50 Ways to Liven Up Your Meetings

Think back to some of the meetings you've been to or maybe you've chaired in the last three months. How many of them left you feeling that you didn't want to be there ... maybe nor did anybody else?We rely so heavily on meetings to communicate with one another, resolve problems, share ideas, negotiate deals and yet when they don't work, they can be worse than useless.Stop taking unproductive meetings for granted!50 Ways to Liven Up Your Meetings is a proven collection of techniques, activities and games that you can use in any meeting to help:- Raise the energy levels of everyone involved and bring the meeting alive - from the start or when people start to flag;- Enable the different people in the group to communicate and work with each other more effectively;- Tackle problems in the group methodically but creatively; and- Focus on the outcomes of the meeting that you want to achieve and make them happen.Each of the 50 Ways is clearly signposted and simply described, which means that you can prepare yourself in advance of a meeting and introduce an exercise or a technique, if and when you need it, with a minimum of fuss.The majority of the exercises are equally suited as planned structured interventions that you introduce as part of an ongoing programme for improving regular meetings such as team meetings, project group meetings or problem-solving sessions.The collection is very varied, to give you the widest possible 'toolkit' of solutions and includes brain teasers and lateral thinking exercises, humorous interludes, ways of introducing a new group or of creating rapport and techniques for analysing data or action planning. There are tools that focus on the way the group is working during the meeting, as well as techniques for tackling the content - for helping to generate new ways of looking at a problem if you get stuck.50 Ways to Liven Up Your Meetings will help you to inject variety, fun and increased professionalism into any meeting that you are facilitating or in which you are simply taking part.Start using 50 Ways today and then look back again at your meetings in three months' time. You will find that you and everyone else involved will see them in a very different light!Roberts-Phelps, Graham is the author of '50 Ways to Liven Up Your Meetings' with ISBN 9780566083921 and ISBN 0566083922.