(NB. This blog was inspired by a combination of some recent facilitation and being immersed in the current season of the British Baking Show! If you aren’t into baking, you might still find some morsels of use in this blog!)
I love to cook but I have a pet peeve when it comes to the way recipes are written. I get excited about a dish where the tagline tells me that it takes ‘only 30 minutes’ to prepare. However, when I read into the fine print (usually 29 minutes before I want to get it on the table), I find that the 30 minutes doesn’t include the fact that all the ingredients in the list should have been chopped before I get started. Or, even worse, that I actually needed to have soaked, infused or marinated something for at least 24 hours before!
I.e. Don’t start from here!
It drives me crazy!
So, what does this have to do with meetings?
I recently got to facilitate a really dynamic meeting, where the group I was working with not only got everything mapped out that they had set out to do, they made several detours into issues that were critical to dig into, and really wrestled with key differences of opinion to get to resolutions that everyone could live with. Everyone came away simultaneously exhausted but also energized.
One might say that a delicious dish was co-created and baked during their time together.
We were all pleasantly surprised by not only how far but how deep we went. As I reflected on the event afterwards and was trying to name the secret sauce (yes I am trying to stick with food metaphors for this piece), I realized that it was because we didn’t show up as a group trying to make a ’30 minute dish’ in 29 minutes. Everyone had done the prep work and was coming in ready to bake together.
So – enough of the beating a metaphor to death. What does this mean in practice?
1. In terms of the preparation before you even start the recipe it means coming into the meeting with the basic preparation done. This isn’t about cooking the books/pre determining the outcome. It’s about every participant having a clear idea about what’s important to them. What’s most important to them. Coming in with the ideas fresh in their minds. It’s about the facilitator talking to a core sample of folks and knowing what fears, hopes and priorities are that are sitting below the surface. About potentially drawing out key themes and the taboo topics to reflect back to the group so folks are hearing the same things and seeing the issues from multiple angles.
2. It’s also about taking the time to warm up the space when the meeting actual starts. While, in time-pressed contexts, we want to jump right in to solving ‘the’ challenges, setting ‘the’ strategies etc. That’s the equivalent of trying to cream butter straight out of the fridge without giving it time to soften. If we don’t find ways to check in with how people are showing up in the room we assume everyone is feeling the same way as we are (very dangerous assumption) or even how they were feeling the last time we spoke to them. If we don’t create shared agreements and shared language then we run very real risks that we are going to talk past each other.
3. We rigidly follow the recipe (aka agenda) to the letter. And we don’t pay attention to the context and the people who are in the room that day. I can’t tell you how many times my beloved spouse has followed a recipe precisely, forgetting that my kids won’t touch anything super spicy. Or that we have a guest coming in who can’t eat gluten… following the agenda precisely doesn’t help if it turns out that people don’t actually want the outcome they said they did. Or thought they did before they got started. This where cooking is an in the moment activity where we adapt to the needs of the group. And when things need more time to prove or rise or bake, it behoves us to pay attention to that so we get the outcome that we need.
4. We say that too many cooks in the kitchen is a bad idea – clearly we usually want more people in our meetings than we need in our dinner preparations. But have we stopped to check who actually should be in the room. Are there people who need to eat the final dish but be less involved in the preparation. And vice versa. Priya Parker talks extensively about this in her book The Art of Gathering. Invite the people in who need to be there.
Of course, even the most experienced chefs have bad days. The British Baking Show is full of ‘excitement’ where things don’t turn out the way that was intended. Same with meetings. But I also like to hold the possibility that sometimes even our disasters may lead us to invent hitherto unknown dishes – whether in the kitchen or the conference room.
Photo Credit: Kirstie Young – https://www.kirstieyoungphotography.com/. Kirstie happens to be my very talented sister-in-law who creates incredible photos in and of and around food. So grateful she shared a photo that could bring this article to life!
