A Surefire Way to Make Your Meetings Matter

We take meetings for granted. We assume that if we get a bunch of the right people in the room together and have a discussion that our intended outcome will just magically happen. Everybody will be on board, and we’ll move gracefully onto the next step. After all, that’s what we pay people to do.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. People need to be given a reason to follow your lead, which is one of the many reasons why it’s important for us to communicate effectively. To do this, many of us end up turning to presentation software. We’ve become such a presentation culture that we don’t even think about it anymore. We have an idea, find a meeting in which to discuss that idea, and create a presentation.

The problem is that while presentations are one of the best ways to communicate our ideas, it’s not always the best way. There are certain business settings where the presentation isn’t the right vehicle for communicating your message, just like you would never develop a presentation to tell someone that there’s a tiger behind them.

Presentations are most effective when you need to persuade your audience to adopt an idea. But presentations are usually a one-way street. You’re sharing information with your audience. But what happens when you need to do more than that? What happens when you need to drive a group to a consensus or hash out unresolved issues in order to move onto the next step? Formal presentations don’t allow you to do that without scheduling another meeting to have a conversation around what was presented. What a waste of time!

Instead, more and more business leaders are turning to informed conversations—giving the group of people you want to speak with the information ahead of time, so they can be ready to engage in a meaningful dialogue about it.

LinkedIn is just one of the companies that have started making informed conversations a standard practice.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn said this about the shift, “At LinkedIn, we have essentially eliminated the presentation. In lieu of that we ask that materials what would typically have been presented during a meeting to be sent out to participants at least 24 hours in advance … We begin each meeting by providing attendees roughly 5 – 10 minutes to read through the deck. … Once folks have completed the reading, it’s time to open it up for discussion.”

What an efficient use of time!

Still, the question remains: What’s the best format to share your information? Standard slides won’t do. Done right, presentation slides should be too sparse and cinematic to get your point across without a presenter.

But you don’t really want to hand people a document either. Documents are too dense to read or reference quickly. Plus, standard documents don’t capture the magic that comes with pairing visuals with text.

Slidedocs, on the other hand, do. What the heck is a slidedoc? A slidedoc is a visual document, developed in presentation software, that is intended to be read and referenced instead of presented.

Slidedocs aren’t new. People have created slidedocs for as long as presentation software has existed. But instead of giving them to people to read, we’ve been presenting them in group read-alongs. It’s time to snatch those slides from the projector and give them to people to process on their own time.

Not only will this be a more effective use of time, but it will help you create more momentum around your message, which is, after all, the real point in having a meeting in the first place.

A Surefire Way to Make Your Meetings Matter