Bring a prototype to every meeting

Ensuring progress by giving attendees something to react to

Author

Drew Weilage
November 13, 2024

Here's a powerful idea from the design world that will ensure you make progress at your next meeting: Bring a prototype.

A prototype is something that turns the idea in your head into something tangible. It's an early demonstration of the idea in action. Rather than just conversation, it's something to react to. It gives others the ability to experience, assess, and improve the idea. Most importantly, in the context of a meeting, a prototype ensures progress.

A prototype is intended to create a scale model of something larger. It's not intended to be a finished product. Think of it as a draft. So mock up an idea using Miro, or Word, or PowerPoint. Engage a colleague to act out a scripted experience. Use Post-It Notes and a Sharpie. Think low fidelity and low-cost. The Interaction Design Foundation has a nice and concise overview of prototyping methods here.

Diego Rodriguez, former Global Managing Director at design consultancy IDEO, says to expect three things to happen when you begin bringing a prototype to every meeting:

First, a lot of your meetings will evaporate. Those that shouldn't happen in the first place, the ones where nothing gets done, won't. If you can't bring a prototype of your latest thinking, there's a simple solution: don't have the meeting.‍

Second, the meetings you do have will be awesome. With something concrete in the room, discussions will be more productive and actionable, and the level of shared understanding and alignment will go through the roof.

Finally, bring more prototypes to meetings, and you'll boost levels of performance and engagement across your organization.

Look at next week's calendar and pick the meeting you're least looking forward to. Create a prototype for it, then open with: "This is an early prototype to get us started. It's meant to be changed and improved based on your feedback …"

Afterwards, bask (in the progress and) in the glow of having shifted the meeting's energy from passive to active.

Around The Water Cooler ⛲

“Self-made people, and all heroic spiritualities, will try to manufacture an even stronger self by willpower and determination—to put them back in charge and seeming control. Usually most people admire this, not realizing the unbending, sometimes proud, and eventually rigid personality that will be the long-term result. They will then need to continue in this pattern of self-created successes and defenses. This pushy response does not normally create loving people, but just people in control in ever deeper need of control. Eventually, the game is unsustainable, unless you make others, even your whole family, pay the price for your own aggression and self-assertion—which is the common pattern.” — Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water

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