Decisive Meetings
A full-day workshop in NYC, led by world-renowned meetings expert Al Pittampalli, that will ensure all your meetings successfully conclude with documented decisions and clear action plans.
The Benefits
Become a Decisive Leader
Learn how to make decisions with your team, without any second guessing and unnecessary delay.
More Time
Your meetings will become so much more productive, decisions that used to take you five days will take you five minutes. What will you do with all that extra time?
Less Decision Overwhelm
Decisions clutter our desks and our mind. By having an easy framework for helping you identify and prioritize decisions, you’ll feel 50 pounds lighter.
The Problem
Have you ever been in a horrendous traffic jam, inched your way up to the source, and marveled at how hundreds of cars were delayed as a result of just one stalled vehicle?
Just like stalled cars create traffic jams on the highway, stalled decisions create traffic jams in our organizations. Since one decision often sets in motion hundreds of others, when one is delayed so then are countless others.
Unfortunately, meetings, the place we’re supposed to make decisions on the most important matters facing the organization, often fail.
The discussions might be robust and engaging, but at the end of the meeting people pack up their things and leave with few, if any, documented decisions or clearly enumerated follow up actions. And so, another meeting is scheduled and another and another. In the end, it takes five or six meetings to make a few rather minor decisions.
But while it’s tempting to assume the way we’re running the meeting is causing the indecisiveness, the causality is backwards. It’s our indecisiveness that is causing a problem with the way we’re running the meeting.
How do you make decisions?
Leaders and managers are confused when asked this question. And that’s because most of us are never taught a systematic way of making decisions. Instead we gather in a room and assume the meeting will make the decision. It never does.
Meetings don’t make decisions, leaders do.
Decisive leaders and managers employ a special skill that I call _decision planning_. Before calling a meeting, they understand precisely what decisions to make, who should make them, and how. Meetings are then a tool these leaders use to help them carry out their decision making plans. The result is: the ability to make decisions with velocity.
And the great news is that leaders aren’t born with decision planning skills. They’re taught them. And here’s your chance to learn.
The Solution
In Decisive Meetings, a full-day classroom-style training, you will learn a simple and coherent decision making framework ensuring productive meetings and fast decisions.
Module 1: How to Identify Decisions and Cure Overwhelm
Sometimes we know exactly what decisions need to be made, but all too often, it’s not exactly clear. This is precisely the root of our incessant decision making overwhelm.
Whenever we experience change, new problems or opportunities, we find ourselves in a state of confusion. The first, and most critical step, is to be perfectly clear on what decisions we’re making.
In this module, we will teach you a simple technique to help you cut through the overwhelm and identify what decisions need to be made. Feel the stress melting away already?
Module 2: Consensus Isn’t Enough – How to Assign Decision Roles
Imagine a restaurant kitchen, where carrots need to be chopped, cheese shredded, and scallops grilled. Now imagine a team without any formal roles. No chef, no soux, no dishwasher — no way to know who is supposed to do what. Would dinner ever be served?
Unfortunately, a lack of clear roles is omnipresent in meetings. Instead, we default to consensus. The assumption is that if we all get in a room together, the decision will somehow get made. But who makes the decision in the all too frequent case when consensus is elusive?
In this module, we’ll teach you a fool proof system for determining decision making roles, which will have your team running as smoothly as the kitchen of a Michelin starred restaurant.
Module 3: The Decision Roadmap – 3 Steps to Making Any Decision
Once we know precisely what decisions to make and the roles each team member will play, we need to design a roadmap, a step-by-step plan that will get us to our destination.
In this module, we’ll teach you how to build a plan so simple it will fit on the back of a napkin. Once the plan is set, you’ll effortlessly run meetings, because you’ll know exactly how they fit into the overall plan. And so will your team.
Watch as your meetings become more productive and decisions get made powerfully.
What Makes Us Different
Most meeting training programs teach you how to facilitate meetings. Unfortunately, standard advice like have an agenda, start on time, and invite fewer people rarely make a difference. (We already know those things, don’t we?)
The truth is, unproductive meetings are a symptom, and if we want results, we have to address the underlying cause: a misunderstanding of how to make complex decisions. Decisive Meetings combines insights from decision theory, social science, and practical management to provide you the tools you need to make better decisions and as a result, lead better meetings.
About the Trainer
Al Pittampalli
Al Pittampalli frequently helps groups like NASA, Starbucks, Kaiser Permanente, Allstate, and more improve the quality of their meetings. His first book, Read This Before Our Next Meeting, printed in 5 languages and now out in over 100,000 copies, is one of the most popular meeting guides of the last decade. Al is a writer for Harvard Business Review and has been featured in NPR, Forbes, and Entrepreneur. He is also the author of Persuadable: How Great Leaders Change Their Minds to Change the World (Harper Business 2016) which was chosen by The Wall Street Journal as a book-of-the month.
What People Are Saying About Al
The people that lead the meetings at our highest executive level are changing the way they use their face to face time because of what they learned.”
- Brent Trickett, National Coaching Director, Power to Change
[Al’s] fresh take on the skills needed to successful in a modern office community are invaluable. He presents his ideas with style, grace, and good humor. His content is excellent and very helpful. A true new voice in providing workplace/work life improvements.”
- Kate Klugston, Google
Random participants have even sought me out to brag about broken meetings they’ve opted out of… the benefits of the training are only beginning to be realized.”
- KC Procter, Starbucks
Changing the manner we meet … Al caused us to rethink the purpose of our meetings.”
- Larry N. Sweet, NASA, Johnson Space Center Chief Information Officer
The Logistics
| Next Date: | TBD |
| Time: | 9am - 4pm with breaks throughout. |
| Class Size: | 10 - 20 Students |
| Location: | 54 West 21st Street 6th Floor, Suite 601 New York City |
| Price: | Contact Us |
Contact Us
For questions about the Decisive Meetings workshop or to inquire about bringing Decisive Meetings on-site to your organization fill out the contact form below, or e-mail us directly at [email protected]