My father has often reminded me that I, “cannot change the past, so just move on.” In principle, I agree… and yet, the past can have a real grip on me, and on the leaders I have the privilege of working with across the country. This is visible when team members feel compelled to recount mistakes made in the past and the impact of those mistakes on an organization, client, or community.

These experiences and memories are valid and real, but they can also obstruct a group’s ability to move forward. In keeping with my father’s wisdom, you can’t change the past–but on the other hand, I’ve found it’s important to respect collective previous experiences while still keeping a focus on the ultimate goal at hand.

I recently sat with a group who were in the earliest stages of moving forward with a large system implementation that would impact their core business strategy and how they deliver value to their clients and customers. They were simultaneously ready to move forward with the change and acknowledged its importance, but could not stop referring back to the last time they did a similar project.

A technique that works to unlock the past’s grip on an individual or a group involves not shutting down discussion about how teams have experienced failures in the past or unmet expectations, but to instead, place those fails in the center of the dialogue. Thought leader David Gray refers to this concept as a “pre-mortem”.

Ask the group: “What would it take to really screw this up?”

Invite participants to generate a no-holds-barred list of specific behaviors, actions, and decisions required to negatively impact the project or initiative at hand. These ideas can be generated by sitting staunchly in the past and talking about all the things done wrong before. They can be pulled from the underbelly or shadow side of an organization’s culture. They can highlight the perceived weaknesses of flat sides of the leadership team charged with designing and executing a large project–or all of the above.

The generation of this list will result in the surfacing of ghosts, secrets, and ideas that may feel unspeakable. If left unshared, these ideas will carry a negative charge into future discussions and key moments when the group will need its full leadership power to solve the inevitable problems that arise in organization-wide changes.

So, it’s important to first explicitly and openly name both these realities in addition to the collective perceptions of the group. From there, the data available in this list can be grouped into the likelihood of repeating, ability to control, and the significance of impact, among other categories.

Suddenly, the collective group has the space to bring history and past experience into the present, in a way that enables them to close the gap between their current state and the future they desire. It may seem counterintuitive, but you might be surprised at how openly discussing your fears of failure can band your team together to accomplish their goals. Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

According to Atlassian, U.S. workers waste about 31 hours per month in meetings. Many studies indicate that time wasted in meetings is one of the most costly problems in every industry, across every organization. In order to help you eliminate wasted time in meetings, we’ve compiled a list of nine critical requirements that, if followed, will ensure that your meetings are efficient and effective. Our consultants at The Clearing have designed, prepared for, and facilitated countless successful meetings with clients, so these steps are tried and true.

Identify Your Meeting Type
In order to understand the meeting purpose and outcomes, you must determine what type of meeting is needed. The most common types of meetings are information sharing, decision-making, brainstorming, and educating.

Define Your Meeting Purpose and Outcomes
Once you’ve determined the meeting type, it’s now time to define your meeting purpose and the outcomes you want to achieve. The meeting purpose is why people are in the room and the outcome is what you want to achieve with them. Outcomes determine what success looks like at the end of the meeting. Be sure to set realistic outcomes for the time you have allotted for the meeting so you don’t leave participants with a sense of failure and unease when outcomes aren’t met.

Distinguish Between the Facilitator and Owner
Clearly define a facilitator in charge of the meeting process, and an owner who convenes the meeting and determines the desired outcomes. The same person should not play both of these roles because they serve different purposes. The facilitator designs and manages the meeting process by ensuring the group performs at its highest possible level and achieves the desired outcomes. The owner contributes to content by convening the meeting and sharing the vision, and is accountable for tying the outcomes to organizational efforts.

Develop an Agenda and Design
Develop an agenda with topics to discuss, and create a meeting design that outlines how participants will engage with the content. While the agenda should be shared with participants, the meeting design is a plan of how to execute the meeting, and does not need to be shared with all meeting participants.

Use a Knowledge Agent
Great meeting designs will always include a specialized “knowledge agent.” A knowledge agent is a co-facilitator role assigned to listen for key takeaways, nuances, and contextual factors. The agent is responsible for creating a meeting artifact that accurately reflects what the group accomplished.

Organize the Meeting Logistics
Meeting logistics can make or break a meeting. Having a great design and agenda means little to participants if they are cramped, too cold or hot, can’t see, or don’t have proper materials. Consider site selection, room set-up, seating arrangements, catering, materials and supplies, and a “technology master” who is responsible for the technology in the room. Ultimately, you want to create an environment you think will best support the meeting outcomes.

Set the Stage
At the beginning of the meeting, review purpose, outcomes, and the meeting agenda with the group. You should also establish norms and ground rules that will support the group in reaching their desired outcomes. An example of a meeting norm is a working definition of consensus, which we will discuss in greater detail in part two of this blog series.

Hotwash After the Meeting
Hotwashing is a government term used to describe the “after-action” discussions and evaluations of an agency’s performance following an exercise, training session, or major event. Hotwashing is an exchange of honest feedback regarding the content and process of an event, and serves to identify strengths and weaknesses. Meeting facilitators should always hotwash with the internal team and the client after an event, as it will help guide future direction. Ideally, you should gather feedback from participants in person using a survey or physical paper as electronic surveys usually yield fewer responses.

Generate a Meeting Report
The final requirement for a successful meeting is to create a report that contains the insights, outcomes, highlights, and next steps that came out of the meeting. The meeting report does not need to be longer than 10 pages, and should highlight key issues as well as meeting accomplishments. Consider including a recommendations section that emphasizes the larger context of the meeting and makes suggestions for advancing the group toward their strategic goals.

Stay tuned for part two of this meeting facilitation blog series, “Six Best Practices to Facilitate Successful Meetings,” to learn specific facilitation techniques to run a successful meeting and meet the goals of a group. In the meantime, visit MeetingPRIMES.com for more information about running productive meetings.

In part one of this two-part blog series, “Nine Best Practices to Design Meetings that Produce Results”, we touched on the importance of having a designated facilitator to lead meetings. Meeting facilitation is the process of designing and running a successful meeting of the minds, and the management of a process to meet the goals of a group. Our meeting facilitators work to balance the passion of the group, the agenda, and the leaders’ needs to guide the group to the intended outcome by using the following techniques:

Create a Clearing
As a facilitator, your mood and energy impacts the success of the meeting, so take the time to get clear about your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about the meeting before it begins. Create a clearing by bringing only what is essential to achieving the group’s desired outcome. During the meeting, make efforts to mentally step back from the discussion and notice your volume, your tempo, and your nonverbal actions. Small adjustments can have a big impact on group performance.

Manage the Energy
Facilitators are responsible for managing participants’ energy levels throughout the entire meeting. Taking stretch breaks, changing from small to large group discussions, using music and short videos, and eliciting fast “popcorn” responses are effective ways to prevent the group from feeling bored.

Practice Empathetic Listening
Great facilitation requires great listening skills. As a facilitator, you should constantly be analyzing and synthesizing what you are hearing, and reflecting back on the facts and the emotions of the group. Listening to participants is a sign of respect and is critical to ensuring that the group feels that the meeting was successful.

Establish a Working Definition of Consensus
Consensus does not mean that everyone should agree with every statement or decision. Consensus means that participants feel that their inputs were heard, they were treated fairly, and they can live with and commit to the outcomes. Facilitators should establish other meeting norms such as ground rules or guiding principles at the start of the meeting that will support the meeting outcomes.

Use the Parking Lot Tool
A “parking lot” is a facilitation tool that serves as a temporary holding area for ideas or suggestions that are not directly related to achieving the meeting outcomes. Keep the parking lot visible to the room to remind the participants that his or her idea will not be ignored and could form the basis for a follow-up discussion.

Capture the Group’s Memory
It is essential to document the group’s collective memory during sessions to ensure participants remember what was agreed upon and to maintain the momentum created during the session. Group memory consists of the collective rationales, decisions, and any other discussions that will be relevant to future work or interest. As a facilitator, do not keep the group’s decisions implicit; state decisions explicitly in the room and ensure your knowledge agent captures them so that all can see.

Skilled facilitators who use these six techniques are critical to keeping the group on focus and encouraging equal participation of all those involved. For more techniques used by extraordinary meeting facilitators, go to MeetingPRIMES.com.

As we are all glued to the television this week watching the riveting performances of the 2016 Olympics in Rio, it is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the latest insights on leadership and peak performance coming from premiere athletes and coaches in the world. We love the Olympics because everyday people push themselves to the limits of their minds, bodies, and spirits into this realm of excellence. The Olympic games have a long history that connects two core ideas of leadership development – self-knowledge and self-mastery.

The ancient games played in Greece took place near the temple of Apollo, where the saying “know thyself” was inscribed as you entered the temple. As Drew Hyland, professor of philosophy at Trinity College, points out in this excellent article about the connection between philosophy and sports, “If you’re an athlete and you’re thoughtful at all about what you’re doing, you’re constantly learning about yourself in exactly the sense Socrates was talking about, namely coming up against your limits’ of what you do not know.” Fast-forward to today’s games in Rio and we have a perfect example of a coach and player who have spent decades pushing these limits of self-mastery and self-knowledge.

Geno Auriemma, head coach of the USA women’s basketball team, arguably one of the best coaches in the world today, has been praised by his star athletes for helping his players achieve self-mastery by setting small, individualized performance goals. This type of coaching is backed up by neuroscience. When we set and achieve smaller goals, our brains release dopamine, which is connected to feelings of pleasure, learning, and motivation. Given these effects, our minds and bodies are motivated to push through the inherent pain and difficulties of long-term transformations. Using this approach for over 16 years, he has developed his star player Diana Taurasi, at the University of Connecticut and then on team USA through various Olympic performances. They have played over 187 games together as coach and player, winning 178 against their opponents. Coach Auriemma describes his player Taurasi with deep pride, “There have been great players who, mentally, are at a level above everyone else, and there have been great players who, physically, were at a level above everyone else. And there have been (players) who have had a bigger heart and had a greater will. How many do you know who have all three?”

All Olympians have incredible athletic ability, so what is unique to Diana and Geno’s success? Sixteen years of learning and growing together. To be successful, we need coaches and mentors that stick with us over long periods of time, push us beyond our own capacities, and help us understand ourselves with greater depth. Self-knowledge requires a courageous step into the unknown. Sometimes we need an encouraging push to face the unknown in ourselves. Do I have what it takes? Can I make it? Is it worth it? This type of leap of faith is embodied in the leadership framework, or PRIME, we at The Clearing call, Trust the Universe. Leaders typically create visions based on what they already know. This type of leadership works fine when the external environment is stable and the future is predictable. However, it is insufficient when the environment or marketplace is forcing a full transformation of the organization. With the right type of coaching and mentoring, transformational leaders step out into unknown futures. These visionaries:

Understand that most of what is needed is available in the universe; they do not know what they do not know
Believe that whatever they need to realize—whatever vision they declare—is out in the future somewhere
Trust that the universe will make available whatever the visionary needs

As leaders, we are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we know when we pursue new ideas and visions for our organizations. Sometimes this is dangerous. We can fail. We do fail. And sometimes it has a huge impact on our life. In the thousands of stories of Olympic victory, there are stories of those that risked it all, but did not make it. The best have coaches that push through the failures and the barriers. As we persist, we learn more about our capacities and we see the universe provide in ways we could not have imagined. We are both humbled and awed by the experience. This is the joy of effort inherent in all sports and why we love what we do as leaders.

What risks are you taking? Are you pushing yourself into unknown territory? Are you trusting the universe? Do you have a coach or mentor to stick with you through the difficulty?

If you are interested in improving your existing leadership training or coaching, The Clearing has applied the principles outlined above in our Leading with The PRIMES leadership development program.