Meetings can be a tedious time-suck. They can also be the most valuable part of your day. Designing, preparing and running meetings so that they fall into the latter category can be a full-time job in itself"¦ and often a thankless job at that. Ask any project manager!

The clearer we are about what we want to achieve in all of our meetings, the more we can streamline their design and preparation, and the better the results will be for everyone. Here are the 6 most common types of meetings, with some shortcut questions to help with design and preparation.

Why are meetings so bad?

Meetings are definitely up there with things that people love to hate (like printers, Nickelback, and arbitrary password rules), and with good reason: research indicates that bad meetings not only reduce productivity and squander an organisation's resources, but sap morale. Many of the issues with bad meetings can be resolved with basic meeting hygiene, such as having an agenda, inviting the right people, and letting everybody have equal time on the mic.

But in my experience, the most fundamental driver of bad meetings is not having a clear, shared, accurate understanding of the meeting's purpose.

When the purpose of the meeting isn't clear, this leads to loads of issues, such as:

• Stuffing too much into the agenda
• Default participants, default duration, and default results
• Clunky use of facilitation methods and technology
• Mixed expectations and mindsets
• Lacklustre preparation and participation
• Too much unstructured discussion and unproductive tangents 

Clear purpose drives better meeting results

On the flipside, when there's a clear, shared, accurate understanding of a meeting's purpose, it's clear what type of work the group needs to do together. This then drives clarity about other aspects like:

• What's essential to cover on the agenda, and how to achieve that
• Who should be there, and what preparation is essential
• What will the group make (or update) together, and what happens with the results after the meeting
• What mindset(s) should everyone be in, at what point (Exploratory? Creative? Evaluative? Challenging?)

The 6 meeting types, based on the type of work done together

Knowing what type of meeting you need is a great shortcut for when it comes to designing and running that meeting, based on its purpose, and the work that people need to do in that meeting together.

There are loads of lists of types of meetings out there already. Lucid Meetings has done some great work in classifying a myriad of meetings into 16 types (including a cool "periodic table of meetings'), but this set didn't cover some types that I'm familiar with from my consultancy work, plus product and service design work. There are other lists that are either also missing some work types, or seem to mix different work types together a bit too much (e.g. "decision-making/problem-solving meetings'), or are too reductive, or only have a superficial understanding of the work being done within the meetings themselves (e.g. "innovation meetings'). 

The list you see below is based on researching and synthesising all these other lists, as well as years of team coaching I've done, discussing with other consultants and coaches more experienced than me, plus results of an ongoing survey that all my online class participants take as part of class preparation.

1. Strategy and planning
2. Discovery and shaping
3. Solutions and decisions
4. Progress and alignment
5. Team and culture
6. Information and learning

Each meeting type description includes lists of major questions that should be a useful guide and shortcut for you. Let's take a look.

#1 Strategy and planning meetings

Examples: Strategy offsites, project kick-offs, project planning sessions, sprint planning sessions

Strategy and planning meetings are for forming up not only the work to be done, but also why it should be done, by whom, how, and by when. These meetings can vary in focus (from organisation, to product/service to team), and are often as much about looking back and looking up, as they are about looking ahead. 

Outputs typically include higher-order communications like vision statements and strategy-on-a-page assets, as well as sets of strategic initiatives, OKRs and roadmaps. 

Major questions to answer include:

• What is our purpose? What is the impact we want to make?
• Where are we now? Where do we want to be, and by when?
• Where do we play, and how do we win?
• What is our unique strategic advantage? What is the key that unlocks success for us?
• What do we focus on, and why? What do we not focus on?
• What does success look like, and how would we measure it?
• What people, processes, tools and assets do we need?

#2 Discovery and shaping meetings

Examples: Project discovery sessions, client briefing meetings, research briefing and planning, research synthesis, problem framing

To be successful at coming up with winning solutions, we need to be clear about what problem we set out to solve, and whose problem and/or need we are solving for, to shape up the scope and direction of that solution. This usually involves reviewing what we already know and deciding what we need to find out. We can often start with a hunch or a hypothesis that needs validation before proceeding any further.

Outputs typically include research objectives and research plans, research results and insights, journey maps and empathy maps, personas/archetypes/jobs-to-be-done statements, hypotheses, problem statements and design challenges.

Major questions to answer include:

• What is the strategic intent? What's in it for the business?
• What is our target market? Who are our target buyer and user customers?
• What problem are we trying to solve? Whose needs are we wanting to fulfil?
• What risks, assumptions and hypotheses do we validate?
• What are we curious about?

#3 Solutions and decisions

Examples: Brainstorming sessions, design spikes, design sprints, co-design sessions, hackathons, community consultations, critique sessions, go/no-go decisions, approvals

All decisions are made based on one or more options to evaluate, and those options need to come from somewhere. This group of meetings all have a flow of divergent thinking (idea generation and option creation), emergent thinking (synthesis and discussion), and convergent thinking (evaluation, prioritisation, and decision).

Outputs of these meetings of course include a range of ideas and solutions to the problems and needs scoped earlier. Those ideas and solutions can be anything from a list, to a set of storyboards, to a mockup or prototype, to a proposed business case. The ultimate output is not only a decision, but details about the decision: what are the actions, who takes responsibility for what, and how is the decision communicated.

Major questions to answer include:

• What are our ideas for solving this problem, or meeting this need, or improving this offering?
• What if? What wows? What works? (big thanks to Jeanne Leitka and Tim Ogilvie)
• What is our best option? How do we know?
• How do we decide? Who decides? When do we need to decide?
• What needs to happen, now that we've decided?

#4 Progress and alignment

Examples: Project status meetings, team progress meetings, Agile stand-ups, management one-on-ones

If there was a macaroni-and-cheese group of meetings, this is it. The vast majority of meetings are to do with progress and alignment in some way, shape or form. The larger an organisation gets, the more of these there are, because it gets harder to stay up to date and aligned.

Thankfully, project management software and chat software can do the heavy lifting of work status updates; the real-time conversations should be optimised for alignment, helping each other be more productive, and getting to done, whatever done means. 

With that in mind, outputs tend to be assets that get regularly updated, like project plans, campaign plans, event plans, product roadmaps, kanban boards, issue lists, job sheets, and OKRs. Good project hygiene also includes assets like definition of done, quality criteria, risks register, and a roles and responsibilities matrix. 

Major questions to answer include:

• How are we going?
• What has been accomplished so far? What remains to be done?
• Are we on track?
• Are there any risks or blockers?
• Who needs help? Who can help?
• What should we focus on next?

#5 Team and culture

Examples: Team offsites, weekly team sync meetings, team lunches, values and culture workshops

Where meetings to do with progress and alignment tend to be about the work getting done, meetings to do with team and culture tend to be about the people doing the work, and how they do that work together. In most meetings, culture happens by default, but in these meetings culture happens by design. These are the meetings where a team or group of stakeholders or managers have the opportunity to connect and increase their camaraderie, find more in common, and share common (often fun) experiences outside of the regular day-to-day work.

Outputs of these meetings sometimes include a social contract, a set of values or principles, or a list of WINFYs. And possibly awkward photos of people having drinks, doing ropes courses, or cooking pasta together.

Major questions to discuss include:  

• What's the purpose of our team? What impact do we want to make?
• How do we want to work together? What hours do we work, how do we communicate, how do we use technology together? 
• What promises do we make to each other about how we work together? What behaviour is OK and not OK?
• How do we want to improve as a team? How do we hold ourselves accountable?
• What will we do to have fun together, and getting better connected?  

#6 Information and learning

Examples: Organisation all-hands, business presentations, training sessions, lunch-n-learn sessions, community of practice sessions, meetups

There are, I suspect, still too many meetings that should be about solutions and decisions, but instead are just about information dispersal. There might be times where it's appropriate for a whole meeting to be taken up by somebody who wants to be a human intranet and go through a Powerpoint presentation, but those times are very very few.

Outputs of these meetings tend to be the slide decks that were displayed. This means that those slide decks could be inputs instead, and the meeting could instead be more about analysis, discussion, and alignment. Or no meeting at all.

You be the judge on that one.

Major questions to answer include:

• Why do I need to be a human intranet? What is a more valuable use of this time?
• How does this relate to the broader context?
• How does this help us achieve our goals?
• What does this information mean for me and my responsibilities?
• How might we apply this information?
• What questions do we have?

As Steven Rogelberg wrote in this great MIT Sloan Management Review article, successful organisations don't treat meetings as a necessary evil. Instead, they view them as a strategic resource and seek out ways to get the most from them. I hope that by being clearer on the purpose of each and every one of your meetings, you can not only make the design and prep more efficient, but the time together more effective.