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Magical Meetings
Reinvent How Your Team Works Together
By Douglas Ferguson & John Fitch
What if having an agenda has no effect on whether you have a great meeting? What happens when you actually do the work in the meeting? What are the five common elements of every meeting that sucks, and how do you avoid them?
Douglas and John show you how to adopt and adapt the non-obvious Meeting Mantras they developed at their company, Voltage Control. Their methods have helped companies and teams transform the perception of meetings from “going to the dentist” (ie – something you have to do but hate) into something you can’t wait for – like a rock concert or great dinner.
Free Resource
Magical Meetings Book Assets
Did you purchase our book on Audiobook or Kindle? We've organized all of the tables, lists, and figures from the book here.
Free Resource
Magical Meetings Quick Guide
This is a bite-sized guide to create and run magical meetings based on the book.
Free Resources
Magical Meetings Mural Templates
A template for before, during and after your meeting.
Premium Resource
Magical Meetings Online Course
Based on the Non-Obvious Guide to Magical Meetings, this course, covers the information you need to create a magical experience at every meeting.
Short Stories
Magical Meetings Stories
A series of short stories highlighting magical meetings from around the world
Event
Facilitation Lab
Each week we feature a guest to guide us through an experience, the entire group critiques them, and then as time permits, we run an open mic style facilitation jam.
Blog
Meeting Culture
Articles written by Voltage Control about how to run better meetings.
About the authors
Douglas Ferguson
Douglas is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is the 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 Acceleration, Team Alignment, Meeting Systems, Culture Transitions, and Change Transformations. 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 Magical Meetings and is an author of 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.
Magical Meetings Stories
Share Your Story
We would love to hear about your magical meeting. Share how you are creating magical moments in your work.
If your story is selected we’ll feature it on the Magical Meeting Stories series on our blog and in the upcoming Magical Meeting Stories book.