Problem solving is a hard problem. If problem solving was easy then we would all have flying cars by now, would never catch a cold and would not have to spend endless hours in meetings.
There are a lot of different techniques for problem solving. For example this article I wrote includes 60 different problem solving techniques for programmers. What are the underlying forces behind these techniques? How can we group these techniques to find the principles as to why they work?
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could always have productive meetings? Meetings were actions were assigned and then completed. Meetings where decisions were actually made with a minimum of fuss and effort. Wouldn’t that be nice.
The Six Rules of Productive Meetings
Must have an agenda
Start & finish on time
Switch off phones
Listen…
Decision making involving more than one person almost inevitably requires a meeting to discuss the decision, proposal and selected option. So this post is a list of various meeting types to collect them into one place for later study. I’ll probably add to this list as I think of new types, so bookmark it and check back later.
Can you think of any that I have missed? Would love to hear about your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.
Time Aspect
This section describes meetings by the period by which they occur. Which isn’t to say that other meeting can’t occur at a regular interval but there seems to be something a little different by the daily/weekly/monthly cycle.
Daily Meetings, Stand-up Meetings. Notices, News, what people are going to work on today, quick coordination of tasks.
Weekly Meetings. Weekly status reports, actions, short term resource planning, risk review
Monthly Meetings. Review the previous month particularly any monthly reports. Plan tasks for the coming month.
Quarterly Meetings. Reports and Tasks with more of a strategic focus.
Annual Meetings. Often become kick-off meetings
How many different ways of making a decision can you think of?
Have you ever measured your problems with a rubber band? Do you know how to use a morphological box? Have you climbed to the peak of inflated expectations?
If not then this book is for you.
This book describes fifty different…
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Read MoreHi, just released an extension for Chrome into the Chrome Webstore to make it even easier to use The Decision Wall. You can find the extension for Chrome here.
This extension makes it easy to add an option to one of your decisions. From any web page you are looking at you…
Read MoreDecision making is the process that results in one option being selected from a number of different options. It is possible to not select an option and so not make a decision. Decision making may, or may not involve analysis of the available options. You could make pick a decision…
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Making decisions can be hard. Making the right decision can be even harder. If you don’t make the best decision it could be very costly either in time or money for your organisation. Even once you’ve made a decision often you are left wondering if it really was the best decision after all.
How to make a decision? How do you make the right decision, it might not be the cheapest but how do you know that the option you have selected is a good choice? Read More
In the last blog post I talked about how I was looking for an Internet orientated, web research, decision analysis tool because I hated copying and pasting into Excel spreadsheets. In this blog I’m going to outline some of the features that I think such a tool should have. However before I do that I had better explain what has been implemented so far and is currently available over at www.the-decision-wall.com.
