Organizing Meetings Around Questions Instead of Topics

Effective meetings are driven by agendas and often include a variety of issues, topics, and discussion points. Naturally, leaders organize meetings topic-by-topic to keep the discussions focused and on track. Look at virtually any meeting agenda at nearly any enterprise, and you will find a topic or issue-driven agenda. 

While there is nothing wrong or problematic with this well-worn approach, it has one Achilles heel: it doesn’t promote dialogue or intense debate unless the topic is highly charged for team members. 

In most cases, topics and the words used to describe them are simply placeholders for the group to stay focused on one issue at a time. They do very little to excite the imagination or to encourage people to contribute. 

A simple way to promote more discussion and to get people excited and ready to contribute is to cast each topic or issue as a question. Questions demand an answer. As such, they promote thinking as soon as they are read or heard. 

Going from topic or issue to question requires the leader to know what area they really want to address during the discussion. This improves clarity and focus. 

For instance, a topic like “Improving the Culture” might become “How Do We Make Our Culture More Performance Driven?” or “What Do We Need to Change About Our Culture?” or “Why Has Our Culture Lost Its Way?” Questions are imbued with provocative assumptions, whereas topics sit idly on a page as a headline. 

The best agenda questions pose a challenge, presume an end state, or suggest a root cause. The better the questions, the better the discussion that will emerge from addressing them. 

Not surprisingly, how questions get stated will have a tremendous influence on the focus and trajectory of the discussion that follows. As such, leaders must give considerable thought to how to frame the question with the idea of the desired discussion in mind. 

Any topic, problem, or issue can be stated as a question, and any agenda can be organized as a set of questions. Meetings, agendas, and topics organized by questions create a more vibrant dialogue between team members. 

When sent in advance, the questions posed in the agenda stimulate answers and prepare team members for a more lively conversation. Best of all, the discussion that follows a question-driven agenda is easier to keep on track. That’s because any point that is not an answer to the question becomes obvious and can be brushed aside as irrelevant. Any questions?