Matrix Analysis of Meeting Design

The green track is about using the matrix technique on something simple and straightforward, just to get familiar with it.

Let’s consider the meeting you routinely have with your team.  Imagine that this meeting could have the most positive impact possible on your team and their power to succeed. Describe what the result of that would look like in simple words and phrases. For example: enthusiasm; trust; ideas; …   Aim for 5 to 7 really important ideal outcomes, and try grouping them if you end up with more.

Then list down the typical elements of the meeting – the key agenda items, location, methods. Again aim for 5-7 things that best define the design of the meeting.

map out the logic between them

Use the template that is available here and list down your ideal outcomes  in the row headings on the left, and your meeting elements in the column headings along the top. Then, using yellow sticky notes, label the squares of the grid to reflect how each of the main elements helps you to achieve your ideal outcomes. Keep it to one contribution per sticky, but each grid square can include more than one sticky.

When you have done this, reflect on how well your current structure is contributing to your current outcomes, and use blue sticky notes to add in new ideas of how you would most like the meeting elements to contribute. Consider the potential of every square. Don’t worry if the meeting elements would have to adapt to deliver your blue stickies, that thinking is the purpose of the exercise.

All we are trying to do with this tool is lift your mind up to control the structure, rather than leave the structure control your mind. What you do with the ideas is up to you. Incidentally, if you find some columns almost blank, you might like to consider whether these are necessary, or whether these may better be tackled using other forms of communication.

Analysing the Design of Your Team

This builds on the green track to consider your structures more widely. But before you apply it, it would be helpful to clarify a few things.

Matrices are first and foremost about providing insight. The size of each matrix is all about keeping the thinking fresh and stopping it becoming a chore. You are not constrained to what you put in the columns and rows. You can put in whatever aspects of ‘structure’ provide you new perspectives and insights. However, the potential causality should always be from the columns to the rows. The columns are the what, where, when, how or who, and the rows are the why!

We have used this simple technique to gain fresh insight and inspire creative design of everything from individual events and solutions up to entire organisations, and it is phenomenally powerful. It enables design thinking to upscale from individual sprints to agile configuration of entire enterprises.

So the blue track is to use it to think about your current team.

analysing team logic

Imagine you and your team could be replaced by a magic box. Make a list of all the differences the box would have to magically deliver to be effective. Group these into 5 to 10 key objectives and consider how closely these reflect your current objectives. Consider also, if it was your choice, would there be anything else you would get the box to do?

Then make a list of all of the activities that your team does, and group these also. Consider how well your activities cover your objectives, and whether there might be any that are weak or missing, or that may be surplus to requirement. You don’t have to do anything about this, just be aware of it for when the insight might come in useful.

Then create your matrix. List all the black box objectives down the left hand side of the matrix. List all the groups of activities along the top of the matrix. In each cell, consider how each activity currently impacts each objective on yellow sticky notes. And, when you have finished that, creatively consider the potential for each square to do more, and write these on blue sticky notes.

Strategic Engagement with Matrices

The power of matrices work far better with teams than it does when you use it on your own. A group of people have much more creative capacity to see things differently and generate new possibilities. And engaging a team (or a series of teams) in considering their roles within matrices builds greater ambition for the impact they want to have, and greater ownership and commitment to deliver the result.

Furthermore, matrices can become a digital twins of the organisation, enabling your people to better understand the influences of change, and to quickly develop and test agile responses across the organisation.

There are numerous case studies of organisations using matrices to do this. The red track, should you wish to take it on, is to reflect on some of these case studies, and think about how you might collectively engage your own team in beginning this sort of strategic thinking about their own roles.