborative sessions. You’ll have the chance to try new facilitation approaches and frameworks in a safe space. We won’t just talk at you — you’ll learn through doing, work with other participants, and get feedback. There will be plenty of time for Q&A, so you can learn from our experience running hundreds of workshops at some of the world’s largest enterprises.

Agenda

Deep Work Session 1

What are meeting systems and how do they create the culture?

Deep Work Session 2

Find out where the bugs are in your current meeting systems

Deep Work Session 3

Design systems to help you foster creativity and capture virtual room intelligence

Deep Work Session 4

Level up with feedback like a pro

Who Should Attend

Professional Facilitators

Who want to hone their virtual facilitation craft.

Scrum Masters

Seeking to improve virtual planning, grooming, and retro sessions.

Design Thinkers

Looking to add new tools and concepts to your virtual tool belt .

Leaders

Coming to the realization that facilitated leadership in the virtual landscape is the future.

Key Takeaways

Your unique mix of strengths and weaknesses

Simple virtual tools to transform everyday meetings

Strategies to address meeting dysfunction

A personalized plan for your meeting culture

This event has ended

Interested in hearing when this workshop will occur next?

Douglas Ferguson

Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is Founder and President of Voltage Control, an Austin-based facilitation agency that specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques. He has helped transform teams from U.S. SOCOM, the Air Force, Adobe, Dropbox, Fidelity, Vrbo, Liberty Mutual, Humana, and SAIC.

Douglas is a thought leader and master facilitator of Design Sprints, Innovation Workshops, Team Alignment Workshops, Transformations, Meeting Systems, and Culture Workshops. He is also the author of three books: Beyond the Prototype, How to Remix Anything (co-authored), and Start Within (co-authored).

Motivated by a mission to rid the world of horrible meetings and offer meaningful meetings in their place, Voltage Control is calling upon fellow facilitators to transform meeting and innovation culture. From free weekly community meetups to Control the Room–the annual facilitator summit, Voltage Control is building a community of facilitators to change the world.

John Fitch

John is an entrepreneur and business coach. He is Chief Product Officer of Voltage Control, where we prototypes tools to help people facilitate better meetings. He enjoys designing technology through unlearning and the generous act of sonder. Prior to Voltage Control, John was Entrepreneur in Residence at Animal Ventures where he advised Fortune 100 leadership on their prototyping practices and led distributed software teams at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and decentralized computing. John also worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now coaches organizations how to develop rapid prototyping practices within their culture.

John is a co-author to two books with Douglas Ferguson: How To Remix Anything and Non-Obvious Guide to Fucking Awesome Meetings. He is finishing his third book Time Off – a look at how modern society is burning us out, why time off and creativity will be a crucial component to the future of human work, and the solutions to help us all prioritize our “rest ethic.” John spends his leisure time farming, hosting dinner parties, and practicing Jiu Jitsu. He graduated from University of Texas at Austin and is a proud alumni of Seth Godin’s altMBA.
What People Are Saying

"I realized my entire role is facilitation. I have to do a lot of lateral influencing. So I use these skills even if it is not a super-structured workshop. Our product team has micro meetings all the time, and these methods help us get the most of those moments. My team can lean on me to facilitate. You will redesign the way you have conversations. I can’t believe every college student doesn’t have to take a class like this. This is how you collaborate. It is the underpinning of the future of work."

Savannah C.

PRODUCT DESIGNER AT TAILWIND

Apply for a Diversity Scholarship

A key part of our mission is to support diverse facilitators from different methodologies, backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, cultures, and ages. If you are a part of, or serve, a traditionally underrepresented group and feel that this scholarship would allow you to amplify this mission, please apply now.

Photo Disclaimer

Please note that photographs, video & audio recordings will be taken throughout this event. These will be used by Voltage Control for marketing and publicity in our publications, on our website and in social media, or in any third-party publication. Please contact us via email if you have any concerns or if you wish to be exempted from this activity.​

The Books

Bring Your Ideas to Life

Innovation can seem complex or reserved for the exceptional. But we believe innovation is for everyone. We’ve set out to illuminate a path for you to generate bold ideas, visualize and share them, overcome obstacles, and turn them into reality. Our books are equal parts guidebook and stories from years of experience helping companies adopt an innovation mindset and culture. They’re practical & actionable, so you can get started now. We hope they’ll help you on your journey to realizing your biggest, boldest ideas.