Meetings don’t have to be painfully inefficient snoozefests—if you design them. Meeting Design will teach you the design principles and innovative approaches you’ll need to transform meetings from boring to creative, from wasteful to productive. Meetings can and should be indispensable to your organization; Kevin Hoffman will show you how to design them for success. "I would like Kevin Hoffman to design not only my meetings but also probably my entire life." — Kristina Halvorson , CEO, Brain Traffic and coauthor, Content Strategy for the Web "At last, a book that acknowledges meetings as a design problem. Read this. Learn it. Put it into practice. Then thank the author when your group work soars." — Sunni Brown , best-selling author and Chief Human Potentialist "Want to run meetings that are both productive and fun? This book is for you!" — Andy Budd , Owner and Director of Clearleft "In Kevin Hoffman’s hands, business meetings become a powerful tool of design." — Jeffrey Zeldman , Founder, studio.zeldman and A List Apart "There''s meeting your maker, and then there's making your meeting. Kevin Hoffman dives deep, offering myriad ways to design good meetings." — Molly Wright Steenson , Associate Professor, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University "I kid you not: the last meeting I was in that Kevin facilitated, people teared up at the end because of how transformative our time together was. When's the last time you could say that about any of your meetings?" — Dan Mall , Founder and Director, SuperFriendly KEVIN M. HOFFMAN connects people, ideas, and solutions in order to solve our industry's pressing design challenges. As Vice President for Design Practices at Capital One, he takes responsibility for assessing, exploring, and accelerating all areas of design with a team of more than 70 very talented human beings. Prior to working at Capital One, he founded and led Seven Heads Design, a network of digital design thinkers who collaborated frequently on major projects. Trusted by major brands over his career such as Capital One, Zappos, Harvard University, Nintendo, and MTV, Kevin's roles as design thinker, agency founder, and product manager have given him a unique perspective on how people interact when they make things. Kevin regularly shares his insights at conferences around the world. Chapter 1: How to Design a Meeting When hundreds of hours of his design team’s sweat, blood, and tears seemed to go up in flames in a single meeting with a group of vice presidents, Jim could have easily panicked. So that’s what he did. Jim is a creative director at a successful and highly respected boutique design agency—let’s call it “Rocket Design.” He found a fantastic opportunity for Rocket through a former coworker’s new job at a Fortune 100 client―they were ready to spend half a million dollars to build the best website experience possible in a competitive market: online meal delivery. After several weeks of discovery, his team had assembled a design direction that they believed could be effective. Baked into a collection of mocked-up mobile screens were strategies guiding content voice, brand execution, photographic style, and user interface functionality. To move into the next phase, Jim’s job was to make sure that the senior leadership at the company believed in the proposed direction just as strongly as his team did. Project managers on the client side navigated the rat’s nest of the leadership’s meeting availability to find a standing monthly hour in which Jim and his team could provide progress updates. At one of these check-in meetings, Jim walked the gathered group of vice presidents and directors through a series of screens, stopping to accent unique elements and key decisions along the way. Despite asking people to hold questions until the end, there were a handful of odd interruptions, like this gem: ”That’s a really strong yellow. I just don’t know about that.” Jim found the interruptions unnerving, each one forcing him to reset his presentation rhythm and remind the group to wait until he was finished. When he reached the end of his walkthrough, a bit rattled, he opened the floor for an unstructured session of comments and questions. The comments and questions came fast, furious, and, of course, unstructured, like invaders from all sides breaching a fortified position: “What will you do differently to accommodate our unique business rules around delivery partners?” “This must work within our existing JavaScript framework, so that will happen, right?” “Were you aware that we’ve got an internal team working on this exact same issue, and they’ve already wireframed the whole thing?” Jim struggled through, answering each off-topic comment and occasionally handing questions off to the most qualified individuals on his team. But his frustration wasn’t masked in the slightest: Jim interrupted people mid-comment, stammered when surprised, and answered brusquely with “that’s out of scope!” in r