building an agenda

If you facilitate or lead lots of meetings, you likely have a few standard agendas readily available that you use and customize to address a particular need – whether for group meetings or internal/external client meetings. This, of course, helps to save time from building an agenda when you have go-to standards available. And, I suspect that most of us run, perhaps, only two, three, or maybe even four different types of sessions on a regular basis.

For example, I personally facilitate a lot of strategy sessions, some issue resolution sessions, some action planning sessions and, every once in a while, a team building or large conference session. But, in any three-year period, I suspect that 80-90% of the work I do falls into one of the first three: strategy, issue resolution or action planning. And, of course, I have standard agendas for each of these sessions which I can customize as needed to make sure clients get what they truly need. But, what do you do when a client has a completely different and, perhaps, unique need for you to facilitate, and none of your standard agenda templates even come close to addressing the need? I like to suggest that you consider a four-step process to help you with building an agenda from scratch. The first step is the most crucial.

Steps for Building an Agenda from Scratch

  1. Determine the critical question. (This step is key!)
  2. Determine the preparation questions.
  3. Determine the logical order of the preparation questions.
  4. Transform the preparation questions into agenda items.

Determine the Critical Question Before Building an Agenda

Your first step is to identify the key question that the participants must answer by the completion of the session. An important characteristic of the critical question is that, once it is answered, the session can end. For example, the HR director states the following session purpose: “In our session I want to develop a plan for fixing the hiring process. Make it less time consuming, less resource intensive, and more responsive to the needs of the department heads.” Therefore, you might phrase the critical question as follows: “What actions will be taken, by whom, and by when to improve the hiring process?” Note that sometimes your critical question may have multiple parts.  For example, if the purpose of the session is to set the organization on a new direction, the critical question might be: “What should our new direction be, and how do we get there?”

Determine the Preparation Questions

Obviously, you can’t call a meeting, and once people are in the room, immediately ask the critical question, “What actions should we take, by whom, and by when to improve the hiring process?”  People aren’t ready to answer that question yet.  They have to answer other questions first to prepare them to answer the critical question.  We call these other questions the “preparation questions.” So, once you have determined the critical question, you need to identify the questions that participants should answer first to prepare them to answer that critical question. For our session to improve the hiring process, the list of preparation questions might look like this:

  • What’s wrong with the hiring process?
  • What should the new process look like?
  • What’s right with the hiring process?
  • How does the hiring process work today?
  • What things could we do to improve the hiring process?
  • What are the actions necessary to implement the new process?

Determine the Logical Order of the Preparation Questions

Having identified the appropriate preparation questions, you now must determine their order. You should sequence the questions so that related questions are in close proximity to one another, and questions that depend on answers from other questions are positioned later in the sequence. The following is the newly-ordered list of questions:

  • How does the hiring process work today?
  • What’s right with the hiring process?
  • What’s wrong with the hiring process?
  • What things could we do to improve the hiring process?
  • What should the new process look like?
  • What are the actions necessary to implement the new process?

Transform the Preparation Questions into Agenda Items

The final step is to convert the list of questions into agenda items. You might choose to use the questions as they are as your agenda items. In other cases, you might change the wording so that all items appear as verb or noun phrases – as in the example that follows.

  1. Introduction
  2. Current processing steps
  3. Strengths of the current process
  4. Problems and root causes
  5. Potential improvements
  6. Implementation plan
  7. Review and close

These four key steps can help you create focused agendas that achieve your desired result. Once you design your agenda from scratch, you will want to use our OPQRST approach to develop your detailed agenda. Both the OPQRST approach and the four-step method are techniques taught and practiced in our FOUR-DAY course, The Effective Facilitator.  This course provides a comprehensive, structured approach plus over 100 techniques for leading groups toward better results. For TWO-DAY meeting facilitation training, contact us about Facilitating Masterful Meetings – the course where you will learn a proven framework for preparing for, executing, and closing successful meetings. Learn more about these two courses and which one is best for you.