Magical Meetings Mini Workshop

Create meetings that people actually want to attend.

Are your meetings playful and purposeful? Do they leave all attendees proud of the work done in them?

In this mini-workshop, we will provide you with the information you need to create a magical experience at every meeting. We will review meeting mantras that you can apply to your meeting culture, and we’ll go way beyond the agenda to show you frameworks to use before, during, and after your meetings. Join us to gain the tools and expertise you need to be a meeting magician.

Date

October 28, 2020

Time

9am - 10:30am CT​

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

You will come out of this workshop with a renewed perspective on meetings. You will learn a systematic method to better approach the before, the during, and the after of meetings to ensure they are magical. This mini-workshop is full of best practices and practical tools. You’ll walk away with the confidence to make any meeting magical.

There will be minimal lecture, so if you are expecting to turn on and multi-task, this workshop is not for you. Instead, we’ll be diving in and practicing virtual facilitation to build muscle memory and confidence. You’ll also have plenty of opportunities to connect and work with your peers, as we believe this is the best way to learn.

What You'll Learn

- Prevent terrible meetings from happening. - Revolutionize agendas with the use of narratives. - Handpick effective exercises and insert them into your meeting narrative to better engage participants. - Maintain momentum outside of your meetings. - Distinguish between work that should be done in a meeting and work that should happen asynchronously. - Make meetings more playful, productive, and magical. - Unleash the potential in everyone so that you can all do your best work together, but also alone.

How You'll Learn

This mini-workshop will be extremely interactive and hands-on. We will show you templates, checklists, and frameworks that you can start using immediately after the training. You will tinker with these assets to become familiar with them. You will also create meeting mantras together with other leaders, and we will do peer-to-peer coaching and cross pollinate best practices.

Agenda

Open

Review meeting mantras that create magical meetings.

Explore

Frameworks, templates, and checklists to use before, during, and after meetings.

Close

Create your own meeting mantra to apply to your team right after the course.

Reflect

What magical methods work for you and how can we all get better together?

Who Should Attend

Managers

who want to enable their teammates without getting in their way.

Entrepreneurs

who want to make the most out of the collective intelligence within their company..

Executives

who seek more alignment, trust, and productivity.

Anybody

Looking to create meetings people want to attend

Key Takeaways

How to facilitate meetings that don’t suck.

Know when to have a meeting and when not to.

Create momentum before a meeting and keep it going after.

Mantras, frameworks, templates, and checklists to use in your next meeting.

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 @ 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.