Flipped meeting. No need to waste your time

Uncountable discussion meetings, all around the clock, from sunrise to sunset: this is the typical scenario in many institutions every day of the week. Outlook, Google calendar, Asana, MindMapper and many other tools to organize a crazy agenda: these are the resources to organize the mess. However, who is possible to produce, to deliver, even to focus, when you keep up in long-lasting debates? These discussions are usually meant to get participants up-to-speed on a topic and to meet a consensus. Furthermore, many people jump into the meetings with no real clue about the agenda, the facts or the expected outputs: they use the meetings to become instant experts and take on-the-run decisions. The main challenge is that you cannot become an instant expert on complex problems that require elaborated analysis and sharp solutions. You are doomed to fail. In addition, some of these people use the work of others, who actually did prepare those meetings, with slides, Excel sheets, reports and even a script. This setting seems unbalanced, it is unproductive and it is unfair.

Homework to prepare meetings ahead saves time and energy

 At the Morocco Open Education Day 2018, using the flipped-meeting approach

Deep thinking comes as a solution in the way of a flipped approach. Homework to prepare meetings ahead saves time and energy. What we need in meetings is a deeper layer of analysis and we also need to close a decision, even an action plan with specific activities and a related calendar. In short, less talking and more wrapping-up. And this approach becomes viable if, and only if, every single discussant masters the topic, the pros and the cons, and comes with a solution at hand.

Daniel Burgos
Morocco Open Education Day 2018
Marrakech
January, 23rd, 2018