On location at a meeting, Craig explains how meeting participants can simultaneously visit multiple “stations” to learn things. This can be a lot more efficient than hearing one speaker after another address the whole group. Visiting stations is dynamic, interactive, and gets people out of their chairs and actively learning. This is a great technique if you are looking for new ideas for how to run a meeting.
Here’s what Craig says in the video
Hi everybody. Hey it’s Craig Freshley here and I have the camera pointed out across this meeting room where we have set up stations. This is a fast way to learn a lot. See, we were sitting at these tables earlier today, we had some table discussions, we heard from some speakers who were up here at the front table, we looked at the screen, and we have seen some PowerPoint presentations, but at this point in the meeting we have seven different stations set up around the room.
Now we could have asked seven people to come up here to the front and give seven little speeches, but instead we asked the participants to go around to seven different stations and hear seven different speeches. I ring the bell every 10 minutes and when I ring the bell everybody changes places.
Now asking people to stay on their feet for 70 minutes and visit seven stations is too long. So instead we asked them to do this four times. We’re actually in the fourth round right now. Then I’m going to ask them to take their seats and I am going to go around to each station with a portable microphone and I’m going to ask people, “Hey, those of you who visited this station, what did you learn? Somebody tell me two or three things that you learned over here.” And then I’m going to go to the next one: “Hey, anybody in the room tell me two or three things that you learned over at this station.” Etc. – all the way around the room.
And that is a very fast way for people to get in-depth knowledge about the things they most care about and for everybody to get at least a little bit of knowledge about all seven topics.
Thanks for listening! Here’s hoping that you help your group make good decisions.
