Recently, while I was watching the Business Development Foundations course on LinkedIn Learning, I came across the idea that there are three types of meetings. According to the instructor for this course, the three types of meetings are as follows:

1. Brainstorming meetings
2. Prioritization meetings
3. Implementation meetings

Brainstorming Meetings

I have experienced the value of brainstorming meetings firsthand when I worked with a team of fellow Toastmasters to develop a promotional booth training program. I was with my team in my living room, and we connected my team member Marc’s laptop to my TV via an HDMI cable. The rest of the team was situated around the room and Marc had a mind mapping application open on his computer, and this application was displayed for everyone to see on the TV.

As we started discussing what we wanted to include in our training program, Marc captured all of our ideas and thoughts in the software on his computer. Everyone could see these ideas being captured on the TV screen, and as we all shared our ideas, they came to life before us as Marc typed them into the mind mapping software.

The brainstorming process stimulated our thinking as a team. As one member would throw out an idea, this would trigger another team member’s thoughts. This would lead to further thoughts on that idea which fleshed out that idea in more detail. We developed many branches in our mind map with a lot of depth in each branch. This really helped us to think through what we wanted to include in our training program. It was a great meeting, and we went away with lots of ideas to think on.

I also experienced another great brainstorming meeting with a friend where we used sticky notes to capture our thoughts. This was an online meeting via Zoom, and we used the Miro software to capture our thoughts via electronic sticky notes. As we shared our thoughts, we added new sticky notes to the board. As our discussion progressed, we quickly built up several ideas spread across our board.

One thing we didn’t do was to try to prioritize or evaluate our ideas. We just kept talking and capturing our thoughts as sticky notes. This helped us think through our ideas and to capture them for future reference.

So what is the true value of a brainstorming meeting? It doesn’t matter if you use software or paper for your brainstorming. The true value is in stimulating your thinking as a group and capturing all of your thoughts and ideas. By having an open discussion and throwing out ideas as they come to you, you can build on those ideas and get input from everyone on the team.

Once you have completed your brainstorming session, you can schedule additional meetings to prioritize which ideas you will act on and to implement the ideas you want to work on. Based on the idea that there are three types of meeting, I think prioritization and implementation could happen at two separate meetings.

Prioritization Meetings

I don’t know if I have ever attended a meeting with the sole focus of prioritization, but I can imagine what such a meeting would be like. I expect this would be a meeting in which you work with your team to decide on which tasks you are going to focus on over the next few weeks or months. It would be primarily about choosing a subset of your ideas and tasks to work on, and you could then schedule another meeting to plan the implementation of those ideas and tasks.

I think a prioritization meeting would be especially helpful as a follow-up to a brainstorming meeting. After a brainstorming session with your team, you will likely have many more tasks or ideas than you can easily handle all at once. This is where a prioritization meeting can come in handy.

In agile project management, teams work in sprints. A sprint is a period of time, such as 2 to 3 weeks, where a team works on a set of tasks assigned to that sprint. I believe a prioritization meeting would be a good way to decide on the work to include in a given sprint.

In a prioritization meeting, the focus should be on decision making. This would be having a discussion with your team on which tasks or ideas are the most important to act on, and then moving less important tasks and ideas to a backlog, or even discarding tasks or ideas that are not worth pursuing.

Once you have prioritized your ideas and tasks, the next step is to assign the work to your team members. This is where an implementation meeting could come into play.

Implementation Meetings

The third type of meeting is implementation meetings. My understanding of this type of meeting is that it is the meeting where the work gets assigned. If you have done the first two meetings (brainstorming and prioritization), you now have a list of ideas to implement and/or a set of tasks that need to be done.

At work I have been part of sprint planning meetings. These are meetings that take place at the start of a sprint. In these meetings, work is assigned to each team member that covers what each team member will do over the next three weeks. This gives the team members their assignments and their focus for the sprint, and this helps to ensure that work will get done over those three weeks.

I think implementation meetings are important. I have even led implementation meetings myself while organizing training events for my Toastmasters district as part of the district education and training committee.

In these meetings I work with my fellow committee members to assign tasks to volunteers who will be the speakers and/or volunteers at our training event. I also delegate tasks to committee members to get work done, such as assigning someone to create the check in form and evaluation form for the event. All this work done in our implementation meetings helps to organize our training event and ensures that someone is responsible for each task required to organize the event.

Conclusion

These three types of meetings each have a specific purpose. Brainstorming meetings are all about generating ideas and identifying what work needs to be done. Prioritization meetings are about deciding which of the ideas and tasks that you came up with will be done first, or at all. Implementation meetings are about assigning work and delegating responsibility.

I encourage you to plan your future collaboration with your teams based on these three types of meetings. Consider having meetings focused on brainstorming ideas and leave prioritization to a separate meeting. Also leave implementation to a separate meeting as well and take advantage of the different focuses for each type of meeting to make each of your meetings more effective.