What You'll Learn
Understand what different meeting systems look like
Audit your own meeting culture and redesign system components
Experience a handful of battle-tested meeting mantras
Meeting Systems
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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.
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.
Our Approach
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.
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
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.
Bringing a Team?
Discounts are 20% off for a group of 3-4
Discounts are 30% off for a group of 5+
Email hello@voltagecontrol.com for group discount codes
Wait, what's facilitation?
Whether you know it or not, you are probably a facilitator. Facilitators lead and guide teams through important gatherings (think: “lockdowns,” working sessions, strategic meetings, etc.) to achieve better outcomes. Facilitators create the meeting culture. They are skilled at developing focused agendas, leading collaborative activities, remaining impartial, and keeping participants on task. They design better meeting systems. Even if you are not a professional facilitator, many of us have to play the role of facilitator at key moments in our day-to-day work. Here’s your chance to learn tools to do it more successfully.
About Douglas
Douglas is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist with over 20 years of experience. He is president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based workshop agency that specializes in Design Sprints and innovation workshops. Prior to Voltage Control, Douglas held CTO positions at numerous Austin startups where he led product and engineering teams using agile, lean, and human-centered design principles. While CTO at Twyla, Douglas worked directly with Google Ventures running Design Sprints and now brings this experience and process to companies everywhere.
Douglas recently published Beyond the Prototype, which offers expert advice for people shifting from discovery projects to realization and launch. He is also the co-author of Start Within, How To Remix Anything, and Non-Obvious Guide to Fucking Awesome Meetings. Douglas is active in the Austin startup community where he serves on the board of several non-profits, mentors startups, and advises early-stage ventures. Douglas spends his free time patching up modular synthesizers, playing guitar, and taking photographs. He graduated from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
About John
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
"Anyone that can construct a sequence of conversations to lead others is a metaskill. Anyone who participates in meetings or owns an agenda would benefit from this. It is a whirlwind, but you are among others who are in charge of making an impact. This is a practical, hands-on deep dive for managers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who can change their culture by leading meetings like a pro."
Mark T.
Head of services at Mural
"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
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 our events manager, Tara <tara@voltagecontrol.com>, if you have any concerns or if you wish to be exempted from this activity.
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